“On all sides, madness fascinates man. … what is born from the strangest delirium was already hidden, like a secret, in the bowels of the earth. When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares … is his own nature, which will lay bare hell’s pitiless truth .…”

— Michel Foucault, French philosopher, 1926–1984: Madness and Civilization

The “madman” has become a rock ’n’ roll cliché, of course: we all know that, for instance, while Ozzy Osbourne may be a bit drug-damaged, he isn’t really mad, what with the manager wife and the spoilt kids and the cunning career calculations. He’s merely playing a role. Yet Demon Angel: A Day and Night With Roky Erickson reminds us that rock does have its true madmen, those whose contact with certain elemental forces allows them to access truths most of us can’t or won’t face. Such figures become peculiarly sacred icons, whispered about in hushed tones, yet kept at a distance. Some disappear entirely, like Pink Floyd’s late Syd Barrett; others periodically pop their heads up just long enough to scare us before returning to rule their own internal infernal realms — in the latter category we find one Roger “Roky” Erickson. Roky Erickson’s mythology, from his days fronting legendary ’60s Texas acid garage punks The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, to his incarceration in a mental institution for possession of a mere joint, can be found elsewhere — including on Amsterdamned’s simultaneous video release of Demon Angel, in which friends of Erickson discuss his fascination with occult writer H.P. Lovecraft, and on which Roky himself casually confesses to having signed a pact with Satan. This aptly titled collection — originally cut by Erickson (with producer Mike Alvarez helping out on guitar) live in an underground cave in Austin, Texas, on Halloween night in 1984 — emits a mesmerizing power as channeled by a man only just able to maintain control over that which he conjures. 

On this Plugged/Unplugged session, one can literally hear the struggle of the demons and the angels inhabiting the singer. Occult-themed songs such as “White Faces” and “Stand for the Fire Demon,” for instance, offer the hair-raising sounds of a white counterpart to Robert Johnson, the black hoodoo bluesman who, it is said, sold his soul to Lucifer at some unspecified rural Southern crossroads. But Erickson is just as compelling when he give the angels some air time, as on the ballads “Starry Eyes,” which you’ll find yourself humming for days, and “Right Track Now,” performed while sitting in a moving car and featuring some lovely, mountain-music-styled finger-picking.On the video, as Erickson sits in the lotus position in his underground domain singing “Bloody Hammer,” an eerie depiction of his time in a mental hospital; his head is adorned with a crown that looks as though it came from a high-school production of King Lear. One realizes that the singer has performed what Foucault calls the “inverse exaltation” of the madman: He is able to “grant himself all the qualities, all the virtues or powers that he lacks … Poor, he is rich; ugly, he admires himself; with chains still on his feet, he takes himself for a God.” And it is through the vehicle of Erickson’s music that this alchemical transformation from social pariah to sovereign takes place. There are moments here when Roky lives up to his name (pronounced “Rocky”) and just plain kicks ass in a way that few others can — after all, if you’re rocking for Satan, you really don’t want to let him down. 

“Cold Night for Alligators” finds Roky burning up the frets of his electric guitar in a manner that recalls the most speed-soaked excursions of the Velvet Underground (as on “What Goes On” from their 1969 eponymous album). The voice, a tremulous high-end tenor, is also in fine shape as Roky yowls his way through the Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me” as if he’d just written it, his mannerisms clearly the model for another legendary Texas rocker, Janis Joplin, who claimed him as an influence. Ultimately, these compositions bring to mind the late Miles Davis’s stated wish to make music inspired by the sound of the South’s rural back roads after dark, when the owls come out hooting and the sound of gospel and blues singers echo eerily in the distance. 

While Erickson’s arcane obsessions may seem an uncomfortable anomaly in the daytime world of commerce and bourgeois utility, he is, if one listens closely, a keeper of the flame, a bearer of the hidden knowledge that Foucault identifies as residing in “the bowels of the earth.” He lives daily with that which so frightens the rest of us: the secret antidote to the stultifyingly “normal” world of the vacuous pop figures like U2 and Britney Spears. Indeed, while listening to Demon Angel, one may reach Foucault’s conclusion that, “victory is neither God’s nor the Devil’s: it belongs to Madness.”