The Evil One (also known as Roky Erickson and the Aliens or I Think of Demons officially, and as TEO, Five Symbols or Hieroglyph) is the first album by American psychedelic horror rock band Roky Erickson and the Aliens. The album was Erickson's first after his time with the band the 13th Floor Elevators and several years of personal problems.
The recording sessions took place in 1978 and 1979, with 15 songs completed. A U.K. version was released in 1980, followed by a U.S. version in 1981, each with a different 10-song track listing. Subsequent digital releases and expanded vinyl editions of the album comprise all 15 songs.
In the years since its release, several of The Evil One's songs have been covered and re-popularized by modern rock acts, including Ghost, Foo Fighters, and Queens of the Stone Age.
Background
Roky Erickson wrote much of the material that would make up The Evil One during his incarceration at the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane between 1969 and 1972. Friends would visit him at Rusk, bringing him musical instruments, and with fellow inmates he founded a band called the Missing Links. On visits to his incarcerated friend, Golden Dawn guitarist George Kinney collected Erickson's lyrics, often smuggling them out in bits, and published them as a book called Openers in April 1972. This first edition was full of references to love, peace, God, and totems of Christian mysticism that Kinney hoped he could use as evidence that Erickson was fit for release and able to pursue gainful employment as a poet.
After his release in November 1972, Erickson attempted to reunite his psychedelic rock band the 13th Floor Elevators. After rehearsals and a handful of gigs, the partial reunion soon dissolved. Wanting to distance himself from his hippie-era associations, Erickson turned to his fandom for B-movies as source material and dubbed his new music horror rock. When asked about his departure from the 13th Floor Elevators' material, he told the Fort Worth Star Telegram:
I have good memories of those days. But that really wasn't my bag. I'm a horror lover and that's what I'm into now. I'm trying to horrify them, demonize them, and "possessionize" them. I guess that would be a really good way to describe what I do. All my life I've run into people who said, "If you read too much of that horror, it's going to hurt you." They were always trying to take it away from me. But people love monsters. They love horror movies and I just figured it would be kind of neat to put it all into music.
Erickson began to edit the lyrics he had written in Rusk, reshaping their Christian overtones as horror-themed lyrics by swapping out any mention of God and Jesus for Satan and Lucifer, explaining that God and the Devil were two sides of the same coin. He assembled a band with the help of electric autoharpist and Elevators fan Billy Miller, naming the group "Blieb Alien" from the pairing of an anagram for "Bible" with Erickson's claim that he was from outer space. The first lineup of Blieb Alien featured members of Miller's previous band Cold Sun and played their first gig as the opening act for the world premiere of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at 1974's Texas Film Festival. The set debuted Erickson's horror rock songs "Red Temple Prayer (Two Headed Dog)," "The Wind And More" and "Stand For The Fire Demon," among others. Blieb Alien continued to gig into 1975 playing Erickson's new songs with occasional dips into hits from The 13th Floor Elevators' repertoire.
Early recordings of songs that would later make up The Evil One saw release on singles and EPs from various sessions between 1975 and 1977. The first of these was "Red Temple Prayer (Two Headed Dog)" recorded with Blieb Alien and issued in 1975 by Mars Records, a label run by Sir Douglas Quintet frontman Doug Sahm who also played lead guitar on the A-side." While the single's B-side, the Buddy Holly-inspired "Starry Eyes", enjoyed airplay on local country music stations, Rolling Stones review of the record paired its A-side with the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." to define the emerging punk rock subgenre. Writing for NME, Nick Kent called it "A vision of psychotic dread."
At this time, Craig Luckin became Erickson's manager, bringing in a new rhythm section and co-publishing the songs that would make up The Evil One through his company Orb Productions. Doug Sahm's guitar tech, Duane Aslaksen, took up lead guitar as well as musical arranging duties for the band. This new incarnation of Blieb Alien dropped the "Blieb" part from its name in order to be more accessible to radio DJs, and simply became "The Aliens.
Various Aliens lineups featuring Aslaksen on lead guitar and Miller on autoharp continued to record demos, copies of which traded hands around North America and Europe. "Bermuda" and "The Interpreter," two songs that would feature on Roky Erickson's LP Don't Slander Me a decade later, were recorded in 1976 and released on both sides of the Atlantic by a handful of labels in 1977. Another session from 1976 was picked up by French journalist Philippe Garnier of Rock & Folk magazine for a release on his short-lived Sponge Records label. In 1977, Sponge issued debut versions of "Mine, Mine, Mind" and "Click Your Fingers, Applauding The Play," and a new recording of "Two-Headed Dog" as a 7" EP along with the quieter "I Have Always Been Here Before" that Erickson recorded solo. The EP would later be issued on 12" format as Two Head Dog in 1988.
Erickson further developed material for The Evil One while fronting live gigs with Austin punk band the Explosives. Much of his work with the Explosives has surfaced on live albums and video footage in the years since.
