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I didn’t think that the day would ever come that Roky Erickson would come and play in Philadelphia. Even given the fact that he’s only been playing regularly again the past few years, he always seems to play New York without playing a show here. That is, of course, until this past Monday.
Playing with a band that featured the bassist from openers The Happen-Ins and several other young musicians, Erickson played a set that skewed heavily towards late ’70s and early ’80s solo material like “Creature with the Atom Brain,” opener “(It’s a) Cold Night for Alligators” and “Stand for the Fire Demon”. In addition to that, we also got “Don’t Slander Me” and 3 songs from the excellent new album True Love Cast Out All Evil (“Goodbye Sweet Dreams”, the title track and “John Lawman”). The one-song encore was The 13th Floor Elevators‘ “You’re Gonna Miss Me” and that was it. All throughout his set, Roky seemed uncomfortable and didn’t say a single word to the audience. As my wife said, he clearly wasn’t comfortable doing this. Still, it’s a miracle to even see him perform at all and the show was competent and fun. The band, while on occasion catching up to him, did a pretty decent job and Roky can still sing well, though his voice lacks the power of old. I do wish he would’ve played “I Think Up Demons” since he was doing so many from that era, but that’s a minor complaint.
Opener Brother JT (formerly of The Original Sins) was an enjoyable bundle of energy who played ’60s style garage punk that wouldn’t have been out of place during one of the toga parties in Animal House. I enjoyed his set a lot and though I don’t have any of his records or those of his old band and thus don’t know what songs he played, I plan on rectifying this situation.
The first band to play on this evening was The Happen-Ins. To be honest, they weren’t really my bag, sounding like a mix between Kings of Leon circa their first album Youth and Young Manhood and The Black Lips, but they were decent.
Roky’s setlist can be found here.
