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 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 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.