[The 13th Floor Elevators'] 'Easter Everywhere' doesn’t sound like a band trying to create something self-consciously psychedelic; it sounds as though they think they’re making a rock’n’roll record, with the obligatory Bob Dylan cover, Buddy Holly-styled guitar licks, proper choruses and hooks. They just happen to be making it on a planet where nobody else lives. | | | | Roky Erickson at the Wireless Festival, London, July 3, 2011.
(Yui Mok/PA Images/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “[The 13th Floor Elevators'] 'Easter Everywhere' doesn’t sound like a band trying to create something self-consciously psychedelic; it sounds as though they think they’re making a rock’n’roll record, with the obligatory Bob Dylan cover, Buddy Holly-styled guitar licks, proper choruses and hooks. They just happen to be making it on a planet where nobody else lives.”
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| | rantnrave:// The song that made me fall in love with ROKY ERICKSON is a breezy, acoustic pledge of devotion to—actually, I have no idea who or what he's singing to. "ANTHEM (I PROMISE)" starts conventionally enough, with the godfather of psychedelic rock crooning, over a NEIL YOUNG-ish folk-rock strum, "I promise my green and blue eyes to you." In the first verse he ascribes himself God-like powers, which he puts to sweet, romantic effect: He can cool the streets with the wind at night, fill the earth with diamonds, etc. In the second verse, things start becoming unclear, and worrisome. It turns out Lucifer and the mother of witches are getting married, or maybe they're just a metaphor for the union of Roky and his betrothed, who by the way was chosen for him by God and, um, oh dear. In the third verse, Roky informs his beloved and/or us that Satan came to earth on May 9, 1976 (a GOOGLE search is of no assistance here, in case you're wondering), and there are gremlins, and—this is the part where he sort of and sort of doesn't return to earth and where I fall in love—"The square root of zero / Is something smaller than zero / Which keeps getting smaller / Keeps you out of sight and soul." Math. Romance. The cosmos. The dark side. Swoon. To the end, Roky sings as if this is the most conventional and beautiful love song ever written. "Anthem," which appears on the odds-and-sods solo collection GREMLINS HAVE PICTURES, was recorded not long after Erickson's release from several years of lockup in a Texas hospital for the criminally insane, a troubling and much-written-about experience that was followed by three decades of "drifting between reality and insanity," as his hometown newspaper, the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, once put it. He wrote and recorded in spurts during those years, veering between stinging garage-rock, lyrical folk-pop and throwback rock and roll, and also between human and demonic concerns. You wanted to hug him one minute and run away the next. It's a fascinating and often great body of work, produced not because of his mental illness but in spite of it. A major songwriter fighting through the haze, in search of the light. I had been a fan for some time when I finally found my way back to the two psych-rock classics Erickson made with his band the 13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS in 1966 and 1967, before, with assists from drugs and from the government, his downward spiral began. "SLIP INSIDE THIS HOUSE," the just-short-of-unhinged eight-minute epic that begins 1967's EASTER EVERYWHERE, is the sound of an entirely new branch sprouting on the rock and roll tree. Outside the rock cognoscenti, the band never got the recognition it deserved for its enormous influence on the psychedelic rock era (metal, garage and generations of indie-rock bands to follow had a lot to learn from the Elevators, too). But the cognoscenti knew, their grandchildren know and rock itself knows. And though it took way too many decades, Erickson escaped from the haze in the last decade or so of his life, and had at least some chance to bask in the glory of what he had wrought. I'd like to think the gremlins are gone now, too. RIP... The American-Statesman, by the way, reminds me that in the early 2000s, HENRY ROLLINS paid for the dental work to pull the then impoverished Erickson's rotted teeth and bought him a set of handmade false teeth, a tremendous act of kindness and charity. Rollins' Sunday night show on KCRW, which will be archived here shortly, served as a loud, joyous tribute... For a decade or more, it seemed every time APPLE updated ITUNES, it got a little worse. A little more bloated. A little more opaque. A little less musical. A little more useless. But today, the once-great music management app reportedly is getting the update Apple users have been waiting a long time for: The company is deleting the app. It will be replaced, BLOOMBERG reports, with separate apps called MUSIC, TV and PODCASTS, which will each presumably do what you think they'd do. Hopefully anyway. The music app will still be the uber manager of all your Apple gadgets, which has never quite made sense. iTunes was a great tool for managing your iPod. It was a somewhat less great tool for your managing your entire smart phone. Why not create a new app called, say, GADGETS?... Before iTunes, where did you shop for music?... RIP DAVID CARROLL. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Texas Monthly |
