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.