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You're Gonna Miss Me

You're Gonna Miss Me

Re: You're Gonna Miss Me

You're Gonna Miss Me (2005). Directed by Keven McAlester. Documentary. Not rated. 94 minutes.

"You're Gonna Miss Me" is a well-made documentary about Roger (Roky) Erickson, a '60s lead singer from Austin whose career arc spiked early and then descended steadily, taking him on a long slide from modest stardom to incarceration to abject and lengthy mental illness. The film sketches his history and offers a little rock and roll on the side.

A brief scene from a courtroom intervention opens the film, with one of Roky's brothers petitioning the court to have Roky removed from the care of his mother and placed with his brother instead. This scene signals to us that Erickson won't be dead at the end of the movie, that there is family conflict in the offing, and that we can now go back in time to Erickson's roots with the judge's decision and its consequences awaiting us when we make it back to the present.

The movie then proceeds, interleaving scenes of a beautiful, full-voiced, youthful Roky with scenes of the wreck that he has become by the time he reaches his 50s. Interviews with Patti Smith, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, and others suggest that Erickson's performance style and voice had considerable influence on rock and rock in the late 60s. Janis Joplin considered joining one of the bands that he co-founded, the 13th Floor Elevators. (She went to San Francisco instead.) Meanwhile, the Elevators released an album titled "The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators." For this, and because of the LSD and grass that they used heavily, the group was credited with coining the term "psychedelic rock." A quick check of my shelf of 60s wax reveals The Electric Prunes, Ultimate Spinach, and Canned Heat, but no Elevators.

There followed success, the hit "You're Gonna Miss Me," San Francisco, drugs and alcohol and women, and then it was all downhill from there. Hepititis. Back to Austin. Lockup in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Two broken marriages. Back into his mother's arms. As the story unfolds, we jump back to the present periodically, where Roky's behavior onscreen convinces us of his mental illness.

Halfway through the movie, in the course of interviews with family members, musicians, the police, and others, there suddenly appears onscreen a 24-year-old young man, talking about his father Roky. His father? This is Roky's son? Where did he come from? This is a reminder that the filmmaker is compressing 58 years of a man's life into 94 minutes. If I took an hour's worth of video from your life, threw in 30 minutes of interviews with your family and friends, and then sat you down to observe the results, would you notice anything missing? Could I capture your essence in that time? However successful McAlester is at doing so, this movie can't turn me into an expert on Erickson in an hour and a half.

[mild spoilers]

As the past and present converge, we see Roky's youngest brother decide to petition the court for the right to become Roky's legal guardian. This means removing him from his mother's care and a lot more work than the brother realizes. Like when you decide to paint your house.

The core message of the movie now emerges: If you are unfortunate enough to need help in this life, mental or physical, and you don't happen to be rich or famous, your fate will depend upon the kindness and good works of your family, friends, and possibly of strangers. In Roky's case, any such kindness was insufficiently strong or committed or lasting or widespread among those who knew and cared for him to overcome his resistance to it. He walked away from one wife; another wife walked away from him. His brothers looked on from a distance. He dropped friends and they let him drop them. The only, unlucky, exception to this lack of commitment to help came from his mother. Year after year, Roky lived as his mother wanted him to live, remaining dependent upon her. No medication. No music. No dental care. This from a mother who comes across onscreen almost as damaged as Roky himself. If I were to tweak the movie in any way, it would be to add footage that somehow helps us understand and visualize the long, long stretch of time between Roky's youth and late middle age - a lifetime, his life - wasted, frittered away, consumed by an illness that could have been managed by treatment and the involvement of a single person willing and able to make the effort to help him, but instead kept him tied to a mother satisfied to have him near her and broken rather than out in the world and functional.

But, finally, the younger brother does step up and provide the financial and emotional effort to make a difference in Roky's life. A demonstration of the results, after a long period of treatment, rehabiliatation, and support, is provided quietly by Roky with his guitar in a chair outside his brother's home in Pittsburg. 

The screener disk contained no extras. I'm sure that commentary tracks will increase the value of an already excellent documentary.  Rotten Tomatoes rates the movie at 81; the IMDB rating is 8.4. For more on the film, listen to FilmCouch podcast #26. For the latest on Roky Erikson, check out his Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roky_Erickson.

"All hail Roky, King of the Beasts!"

It's easy to minimize the influence of Roky Erickson on the music world.  Unless you were among his ardent fans and followers, he was ostensibly a one hit wonder who promptly disappeared from the music industry, only to return several times with diminishing results.  At its best, his music was carnal, raw, and fierce, as such luminaries as Billy Gibbons, Thurston Moore, Gibby Haynes, and Patti Smith attest in Kevin McAlester's documentary You're Gonna Miss Me.  But at other times, Roky's music was meandering, lacking in direction and cohesion, and -- at least lyrically -- downright silly.  It was hard to tell when Roky was being irreverent and when he was being serious, and the same can be said about the Roky Erickson of McAlester's film.

