Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)

Roky Erickson—Starry Eyes (1982 / Power Pop?)

Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re reflecting back upon ourselves with one of the greatest Texans ever known.

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PART I

The title of this post is also the title of an R & B song by Irma Thomas, released in 1964. It portrays a familiar theme: a woman rationalizing how bad her man is to her. For trivia night’s sake here are two facts:

—The song was co-written by Jennie Seely, who later won four Grammys, and a young Randy Newman, who loves LA.

—It has appeared five times in the dystopian television series Black Mirror—a music cue brilliant as a metaphor of our toxic relationships to technology, even though it seems to have been picked for other reasons.¹

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But that’s not today’s song.

A great friend (who also happens to be a SERMONS! subscriber) recently reached out to me for recommendation of songs about falling in love. I immediately put together a playlist of 20 or 30 tunes. You don’t get to hear it, because it’s for us only.

I’m not good with love and I’m even worse with relationships.

But I am great at picking music. I made a playlist with the intention to break my own heart.

Every love is the willingness to break one’s own heart. I think that’s what they refer to as vulnerability. I’ve read that it’s the key to intimacy. I don’t know for sure, Im still too afraid of that level of closeness, of allowing anything or anyone else to shatter my heart, so I break my own. Every day.

I love so much, that I quietly weep daily for all of the beauty held in this tiny, fragile existence. I cry for all the moments I see around me, because if anything, I’ve realized how much I am just an observer sitting on a park bench watching everyone’s lives. Mostly, I cry for all the beauty people get to feel in their excitement and in their sorrow, and in all we as humans do and feel just trying to help each other get through this strange thing we all universally are doing: life.

But I do it quietly, deep inside. I can’t seem to put into action in the world because it feels like it’s too much.

PART II

In 1992, I moved to Austin with a very dear friend. He taught me a lot about loving people and especially loving your friends. He is the type of human who beams with genuine care for everyone around him, so much so that it often breaks my heart how much he loves other people.

Right after we moved there, we were driving around town and he asked me to pull into a convenient store so he buy a cold drink. It was summer, it was hot. He went in, I sat in the car and waited. He was inside for a long time. I finished a whole cigarette waiting.

And then he returned with a fantastical tale:

“I think I just met Roky Erickson.”

We were never able to verify who this person he met was. I didn’t see him. Roky in 1992 wasn’t a person anyone was looking out for. Even here in Texas, he was very much a cult figure then.

“We were in line, and he was behind me and he had a bandaid on the middle of his head, and he looked confused so I asked him if he was ok and what was up with the bandaid, and he said I don’t want my third eye to see this world around me.”

Now, I have no reason to doubt my friend had this exchange with a confused man in a
7-11 on a hot summer day in 1992 Austin Texas.

Was it Roky? It was to him, and that’s all that matters and the story is so perfectly heartbreaking that it may as well be to me, too.

Decades later, Roky found his voice again and more of the world got to discover him and I finally was able to hear his wonderful music because now his albums weren’t just sitting on the expensive wall at the record store, if you’d ever see them at all.

I remember vividly walking into a pub in Vancouver one night after I first moved from Austin, wondering why the hell had I moved there, and it couldn’t have been a more cinematic scene. Dark pub, pool tables, fantastically cool looking people that I immediately wanted to know every one of. As I’m walking in, a dark haired woman with the kind of eyes and smile that just melt you into a puddle of joy said to me I love your mustache and reached to my face and twirled the ends of it and walked off. And the deejay threw on The 13th Floor Elevators’s “You’re Gonna Miss Me”.

And this actually happened, as fantastical as it seems and that is why I would never doubt my friend met Roky and had that exchange. Uncanny moments.²

I ended up staying in Vancouver for almost fifteen years.

PART III

When I found out that Roky had died, I put on “Starry Eyes”; at first I was smiling, but next my eyes watered up a bit and then around halfway through the song I was fully crying, uncontrollably. My whole body was going through a series of waves, starting in the trunk of my torso and swelling out through my arms and legs. It was a grief, and a celebration. Mostly it was the feeling of my heart shattering into a thousand tiny shards, through a sound that Roky did so well, a sound that another Texan whose broken my heart so many times sang: true love will find you in the end. Roky knew love and put it out there for me in ways I never could. Roky Erickson, my third-eyed Cyrano de Bergerac.

Nei Young knew that only love can break your heart and that’s true. I will always be my biggest heartbreaker and that proves to me that love is real. I may end up alone for the rest of my life, I may always long for something or someone I’ll never get. But I know what love is, and I know that the beauty of it is so blinding that it can only make you cry uncontrollable tears of relief in knowing that it exists. And because I know that I can break my own wonderful heart every single day, I know that if I die tomorrow, true love has found me in the end.

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”

1. “Creator Charlie Brooker chose it for "Fifteen Million Merits" (2011), as a symbol of a past era to juxtapose with the dystopian setting…. Brooker saw the song as one of "earnest beauty", which had "the sound of a timeless haunting classic" but would not be known by most viewers…The song was reused by the production throughout the series, as a way of "nesting all the episodes together in an artistic universe of sorts", according to executive producer Annabel Jones. Wiki.

2. I had another great musical moment a few weeks later at an underground space called The Emergency Room. The city had been trying to shut it down, as I’d soon learn it does all the time, earning Vancouver the fitting name No Fun City. On what was billed as their last night, there were so many people there that there wasn’t enough room inside and what seemed like a hundred people were occupying the back alley. And then the cops showed. I saw the paddy wagon pulling in, and since I had a beer in one hand and a Texas ID in my wallet, I ducked inside to avoid issue. And inside as I saw the cops walk in the door, the first verse of a Black Flag song came on:

This fuckin city / is run by pigs

Of course they then tried to shut it down. I asked that deejay, Justin Gradin, about that years later and he said he had no idea the cops were even there when he put it on.