I finally got around to seeing You're Gonna Miss Me, a 2005 documentary about the musician Roky Erickson. Erickson was the leader of the 13th Floor Elevators (here's a 1960s video of the band), a psychedelic group from Austin that was hugely influential to the more well-known San Francisco bands of the era.
The film chronicles Erickson's crippling problems with severe mental illness, which, for a long time, weren't able to stop him from writing and playing amazing songs (Here's a song . In fact, his music just got better and better (Listen to Two Headed Dog from 1980). He finally dropped out though, thanks in a large part to bad family dynamics, and for 12 years he lived in a squalid apartment doing nothing but sitting in a chair listening to all his radios and TVs playing at the same time (to drown out noises in his head?). He lost all interest in music.
The ending is uplifting; it turns out to be a moving documentary about the unselfish love of a man trying to give his brilliant older brother another chance. It's great to see how much better he is doing now, as seen here in this short clip.
You're Gonna Miss Me – a documentary about the musician Roky Erickson