When we first see Roky, he resembles the addled recluse he is: with scraggly hair, long yellow nails, and a spotty beard, he is fascinated by a half assembled Mr. PotatoHead doll and impressed that Publishers Clearing House would so generously offer him money.  He spends most of his time wandering through his cluttered house, keeping comprehensive logs of his mail -- both incoming and outgoing -- whether it be junk mail and advertisements, or letters to the late Alfred Hitchcock, which he never sends.  His sleep ritual is not unlike something from a David Lynch film; with TVs, radios, baby monitors, and all other sorts of white noise blaring cacophonously, he sits at the head of his bed, and putting on a pair of sunglasses announces that he will now be going to sleep.  Awake, he will only answer the door or the phone for his mother, who spends four hours a day with him, trying to make sense of her son's life -- and through her efforts, validate her own.

Roky's mother Evelyn becomes his de facto guardian, which is a point of contention among Roky's brothers, who feel Roky should have access to prescribed drugs and rehabilitation, of which his mother is skeptical.  This conflict is where McAlester chooses to focus his camera, framing it within Roky's storied history, which includes his early abuse of LSD, arrest for marijuana possession, nervous breakdown, diagnosis of schizophrenia, and three year stint in Rusk Maximum Security Mental Hospital, where he regularly received shock treatment.  The film wisely avoids supposition about the causes of Roky's mental state -- was it the drugs? the shock treatment? natural proclivity? sexual abuse as a child? -- keenly accepting that within the insanity of Roky's life, there is no way of discerning which factors weighed most heavily upon his psychological health.  "Roky chose to go crazy," notes his brother's therapist, "for him it was a solution."

It may have been the only solution.  His family was particularly volatile, driving at least two of the Erickson sons to therapy, most notably the youngest, Sumner.  Evelyn, however, prefers religion and yoga to science and medicine, and tries to lead Roky down a similar path of recovery.  To explain her distrust of psychiatry, she alludes to "Frasier," noting how Frasier and Niles, both therapists, are unable to solve their own problems, never make mention of a "supreme being," and are "another example of knowledge not being turned to wisdom."  Her catharsis comes from giant collages of photos, paintings, newspaper clippings, and other such ephemera which she constructs as a kind of autobiography of her life, to convince herself of her worth as a human and, specifically, as a mother.  Rather than attempt to reconnect with her children and discuss their growing rift, she elects to make a fairy tale film called "The Five Kings" as a metaphor for her relationship with her sons.  A great deal of her skewed sense of context and especially her packratting can be seen in Roky and his mess of a home, but Sumner vocally wonders if this is the healthiest environment for a man who claimed to hear voices and would travel to the beach to "literally have the sense knocked into him" by the crashing waves.

This is not to say that Sumner is a bastion of sagacity.  His home is an eyesore, a great, big box of windows and primary colors -- yellow and red, mostly, both inside and out -- that would stand out anywhere, but does so doubly in the Pittsburgh suburbs; his therapy teeters precariously on the edge of new-agey poppycock.  Nonetheless, he provides a sturdier ground for Roky, and when the film flashes ahead one year, we immediately see a change in Roky, both in how he carries himself and how he interacts with his environment.  He is sharper, keener, and his sense of wonder about the things around him is decidedly more childlike than the skewed rantings and blatant misconceptions we have seen from him up to this point.  But still, when Roky picks up his guitar today and plays a song for his brother and his therapist, the wide-eyed glance he gives to his audience is still somewhat amiss, and begs the question: For someone who, as a youth, only seemed happy playing his guitar, and as an adult walked away from music entirely for no apparent reason and without any remorse, is the joy in his face from the music itself or from pleasing his audience?  If Roky comes off as anything in You're Gonna Miss Me, it's a man at the mercy of those around him, a man being pulled in several directions, unable to cope with the stresses of his family life and his fame.

Whether it's 1966, and he is taking more of bandmate Tommy Hall's acid despite his bad trip, or it's 40 years later and he's picking up the guitar at the suggestion of his therapist, Roky's life is one that seems unable to rectify the impulse to please those around him with his indomitable individuality.  McAlester plays the last several years of Roky's life as triumphant, and there's no doubt they are when you see the new spark of life he possesses.  Nonetheless, the film hits a bittersweet final note: sweet, yes, for Roky's climb back to lucidity, but also bitter, for its portrayal of a man -- brilliant, if you considered him such, but undeniably one of a kind -- who has passed through so many trials in his life that no one, least of all Roky himself, can be sure what is truly in his best interest.

A Human in Progres

The history of rock and roll is filled with tragedy. The stories of Elvis, The Doors, Joplin, Cobain are the best examples. One has only to turn on the TV and see the mass of creativity exposed on VH1. You're Gonna Miss Me is not the rock and roll tragedy. It is a work in progress.

