Tim gets serviced at the Paradise Garage (screenshot by me)
“Do you boogie a lot?… You don’t boogie?… Just a tiny bit? Just a little bit?… Never?!”
Barely audible over the grating squeals of a locked-in keyboardist dominating the band’s groovy rhythm, Tim Curry attempts to wrangle a listless German audience member into some light audience participation. Rebuffed by this “very cold person,” as he quips, he moves on to another viewer: “What do you do? You boogie? He doesn’t boogie!” And another. And another. There were no boogiers (boogers?). Yet Tim was undeterred and boogied for them, bellowing out, “LET’S GO! LET’S GO!” while strutting down the aisle like Mick Jagger. This short clip from a 1979 performance on the German TV show Musikladen is an incredible document—an immovable wall of German stoicism meeting an unstoppable force of boogie.
Though the clip of Curry’s hilariously relentless persistence in the face of audience disengagement posted to X this week didn’t include much of the song itself, I’m going to assume from the constant invocation of boogieing that it has to be the tail end of a raucous performance of Curry’s “Paradise Garage,” off of his second album, 1979’s Fearless. I’ve been fixated on “Paradise Garage” for years, mainly because of its delightful absurd music video in which Curry seems to have taken a wrong turn looking for the storied NYC nightclub and, instead, found five people dancing in an auto repair shop. Was this auto body shop trying to cash in on the popularity of Larry Levan? The music video captures Curry at his tip-top swagger, rolling his eyes, curling his lip, playing with an engine performance tester, and sneering at a woman walking by dressed as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Yet, it’s not just the video that calls to me. All sleazy sax, shredding guitar, and shoo-shoo-woop backup singers, “Paradise Garage” is a rock and roll ode to both the nightclub and the wannabes drawn to its hype in New York Magazine, the latter of which required (or did it?) Curry to take on a curious Southern accent to invoke a guy from…Plainsboro, New Jersey. Even when he’s not oddly vocally transforming into a New Jersey drawl, Curry’s vocal performance is dialed up to an eleven as he suddenly roars out feverish exclamations like, “HIT THE CEIIILLAAAAANG!”
Before I go any further, what a horrid week this has been for our filth elders, huh?! DOLLY AND TIM!?!! My heart can’t take it! I should preface that because I’m writing on Tim rather than Dolly doesn’t mean I’m any less broken up about the loss of our born-to-be-cheap Tennessee saint. Yet, if I’m being honest, Tim’s excessive performances, always defined by a camp too-muchness, have been much more formative to both me personally and Filthy Dreams. I mean, Tim’s unforgettable dramatic entrance and introductory speech (“Let them know it’s….HALLOWREEN!) before his (has-anyone-seen-my) tambourine-slapping seasonal song in The Worst Witch is responsible for the name of our annual HALLOWREEN playlist! Of course, like every other suburban weirdo in high school, I was obsessed with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But his other roles are just as important. As a child, I remember being low-key freaked out by Curry’s appearance as a toothy extraterrestrial clown on the cover of IT’s VHS box at Blockbuster. Yet, I’d also argue that the sewer-lurking, balloon-tempting, fat boy-kissing killer clown is just as much, if not more, of a camp icon as Rocky Horror’s doctor of depravity.
In the days after Tim’s death, though, I find myself not sifting through old movies, but returning to his trio of albums recorded with A&M Records from the mid-1970s to early 1980s. Ok, returning isn’t quite right since I only previously listened to one album in full before this week: the aforementioned Fearless. Though “Paradise Garage” is certainly a club classic, it’s not an outlier. Fearless is a near-unyielding manic episode that draws on the glam rock years of David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Lou Reed, while also being chock full of Tim Curry’s characteristically puzzling line deliveries, so prominent in his on-screen work, whether it’s Rocky Horror‘s “Don’t get HOT and FLUUUSTAAAARD,” Red Alert 3‘s “SPAAAAACE!” or, a clip I just encountered, his exaggerated take on Shakespeare with “she gave me DESPAIIIR!” The album starts with a bang: the antsy “Right on the Money,” which opens with a jolting snarl, “Freezing on this corner! Waiting for a riiiiiiiiide uptown!” “Right on the Money” ricochets from the staccato yelps of the “Right on time! Right on the money!” chorus to extended roars, “I can’t be one minute LAAAATE!” If you need a breather, you’re out of luck. The next song, “Hide This Face,” opens with an eardrum-blasting saxophone wail that reminds me of Dean Johnson’s demand that his saxophonist on “Fuck You” sound like a drunk playing a bar mitzvah. As usual, Tim rises the occasion to match this energy, bragging about being “a smash at cocktail parties” because “I keep falling on my face.” “Hide this Face” is a celebration of acting bad, like a much less repentant version of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ shambolic “Thirsty Dog.”