Album recording
The recording sessions began in December 1978 with producer Stu Cook, former bass player of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who would end up overdubbing bass parts on the songs "Sputnik" and "Bloody Hammer". In addition to Aslaksen and Miller, Cook and Luckin brought in Moby Grape drummer John "Fuzzy Furioso" Oxendine, bassist Steven Morgan Burgess, and Motown keyboardist Andre Lewis. The band recorded basic tracks and overdubs in a Marin County studio called The Church interspersed with rehearsals at Cook's Cosmo's Factory warehouse.
Over the course of the month, Erickson's mental health began to deteriorate, often exacerbated by drug use, and his ability to sing, play guitar, and cooperate in recording became unreliable. With the rest of the band playing well but Erickson's performance being erratic in the studio, Cook had to resort to "wild-synching" vocal tracks—capturing what he could of Erickson and then splicing tape to make it match up with what the Aliens has already recorded. In this way Cook, with the help of Luckin, ended up helping arrange songs into verses and choruses when Erickson's lyrics did not fit into a conventional rock music structure. Shakeups in the band resulted in various session musicians playing on different songs.
During this time, Erickson's first wife, Dana, left him. Erickson had been dividing his time between California where his manager, producer, and bandmates were based, and his home state of Texas. The album's recording process was ultimately interrupted when police arrested Erickson during a psychotic episode near his mother's home in Austin and he was sentenced to 90 days of incarceration in the Austin State Hospital. Erickson regained some faculties under treatment and called Cook and Luckin, saying that he was ready to finish the album. Flying to Texas in April 1979 with the unfinished 16-track reels, Cook and Luckin took turns signing Erickson out of the hospital on day passes and brought him to Austin's Hound Sound studio so that he could complete his vocal tracks. Some songs, like Erickson's "Can't Be Brought Down," were worked on but unfinished for The Evil One, appearing instead on later releases.
After serving 90 days at Austin State Hospital, Erickson moved on to enlist Texas punk bands Reversible Cords, the Explosives, and the Nervebreakers to perform as his backing group for live gigs around Texas. Meanwhile, the album was finished in its author's absence. Producer Stu Cook later told historian Joe Nick Patoski, "By the time the record came out, Roky was gone. I never got to say, 'Heres the album.' We never really said goodbye."
Releases
CBS Records' UK A&R representative Howard Thompson signed Erickson for a one-record deal. A 10-song album was released in early 1980 by CBS in both the United Kingdom and Netherlands. The original front cover design by artist Captain Colorz, an abstract painter from California who had been the Aliens' defacto artist during Erickson's time in the Bay Area. Colorz's cover art bore no words on it and came with a removable sticker that titled it eponymously as Roky Erickson and the Aliens. The band had wanted to name the album The Evil One, but CBS executives dismissed the idea and the only reference on the U.K. release appears in the album's liner notes, announcing the album's title by the acronym TEO. The original UK vinyl editions also present five rune-like symbols (revealed, at a later date, to spell out the word ALIEN in some other alphabet) under the band's name on the LP's labels and more prominently on the cover of the album's cassette version, causing many to refer to the album as Five Symbols or Hieroglyphs.
To support the LP, CBS UK issued the singles "Creature with the Atom Brain" b/w "The Wind and More" in August 1980, followed by "Mine Mine Mind" b/w "Bloody Hammer" in October. These singles' A-sides appeared on the LP, while the B-sides did not, despite A&R rep Howard Thompson's wishes. Other unreleased material from the Stu Cook session, such as the song "Sputnik", appeared on a different 10-song LP released in 1981 by San Francisco label 415 Records after Epic Records passed on the option to sign the Aliens. This US edition was more clearly titled The Evil One.
In 1987, Edsel Records reissued the CBS album under the title I Think of Demons and expanded its track listing to 12 songs from the original 10. In the US, CD reissues through Restless Records and other labels stuck with The Evil One as the album's title and included all 15 tracks from the 1979 Stu Cook session. Many other reissues have followed on various formats, often rearranging the album's track order. The 2002 version released by Austin label Sympathy for the Record Industry spread the 15 tracks over four sides of a double LP and issued its CD version with a bonus disc packaged as The Evil One (Plus One) featuring a 48-minute appearance of Roky Erickson and the Aliens from August 1979 on San Jose radio station KSJO's The Modern Humans Show. In addition to interview clips and listener phone calls with Erickson talking about music and horror films, the Modern Humans disc features many of The Aliens' earlier demo recordings of songs from The Evil One..
Songs
Many of The Evil One's songs, such as "White Faces" and "The Wind and More", evoke Erickson's fandom of vintage horror movies in general, while others refer to specific films. 1943's I Walked with a Zombie and 1955's Creature with the Atom Brain—both screenwritten by Curt Siodmak—provided titles for songs on the album. For the latter song, Erickson recites patches of dialogue from the film. Other song titles were lifted from different media: "Night of the Vampire" is a slowed down and lyricized reimagining of The Moontrekkers' 1961 instrumental hit of the same name, produced by Erickson's hero Joe Meek. Erickson also sings that his vampire was born on Saint Swithin's Day (July 15), which is also Roky Erickson's date of birth. More obtusely, the song "Sputnik" aligns its name with Erickson's quasi-acronymical subtitle, "Spelling Your Theory, Alien I Creator," along with the Soviet Union's first man-made satellite.