Into the Slipstream: Psychedelic Aliens Are at My Door
Rock ‘n’ roll ain’t for the faint of heart. It’s nasty, filthy, and requires one to stare into the abyss, find the character in one’s self and tell it to go hang while you close your eyes and let the darkness take you. Babies, get into the darkness with me. Join me as we go Into the Slipstream to explore the obtuse corners of rock, journey to the center of the mind, and emerge from the swamp a new creature. Let’s get into the meaning of madness as we tool over to Roky Erikson and the Aliens’ eponymous album. Dig it!
We set the Hyper-V craft down to the ma
gical, musical year of 1980. When every American hoped for hostages to come home from Iran, half of us believed that a washed-up B-actor would be a good president, and you could still get McDonald’s fries cooked in beef tallow. KC and the Sunshine Band, Cliff Richard, and Styx had #1 albums. MTV wasn’t yet an embryo of a thought, and the underground music scene harbored the last vestiges of punk and the still-potent-but-watered-down New Wave movement.
Wading out of the swamps, from stretches of time done in insane asylums, was Roky Erikson. Last seen as the driving force behind the inventors of the psychedelic sound, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Erikson emerged with a new group and producer Stu Cook (bassist of Creedence Clearwater Revival) to cut new jams that were stirring, marching, and oozing out the side of his head.
Cook and Erikson formed an unlikely creative team years after meeting each other during joint performances between their two bands at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. Between that time and the recording of Erikson with the Aliens, Roky had been incarcerated at a state mental institution in Austin, Texas. (If you’re curious, all of the details of Roky’s time spent in mental hospitals is well documented in the 2005 film You’re Gonna Miss Me.)
Cook began the process of taking all the train-of-thought phrases, words, and titles for songs and formatting them through multi-track recordings of Erikson singing take after take after take. The band, the engineer, and Cook kept the technical aspect of the job buried and let Roky riff, jive, and improvise throughout the entire process. In an interview with Richie Unterberger, Cook described the process: “He’d have titles, he’d have lyrics. But a lot of times, it was really disjointed, broken stream of thought throughout. It was my job — I enjoyed it. I didn’t have to sit there. But I sat there and assembled the song — like, this was a good verse, I think this verse should be second, using the wild synch technique and combining with the way he actually sang it, I was able to rearrange the lyrics and the verses and so on to make pop-structured songs, rock and roll song structures of what Roky would bring into the studio.”
Ideas and lyrics spanning B-horror movies, conspiracy, madness, and mass murder were set to a hard-edged, driving, almost honky-tonk set of hooks. Fuzzy and righteous in the presentation, like drinking bourbon in a dive bar after hours with the ghost of every Mississippi Delta bluesman singing through electrified veins. Fifteen original songs were released as two albums later organized in the eponymous album.
You can’t start more powerfully than “Two-Headed Dog” with it’s jangly riffs and circular lyrics, and Erikson’s voice just this side of strained. Pleading for you to believe him as he fights for his own sanity. There’s a backlash against the lord of Hell himself — “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer” — and a paranoid dive into government conspiracy on “Creature With the Atom Brain.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_AwZtRhWmM
The band is tight where it needs to be, loose when it has to be, but the gel that binds the whole stew together is Erikson. His lyrics, like, “Stand for the fire demon, burning firey fright / Stand for the fire demon, Stand for the demon of fire!” deliver a message of sympathy for the devil and his voice, pained in a way that only can be made whole again by blood sacrifices upon the alter of open chords and the weird electronics, creates atmospheres of dread throughout. Even if Erikson is being funneled through the lens of Stu Cook’s vision for what the lyrical mayhem was supposed to look like after it was organized, it retains a rawness, a yearning to stretch the listener’s mind past the brink of sanity.
At the end of all of this, babies, you know what time it is in hell. You understand the meaning of man on the edge. This is the dark, crispy underbelly of music and creativity. The reflection of our own growing insecurities about a world that was leaving the id of the ’70s and contorting into the growing, runaway capitalism that sprouted in ’80s America. Roky Erikson and the Aliens shows us a face; it’s ugly and goddamn beautiful at the same exact time.
Until next time, children.
