In the center of her house sits a piano, on top of which are a handful of cassettes, some of which bear Roky's name and a date. For years, she has been recording her son whenever he feels like performing. It was from such homemade cassettes that Monahan found the decade-old unreleased songs that served as the catalyst for All That May Do My Rhyme.
"Mother, what am I gonna do about my toilet?" Roky asks. "I gotta go to the bathroom. I guess I'll wait till it gets fixed." He paces about nervously, holding his crotch.
"Roky," Evelyn says, "just go now." He ignores her. Evelyn eventually calls a plumber, who agrees to come out to Roky's place in the morning.
As Evelyn talks on the phone, Roky sits in a thick recliner and picks up a guitar, idly and loudly strumming as his mother tries to speak into the receiver.
"You gonna play something?" Stewart asks Roky.
"I guess I could," Roky says, though he complains he doesn't have a pick. His mother hands him a plastic bag filled with blue guitar picks, from which Roky takes one, then mumbles something about it being too hard to use.
But he manages just fine and launches into a version of Richie Valens' "Donna"; as he does so, Evelyn sets up the recording device. The guitar is slightly out of tune, but Erickson's voice is perfect -- in-key and beautiful, quietly powerful. He recalls every word, never missing a note as his fingers glide effortlessly up and down the guitar's neck. If the guitar were in tune, the performance would be amazing, but because the instrument is just a bit off, it's incredibly haunting -- like the music of ghosts or something not of this world.
The impromptu performance hints at the origins of such songs as "I Have Always Been Here Before," a sweetly gorgeous song he recorded in 1981 that would be later echoed in the best of R.E.M. And it is to be reminded that Roky Erickson is one of the great but mostly unheralded figures in the history of rock and roll.
"Ya like that?" Erickson wonders when he finishes. "Straaaaange, isn't it? I've got a lot like that." He explains that he keeps such songs on a compilation titled something like "Contortion of Distortion" -- a record that exists only in his mind. He then proceeds to play snippets of such songs as "To Know Him Is to Love Him," "I'm a Fool for Your Love," and other '50s favorites. Each time he plays, he asks how we like the song, then says, "Strange, isn't it?"
When he's finished and gently places the guitar down on a couch, Evelyn plays back the tape for her son. Afterward, she will mark the cassette with the date. At least once in Roky's on-and-off career, his mother has licensed (actually, sold) such cassettes to record companies seeking to capitalize on Erickson's legend. The 1988 Live at the Ritz, released by a French fan club, and a portion of a recently released three-CD compilation on the Collectibles label called The Unreleased Masters came from Evelyn's hands -- which she is allowed to do, since she has power of attorney over Roky's affairs. Evelyn says such deals, however, were made for between $1,000 and $2,000 and before she helped secure trust funds for her son.
Roky now has two trust funds -- one for income from albums and song royalties, including proceeds from a 1990 Warner Bros. tribute album, Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye, which features the likes of the Butthole Surfers, R.E.M., ZZ Top and Sahm among those covering Roky's material; the other is for donations from benefits and fundraisers.
Evelyn controls the sales trust funds, from which she gives her son about $20 every other day to buy "cigarettes and hamburgers," she explains. The other fund is handled by two of Roky's brothers and a couple of old friends.
Before we leave, Roky finally decides to use the bathroom; when he's done, he yells, "Here I come!" from around the corner. He is still washing his hands, obsessed with ridding himself of the germs.
As we climb into Stewart's Jeep, Evelyn Erickson waves and yells to her son, "Love you."
Roky does not respond. But as we pull away, he wonders aloud, "You think she'll be all right?
