67 year-old Rocky Horror Picture Show icon Tim Curry suffered a stroke yesterday and is said to be recovering in an L.A. hospital. We at the Reader hope he gets well very soon and, seeing as how Curry once (briefly) enjoyed a vastly and inexplicably underrated music career, this seems like a good time and place to chronicle those years here in the Jam Session blog by reposting and expanding on an earlier entry about the iconic performer.

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Like many (most?), he first hit my radar as Frank ‘N’ Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I first caught while visiting Austin Texas in summer 1978. A few months later, my first appearance in my hometown Connecticut newspaper the New London Day was NOT in the police blotter (surprise!!) – it was an article about the midnight rockies at the Groton Cinema, as represented by this photo of me (half)dressed as Curry and accompanied by my already underwear-inclined girlfriend ----

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(October 16, 1978 New London Day – let the mocking commence! After above pic was published, underwear girl’s parents forbade their daughter to date me…as did the parents of several other local ladies…)

Anyway, I continued to follow Curry’s musical career. Post-Rocky, he started up an amazing rock-n-cabaret band, with Alice Cooper’s fiery lead guitarist Dick Wagner.

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Curry’s big, booming voice was perfectly suited for the theatrical rock opera-esque songs, most of which managed to be both gritty urban and feather-fay at the same time – think Springsteen concert as staged by Twyla Tharp.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5laG1E0Q4b8

“I Do the Rock” was probably his best known tune, with its stream of consciousness namedropping rap. Curry even updated the tune for a performance on the Tracey Ullman show!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=df9uxaqpEGQ

But most every song on Curry’s albums was a jewel, especially smoldering burners like “Sloe Gin,” an all-out “Stairway” style masterwork (audio-only track below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3Oq1IBQCPA

"Sloe Gin" is still frequently covered today, by guitar gods like Joe Bonamossa...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJQH00VEkcA

...and shredder goddess Chantel McGregor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmb3P18vYB8

However, for some reason, Curry’s rock and roll fire never quite caught on. This baffles me. His deep voiced operatic style clearly foreshadowed the VERY similar music in the two Eddie and the Cruisers movies, as performed by the Beaver Brown band (and lip synched by the actors). In addition, groups like Sisters of Mercy, Oingo Boingo (whose original Mystic Knights cabaret act was directly inspired by Rocky), the Cult, and even Guns N’ Roses and U2 may well some of their inspiration to Curry’s music. Many similarities -----

Certainly Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell looks, feels, AND sounds like a direct descendent of Tim Curry’s rock and roll experiment, as do the Dresden Dolls, the Killers, and a number of other contemporaries.

Curry kept singing, tho, first in movies like the low budget Blue Money, on up through Muppet Treasure Island, Annie, etc.

Up until recently, he was rocking the stage in Monty Python’s Spamalot, as King Arthur, though it's his acting career that almost always keep him front and center stafe in the public's eye. I most recently caught him co-starring in an Ion TV movie The Colour of Magic, based on the Terry Pratchet stories and co-starring friend-of-Frodo Sean Astin, and on a recent episode of the TV comedy Psyche, playing a Simon Cowell-like a-hole talent show judge.

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Curry's best-known and most beloved role of course was in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which has a long and rich local history. It debuted as a midnight movie at OB’s Strand Theater in 1977 – soon enough, devotional fans were showing up night after night to shout over the dialogue and wing wacky props at each other’s heads, some even dressing up as characters from the movie and miming scenes in front of the screen.

Calling themselves “castmembers,” these folks apparently liked to photograph themselves a lot, judging from this online scrapbook put together by a longtime castmember from the film’s 10-year run (beginning 1984) at the Ken Theater. http://www.rassoodock.com/rocky/reunion.html

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Former local Michael Reed, who runs Deep Shag Records, was one of those Rocky Horror cast members. Reed spearheaded a cast reunion at the Ken awhile back, and the aforementioned (and aforelinked) website has an area devoted to chronicling those years of “shadowcasting” (ie miming screen performances).

“I was still in junior high in the early ‘80s and didn't join up with Rocky Horror until I was about 15 or 16,” says Reed. His scrapbook includes plenty of photos of men in lingerie, women with rayguns, tuxedoed Transylvanians, and balding hunchbacks.

Also onsite is updated biographical information about “found people,” longlost castmembers who probably stopped pelvic-thrusting years ago, other than maybe for childbirth or closing the car door with an armload of groceries.

Rocky Horror moved from the Ken to a long midnight run at the La Paloma Theater in North County, the only other still-running single-screen theater in San Diego other than the Ken.

For a local-centric take on Mr. Curry, here's a locally produced comic book Rocky Horror spoof, published in the early 1990s by Hillcrest-based Revolutionary Comics, written by Todd Loren (Rock 'N' Roll Comics) and drawn by Ken Landgraff (Wolverine, Thor, etc).

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