Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover

Releasing an album you made a decade ago must be a deeply surreal experience.

From what I’ve heard from my musician friends, it’s hard enough releasing an album you finished a month ago. From the moment you sit back from the mixing desk, realising that this work of art that you’ve poured blood, sweat and tears into is the closest thing it’ll ever be to “finished”, a seething storm of emotions starts welling up inside. If those friends of mine are to be believed, they are very rarely good feelings. In fact, they often start with a feeling like “Oh God, this is a steaming pile of garbage, and I’ve wasted my life”.

Now, to be clear, it’s rarely that the album they’ve made is actually bad. More that it’s personal and vulnerable to them and he idea of putting it out there, even if it’s something they’re proud of (sometimes especially if it’s something they’re proud of) feels like they’re saying something they can’t take back. Putting a version of themselves out in the world that will never change and never evolve, no matter how much they will in the years to come.

There’s a chance that no one in music has ever felt this hard as Roky Erickson did in 1986 with the release of his third solo album, Gremlins Have Pictures. This should have been a banner year for Erickson to release the record. This was the 1980s, and nostalgia for the 1960s was all the rage as the boomers came of age. The Beach Boys, George Harrison and Eric Clapton were all having career highs, and while Ericsson’s band, the 13th Floor Elevators, were never quite the megastars they were, the 1980s should have been the ideal time to capitalise.

There was just one problem. Erickson started work on Gremlins Have Pictures in 1975. The most recent work on the record was four years old.

Why did Erickson wait so long to release the record?

So, the reason that the Elevators were never the sensation they could have been was that Erickson was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1968. A year later, he was voluntarily committed to a psychiatric institution for five years, being released in 1974 after a painful time pockmarked with electroconvulsive therapy and multiple escape attempts. By the time of his release, the Elevators were long dead, and Erickson had no interest in reviving them, so he went solo instead and began working on his first album in over half a decade.

Erickson had spent the last few years of his time in the hospital frantically writing songs that reflected his mental state. Songs that took his wild man sound pioneered in the Elevators and ran with it. These songs were so dark that by the time he released them on his first solo albums as Roky Erickson and the Aliens, he had taken to calling his new sound horror-rock. He was not kidding around either; this was atmospheric music that bordered on disturbing more than a few times, and it really did reflect what he was going through at the time.

The truth was that Erickson was falling apart all over again due to drug use and his own mental health struggles. Despite recording many songs in 1975, his first solo album, the aptly named The Evil One, wasn’t released until 1980. This was due to Ericsson’s worsening schizophrenia and drug use destroying his personal life, getting him committed and incarcerated all over again during the five years between work on the album starting and the record being released.

By 1986, Erickson had two solo albums released and a cult following in his native Texas. Heightened interest in his work in the mid-1980s caused him and his label to throw together a collection of unreleased songs from his original solo sessions, including a somewhat on-the-nose cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘Heroin’, and release it as Gremlins Have Pictures. One can only imagine how it must have felt at the time to trawl through the darkest period of your life a decade on and mine it for a record release.

One hopes it was a heartening experience in the end. One that showed him just how far he’d come since then.