Roky Erickson and the Explosives: Halloween: Live 1979-1981

A A A Comments By Chris Gray Wednesday, Mar 26 2008

Demons, devils and two-headed dogs, oh my!

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Roky Erickson's recent rising to the occasion of Austin City Limits — first festival, then TV show — and this month's Austin Music Awards isn't the Texas psych icon's first comeback. His initial encounter with cross-generational influence, and the impossible pressure that accompanies being routinely labeled "seminal," came nearly 30 years ago. Back then, Texas bands were assimilating what they heard on Sex Pistols and Damned imports with Erickson's primordially unsettling, shockingly tender howl. The man himself was well enough to tool around the Texas touring circuit with trio the Explosives for a couple of years, even making a couple of West Coast trips. Recorded live in Houston, Austin, Dallas, L.A. and San Francisco, Halloween's meaty, almost Sabbath-like instrumental attack (take a bow, guitarist Cam King) bolsters Erickson's haunted, EC Comics-like tales of zombies and aliens; songs like "Two Headed Dog" and "Don't Shake Me Lucifer" set the musical limits for this new bastard hybrid — namely, that there weren't any beyond those of the human mind. As illuminated by an eight-minute "Stand for the Fire Demon" (recorded at Houston's long-gone the Island), those were daunting enough for Erickson, not to mention his legion of followers. He's since become the patron saint of lovable eccentrics and '60s survivors in the Texas music pantheon, but Halloween captures Erickson when he was more feral than regal. Not a bad way to remember ol' Roky at all.

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