Roky Erickson & the Aliens

As new wave revivals get revived by even newer new new wave revivals, the fashions of Duran Duran or Liquid Liquid or Talk Talk or Bow Wow Wow or Blankity-Blank get recycled and reiterated ad infinitum. But can someone please rip-off the new wave style of these guys? Please? The guys backing up the toothless, bearded, homeless singer (aka Roky Erickson) look like something straight out of the Eyewitness News Crime Watchers actors’ pool. You got bondage leather gear from the bowl-cut tweaker to the left of Manson, a freebasing skinny-tie guy on the right. Further back, flanking Devendra Banhart in the year 2020 and ensconced in that telltale crime scene dry-ice fog, you got a porn-’stached purse snatcher in turtleneck and some Jay-Z butter-soft gear, and then the Austrian jarheaded enforcer in a Carlos D. three-piece.

Oh, and the tracks themselves? Well, that terse garage grip that the Elevators had grinding underneath Tommy Hall’s acid-enlightened gibberish is still at work in the late 70’s by Roky’s latest banding of weirdos, the Aliens, and no matter how glossy new wave production values got in the studios, they still spit sparks (Not that Creedence dude Stu Cook didn’t know how to stir mud behind the boards here). To replace that effervescent boop-dippy-doop of Dr. Hall’s bizarre electric jug blowing that elevated (or else made enervating) every damned Elevators’s track from those fried egg days, Roky uses an electric autoharp to recreate that disconcerting effect, and it stands in contrast to the prevalent synth work of the era (the notes attest to no such devices being used here).

Roky’s hard time at the Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Rusk, Texas scoured out the acid-gobbling dogma of the band, and doozies about “birds of Maya baked into an atom you polarized into existence,” not to mention the three-eyed men and fire engines were replaced with shimmying Lucifers, weird foretellings from the isle of Bermuda, two-headed dogs (in the interior of Communist Russia, no less), zombie promenades, bloodied hardware, and uh, Abe Lincoln. For your listening pleasure, here are songs about finger-popping audiences, climate-changes in reptilian habitats, and someone who may or may not be Buchanan. Spinning them again, perhaps to have a greater understanding of what I am posting, I still have little clue as to what the fuck any of these are about. But this pic attests to what a real band of drug-deranged Killers would look like.

“Click Your Fingers Applauding the Play”
“It’s A Cold Night for Alligators”
“Creature With the Atom Brain”

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