Director Keven McAlester presents an intimate story of a rock pioneer who is lost. Roky Erickson was the heart and spirit of the psychedelic band the 13th Floor Elevators. One has only to watch the interviews with Patti Smith, Kurt Loder, and others to see that Erickson changed the world with the music. It is obvious that Erickson and the Elevators brought something new and alive to the fledgling SF rock scene before Hendrix, and Joplin were common names. This, however, is not McAlester's story.

McAlester presents Erickson today as an aimless aged man who watches TV, and hears loud music at the same time and is cared for by his mother. Where the film shines is by letting Erickson's family, ex-wives, and those closest to him say what they saw happen, and how they feel. The style is not journalistic where the camera runs, and the people talk. McAlester is sympathic behind the camera and his interviewees tell the story.

McAlester's main focus in You're Gonna Miss Me is who can do the best to help Erickson become functional in society. McAlester shows you the conflict within the family, and the pain felt by friends, former bandmates, etc... This conflict is angry and intense. McAlester lets the audience watch it, and avoids taking sides.

McAlester also leaves the audience with questions. He does not say that one thing alone caused Erickson's transformation. It could be drugs. It could be a dyfuncyional family. It could be mental illness. It could be the years he spent in an archaic mental hospital. The cure is the bigger question, and by film's end, one realizes there may or may not be one. Erickson is a work in progress.

McAlester did not make a film filled with rock stories, flashy photos, and a killer soundtrack. He made a human film about a creative pioneer that the superstars knew, but is lost to history and his own mind. He does not draw grand conclusions about the music industry or the inherit unstability of artists in general. He made a documentary that does the best thing a documentary should do; make its audience think and question. Highly recommended.

Re: A Human in Progres

Re: You're Gonna Miss Me

Re: A Human in Progres

I was trying to figure out how to post my review to Mavens when I found a discussion started on You're Gonna Miss Me, with excellent reviews by joem18b, BigJeff, and Demndiary. Fortunately, my review takes off in a different direction, so it might still be worth reading.

Re: A Human in Progres

I'm wondering if documentaries haven't enjoyed most of their successes on TV over the past 50 years, as opposed to in the cinema? Seems to me that, as you say, only recently are people going to documentaries at the moviehouse. The first documentary that I recall making  an impression on me was Titicut Follies (1967), Frederic Wiseman's breakout film, which I saw on TV. The Seven Up! series began on BBC in 1964. An American Family ran in 1973 and had a large audience for public television. And so on, up through Ken Burns.

I wonder if VHS and DVD had a hand in the current cinema upsurge. That is, instead of just waiting for a documentary to show up on TV, folks began bringing them home from Blockbuster or the library, got more in the habit of watching them, and finally started to go down to the cinema and pay to see them first run? 

I'm guessing  that the percentage of great documentaries isn't  higher in any one decade over the others. Looking at this list, for example, the great documentaries seem spread evenly over the years.

Re: A Human in Progres

To answer your two points: 1) I don't have anywhere near the knowledge to venture a good guess as to why documentaries are becoming more popular, but I can venture some bad guesses. I think your idea of tv and video store influence is on the money. I was also impressed (in your linked list) at the number of good documentaries done earlier. Yes, I knew the Canadian National Film Board classics, but I mean more recently Crumb (1994), When We Were Kings (1996), Buena Vista Social Club (1998) etc. These may well have laid the groundwork for the recent POPULARITY of documentaries.

2) My point was that documentaries have become really popular in the last 4 or 5 years, not that they are any better. I wanted to make this point in an effort to explain my main point: People are not clear about what a documentary should be and thus not clear on what criteria to use in judging it. Documentaries and really good documentaries have been around for ages (see Nanook), but recently documentaries have enjoyed huge popularity (penguins everywhere!). Here's where I avoid launching into an extended argument about criticism of documentary films. But look at the criticism of M. Moore--much of it is ad hominem. Pathetic. Much of it is counterarguing his ideas with methods as slipshod as his. Unfortunate. I believe that over the next few years people will work toward more perpicacious criticism of documentaries and that this will probably involve dividing documentaries into sub-categories or sub-genres.

Thanks for responding to my posting.

Re: A Human in Progres

Thanks, Jim.

You mention Nanook. Did he live anywhere near Cascadia? Probably closer to the ocean?

Writing the review above, I was accutely aware of how little I know about the theory of documentary moviemaking. For one thing, it's so easy to forget that with day-to-day filming and interviews, there is actually a camera crew present, inflecting the action but invisible to the viewer. Likewise, the film shown is pared down from hundreds of hours of shooting, according to the decisions and desires of the director. So what we see onscreen is not necessarily a true reflection of "reality."

Tim O'Brien, the TV columnist for the SF Chronicle, has a weekly podcast (available on Itunes). He's had several long interviews with Ken Burns, and he catches up with him for 30 minutes this week. They discuss briefly the controversy around Burns' new, 14-hour WW II documentary. After it was finished, PBS was pressured, and pressured him, to add Hispanic footage to the 6-year project. Another angle in how documentaries are conceived and structured.