It seems today that any blues artist worth a shit has been anthologised to death. Records you would have killed for years ago are now available at the press of a button. We know just about everything about anyone that mattered, fights, divorces, jail terms and, when it comes to the music, all sorts of out takes and versions 1 2 and 3 etc etc….. So when it comes to a song that apparently only appears on one anthology and seems to be the only recording known by the artist, the ears perk up. That song is the spooky mystery that is Honeyboy’s “Bloodstains on the Wall,” a genuine chilling slice of urban blues. Honeyboy has a mess to deal with, the aftermath of some terrible event. What, why and how is never explicitly addressed, all we seem to know is that something happened and the guy is pissed. The title makes the listener think of abattoirs, a mess (or one that will do until a real mess comes along). The guitar sputters over a sleazy barrelhouse blues piano, is the singer a pimp or a messed up working man who finds out strange things are happening when his back is turned. No matter what, the detectives are coming and he has his alibi.
Honeyboy is not to be confused with Honeyboy Edwards but is instead Honeyboy Frank Patt (go on, Google him). According to what I could find about him he was born in Fostoria, AL on Sep. 1, 1928 and he sold about 50,000 copies of this single so there should be some attics somewhere that have this gem lurking underneath the boxes, detritus and cobwebs of someone’s life. Recorded for the Speciality label this is a sleazy, murky piece of work with a dense claustrophobic sensibility. If you don’t believe me ask Bob Dylan who included it in one of his recent radio shows.

So read the sleevenote on a 7” vinyl platter that arrived unannounced in 1977 on Virgin Records. A single by Roky Erickson, Texan psychedelic frontiersman and victim. If you were into music (and particularly if you were a fan of Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation) you knew the story of Roky and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Lysergically charged they blazed through Texas and San Francisco in the sixties until Roky copped a drug charge and pled guilty but insane. Ending up in a state mental hospital all accounts said that if he wasn’t insane when he went in he certainly was when he got out.
So like Barrett and Spence, Erickson was consigned to that bin of burned out acid casualties, never more to be heard from again. It was a bolt from the blue to hear him again, not only on the Virgin single but even more so on a French import single that had four songs that grabbed the listener’s brain in a vicelock. “Bermuda” was a song about the Bermuda triangle that incorporated the devil and had Chinese Alien guitar and electric auro harp backing Roky’s frenzied vocal.
Unhappily, although Roky went on to record several albums he never again caught the feral ferocity of these releases. Subsequent albums found him mining a comic horror vein with songs about zombies and other horror staples. Rerecordings of some of these songs were cool but lacked that killer touch. The eighties and nineties found him continuing to be troubled and it is only in recent years that he has seemed to hopefully put his demons behind him.