April, 1981. I’m in Austin, Texas with rock snapper Tom Sheehan to do a cover story on the great R’n’B band The Fabulous Thunderbirds. It’s sweltering when we arrive to meet Thunderbirds guitarist Jimmie Vaughan at his house and he suggests we might want to get in some cold beers. So, while he’s having his photo taken in his yard by Sheehan, who looks like he’s starting to melt in the sizzling sun, Jimmie’s wife, Connie, and I drive off to a supermarket.

I pick up what seems like a sensible amount of beer, about six cases, in fact, and I’m just stacking them in Connie’s car when she asks if I’ve ever heard of Roky Erickson. I tell her I have. He was the lead singer with legendary psych pioneers The 13th Floor Elevators who after a drugs bust in 1969 pleaded insanity and spent three years in a hospital for the criminally insane. Anyway, I wonder why she wants to know. “Oh,” Connie says, “it’s just that Roky’s standing over there.”

He fucking is, too. And more than that, he’s heading our way with a wave to Connie who often bumps into him down here. He’s a shaggy looking man with an impressive beard sprouting from his chin like the stuffing from a gut-shot sofa, but not quite the befuddled wreck you might have expected. There’s no talk, for instance, of ETs, angels, or the assorted demons he’d mentioned in a rare interview with Melody Maker in 1980 on a brief visit to London, when he’d traumatised Sheehan during a fraught photo shoot that left the snapper trembling.

We get back to Jimmie’s and, excited, I explain we’ve just seen Roky. Jimmie then recalls seeing the Elevators in an Austin club. “They were all freaked out on acid, smashing their guitars. Roky was screamin’ and blowin’ into a kettle.”

Anyway, I mention this because in this issue we have, among a lot of other fine stuff for you, a great piece by Jaan Uhelszki, who recently spent time in Austin with Roky, who at 62 is still in the game and, despite everything, heading this way soon000

allan_jones@ipcmedia.com