| The life of Roky Erickson-one of the most influential Texas rock and rollers of all time-has been one calamity after another. His family and friends have taken care of him with the best of intentions, but you know what they say about the road to hell. (Originally published in December 2001.) | | |
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 | Forbes |
| Alex Guiva’s career arc doesn’t fit that of a typical music impresario. Born in Ukraine, he moved to Arkansas in 1997 to attend Lyon College before settling into a corporate finance job in Dallas. Last year he stumbled across a site called Royalty Exchange and invested a five-figure sum in a catalog of music played on the sitcom "Modern Family" and in Barbie commercials. | | |
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 | Complex |
| For many artists, viral fame seems like an ideal scenario. But the baggage that often comes with being an out-of-nowhere star shows no signs of disappearing. | | |
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 | The Tennessean |
| While religion has always been deeply entrenched in the genre, a slate of Christianity-infused tracks are receiving radio play this year, and they're being belted from award show stages. | | |
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 | Variety |
| The iPhone maker is expected to announce that it will replace iTunes with dedicated media apps. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| With his earthy charm and keen instinct for runaway hits, Luke Combs has enjoyed one of the most striking organic breakthroughs in recent Music Row memory -- recentering a genre in flux and restoring the role of everyman superstar. | | |
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| Complex |
| After a video went viral over the weekend with the students in Lander Elementary singing "Old Town Road," Lil Nas X decided to surprise the kids with a special appearance. Watch as Speedy links up with him to spend a wild day in Ohio, buy some western gear and get the horses in bag. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| The global recorded music industry is doing spectacularly well, but there are signs of trouble ahead. | | |
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 | New York Post |
| Officers assigned to the unit draw up weekly entertainment reports about scheduled hip-hop shows at city clubs, and designate each as posing a low, medium or high risk for violence or other crimes. | | |
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 | Aquarium Drunkard |
| In 2010 Roky Erickson released his first album in 14 years, True Love Cast Out All Evil , backed by fellow Texans Okkervil River. Below, Okkervil's Will Sheff reflects on the iconoclast and his time spent backing him. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| The file-sharing service brought people together more often than not. | | |
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| Billboard |
| With its tolerant atmosphere, newsworthy Q&As and loose definition of 'indie,' the Reddit community has become an influential force in music media | | |
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 | CBS Sunday Morning |
| Reunited, Nick, Joe and Kevin have their first-ever #1 hit, a new album, and a new documentary that explores their family ties that, for a time, were frayed. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| From Jenny Lewis to Margo Price, pot is music’s new money-spinner. And it’s targeting women. | | |
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 | Music Industry Blog |
| One of the recurring themes in analysis of tech businesses is the role of profit, and most often, the apparent lack of it -- or at the very least, the way in which it plays second fiddle to growth. Amazon, one of the most successful global businesses in today’s global economy, famously sacrificed profit for much of its existence in order to focus on long-term growth and expansion. | | |
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| Stereogum |
| For someone my age, who came up just after the riot grrrl movement faded from headlines, Bikini Kill's reunion tour is an opportunity to revel in a moment we never lived through. And though Kathleen Hanna has said playing these shows feels like "stepping into a time machine," the show I witnessed at Brooklyn Steel didn’t quite feel like a nostalgic indulgence. | | |
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 | The Outline |
| A Q&A with the founder of FORM Arcosanti, which bucks corporate festival culture. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| From now on, the company will curate the artists it works with, picking a select number of VIPs from an online membership application system – not dissimilar to the approach adopted by companies like AWAL or Create Music Group. | | |
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| Forbes |
| David Marcus, a leading investor in Vivendi, owner of Universal Music Group, is predicting a formidable change in the music industry in a move that could spark a war between content platforms. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| The global icon penned an open letter in support of the Equality Act. After staying silent during the 2016 election, Swift has changed course in a big way. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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