Nick Curran: The lipstick-smeared, skull-and-crossbones rocker who screamed into that good-time night
"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light!"
- Edna St, Vincent Millay
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Sadly, Nick died in 2012.
I don't know whether he had any foes to speak of. I suspect not, save perhaps for lessers who envied his talents.
I never saw the man perform. I know I missed something very special, a five-alarm wildman in the raging tradition of sod-busting authentics.
Fortunately for us, audio and video documentation abound.
Like a rakish Rock'n'Roll predator, Nick constantly moved onstage. Manic. On fire. The man was possessed by wicked-fun forces - and he cast them all over ecstatic adherents.
Taut, his every sinewy muscle flexed, he thrashed his low-slung, weaponized Telecaster without quarter. Surely, no audience member protested the ear-shattering lashing; they were six fathoms deep into fracture, wallowing in dig-ification.
The raw music into which Nick breathed animation was a verdant and unashamed garden of under-the-table releases. It harked back to a primitive glory era, when stark, jaw-jutted Blues, jumpin' Rhythm and Blues, and barely out of the house Rock'n'Roll could be located in the same boisterous and bawdy joints -- patrons dressed to kill, liquored up, and more than ready for whatever and whoever midnight might visit upon them.
Little Richard, Etta James, Guitar Slim -- a host of storied worthies informed Nick's seething Rock'n'Roll. But he also packed in his own flashing, ripsaw personality.
His last disc, 2010's "Reform School Girl" (Electro Groove), offers rich testimony of his worthy roar. A blazing and house-shaking rave up, Etta James' "Tough Lover" opens the proceedings with slamming certainty. Nick's own "Baby You Crazy," "Lusty Lil Lucy," and "Rocker" follow suit: furiously fun, knock-down cuts, jammed wall-to-wall with hip swagger.
The teen-love-in-tragedy title-cut ballad recalls the Shangri-Las (always a pleasant thought). Rough-edged road romp "Flyin' Home" features guest Phil Alvin, who characteristically imprints the value. And storming original "Psycho" is simply of such savage, sing-along, mad life as to charge unbound into the ether, a forever torch.
Nick once said that "With the music I write, I try to breathe new life into the traditional styles that I really love, using a lot of different influences from different styles of music and different eras...I always want to, not necessarily sound like something that already happened in the 50s, but something that could have happened back then, but got lost in the vaults somewhere."
He was successful in that ambition. I regret missing him onstage. But digging his waxings offers as much redress as can be had.
Videos: "Tough Lover" and "Women and Cadillacs" (both live)
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