Though much of Fearless idles at about 100 mph, there are more subdued ballads on offer, like the emotional “S.O.S.” and not-quite-heaven “Something Short of Paradise.” Yet, because the rest of the album is so ceaselessly berserk, these softer moments are filled with (dynamic) tension as the listener just waits for the next vocal bomb detonation. And that explosion always comes, whether in the form of one of the most demented renditions of a Joni Mitchell song ever pressed to record, the barking, whimpering take on “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire,” or “Charge It,” an unraveling roiling account of a psychotic break shopping spree as Tim declares himself in a “state of grace” while racking up credit card debt. Think of it as the frantic flipside of Charli xcx’s “Card Declined” off of her recent Music, Fashion, Film. Whereas Charli sounds apathetic about buying handbags, a Mah Jong sofa, and a new personality, Tim is in pure consumerist bliss, belting out a “OH OH!” even before the receipts start flying. While a riotous rock song about credit cards with references to capital gains is bonkers on its own, its concluding mostly spoken-word, one-sided dialogue must be witnessed, as Tim perseverates about the color of his credit cards and howls in appreciation at a new platinum one. It should really end with the narrator being hospitalized and heavily medicated.
Curry’s debut album, Read My Lips, released in 1978, years before the Gran Fury poster and Madonna’s Latin-infused song off of CONFESSIONS II, is both more and less insane than Fearless. It is less consistently insane, but its moments of dizzy derangement are somehow, almost impossibly, even more extreme. Though it begins slowly with the subtly gay “Birds of a Feather” by Rough Trade, the album kicks into head-spinner high gear by the second number, a frothingly demented, heroically inexplicable take on “Wake Nicodemus,” a Civil War-era abolitionist tale of an enslaved man by Henry Clay Work. Tim’s version opens with a parade of a pipe and drum band, before bursting into blaring guitars and a vowel-extending pronunciation of Nicodemus that must be heard to be believed. I have many questions about the decisions here: What is this accent he’s doing? With the rolling r’s, is he going for Scottish? And why would an abolitionist song sound like the Pogues? I would say it’s one of the most batshit recordings I’ve ever heard, but the next song rivals “Wake Nicodemus,” a reggae version of The Beatles’ “I Will,” a description so bonkers that I can’t believe I just wrote that. And sure, we could all get offended at Tim Curry doing a stereotypical Jamaican accent while trying his white English colonizing hand at reggae, but after Boy George’s AI pro-genocide reggae song, I’m just happy this isn’t about rape.
Like “Wake Nicodemus” and “I Will,” most of Read My Lips consists of lunatic cover songs. These range from “Brontosaurus,” which includes a Divine’s “Alphabet Rap”-like chant, “Give me a B!” to a musical genre-themed nervous breakdown version of Irving Berlin’s “Harlem on My Mind,” which induces queasy whiplash by encompassing both top-of-the-lungs shouting blues and temporally accurate 1920s jazz. My sleeper favorite, though, is Tim’s transformation of Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” into Tom Jones-style Vegas schmaltz, through a combination of full-chested belt and overbearing orchestra.
Compared with Read My Lips and Fearless, his last album of the trio, Simplicity, is kind of a letdown. Sure, Tim yet again attempts reggae with “Working on My Tan,” but, as a whole, the album seems like someone at A&M told him to tone it down and turned him down, as his vocals are much quieter in the mix. Songs that should be belters, like “Dancing in the Streets,” come off as relatively even-keeled. Hell, even “I Put a Spell on You” takes more after the High Priestess of Soul Nina Simone’s famed cover than the grunting graveyard boogie of its originator, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, a version I would have assumed Tim could loopily launch himself into at will.
What makes Simplicity such a disappointment is also what makes his music overall so sublime. So many of Curry’s choices are so utterly baffling that he risks absolutely no audience understanding what the fuck he’s doing. Yet, he clearly does not give a shit. Take “I Do the Rock,” which was unbelievably his biggest hit in the United States (How?). Pairing Roxy Music decadence with Billy Joel’s laundry list, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” “I Do the Rock” sees Tim invoking a smattering of artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and politicians, ranging from John and Yoko to O.J. Simpson to…Idi Amin. These creatives and dictators, he seems to say, dither around with their time whereas he does the rock. In fact, he gets so carried away doing the rock that he fractures completely by the song’s conclusion, shouting about the sunshine like he’s an Andre Gide protagonist staring at those blue skies. The lyrics themselves are certainly eye-swirlingly bizarre, yet it’s his choice to present them with an ever-evolving accent that turns “I Do the Rock” into a legendary head-scratcher. At first, he seems to be doing the rock in German, but by the end, he’s reverted to his favorite problematic accent appropriation, Jamaican!, with the “Come to the rock, the rock will cure your ills, man.” What?! What the fuck IS this song? It’s too much. It’s camp. It’s berserk. It’s kind of offensive. And yet, with that sleazy sax and glam rock mix, I can’t deny it, listening over and over. Why? Because I’m drawn to how, like his appearance on Musikladen, Tim persists, fully committing to the bit regardless of the response. So, nobody else gets it—who cares? As if taking a tip from Dr. Frank-N-Furter, he dreamt it; he was it!