"I Do the Rock": A Stimulating Study of the Song That Defined Tim Curry's Pop Career

Here is the text of the paper (and a portion of the slide show) I presented at the Pop Conference on April 23, 2022.

Full title: "I Do the Rock": 

A Stimulating Study of the Song That Defined the Pop Career of Musical Theater-Turned-Movie Star Tim Curry 

Dame Edith Sitwell, a Modigliani painting come to life, wasn't just a poet, but a lyricist, since she set some of her poetry to music. She would also perform these musical poems on stage behind a myriad of scrims. Further, she had a connection to Hollywood through her many famous silver screen admirers, including Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, who set out to meet her when she visited California in 1950. 

On the personal front, Sitwell had a knack for falling in love with gay men, like Siegried Sassoon, who shared her love of art and poetry. Her brother, Osbert, was also gay. Sitwell would never marry. 

A decade from the stardom he would claim in the 1970s, aspiring actor and singer Tim Curry was 18 when Sitwell died in 1964. Fifteen years later, Curry would co-write and record a song, "I Do the Rock," that opens by mentioning the poet. But he went several steps further by citing her brothers Osbert and Sachie, also poets, in the same verse. How many listeners in 1979 actually recognized those names? 

According to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Sitwell siblings "drew inspiration from the commedia dell'arte and the Ballets Russes, from Pope and Swift, from Dickens and D'Annunzio, from Claude and Marinetti, from the baroque and chinoiserie. Frequently attacked as enfants terribles, they were none the less widely admired, especially by Evelyn Waugh, who paid them a supreme compliment when he proclaimed: 'They took the dullness out of literature'."

I was 15 when I first heard "I Do the Rock," and the names of the Sitwells sailed right over my head. Granted, I was also unfamiliar with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas who join them in the first verse.

So, what connects these public figures, beyond their nationality and striking bearing? As a young performer, Curry would join a band of English eccentrics, like Rocky Horror Show playwright and actor Richard O'Brien, who shared characteristics with their poetic predecessors, including a predilection for eye-catching outfits, a love of wordplay, and a delight in shocking straight society. Sitwell and her tribe helped to sow the seeds of glam, glitter rock, and even the more flamboyant stage plays, like Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, for which Curry would play the title role in the 1980 Broadway premiere. 

The previous year, he released his second album for A&M, 1979's Fearless, which included the singles "I Do the Rock" and "Paradise Garage." The videos for these songs would appear before screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. At that time, MTV was still two years away from inception. 

I should backtrack for a moment here to note that Fearless was actually Curry's third album, because his 1976 debut, now known as …From the Vaults, wouldn't see release until 2010. Grammy Award-winning producer Lou Adler, an executive producer of 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, handled production duties, and the results are surprisingly strong for an unceremoniously shelved release, especially Curry's kicky, piano-driven cover of John Phillips and his wife Geneviève Waïte's "Biting My Nails," which would become a dancefloor sensation, by way of a radically different arrangement, for British electronic act Renegade Soundwave in 1989. 

Adler's production duties for the Mamas and the Papas in 1968, in addition to Phillips' 1969 solo release John Phillips (John, the Wolf King of L.A.), helps to explain why Curry covered yet another Phillips composition, "Just Fourteen," on the same album. The song, featuring backing vocals from Brian Wilson and members of the girl-group the Honeys, was released by Adler's A&M imprint Ode Records as a single in 1976. It represents Curry’s first official studio release. 

Fearless, which reached #53 on Billboard's US 200, followed 1978's Read My Lips. Curry would issue his third and final official pop album, Simplicity, in 1981. It produced no charting singles and led to the end of his contract with A&M. Though "Paradise Garage" wouldn't chart in the US, "I Do the Rock" marked Curry's sole entrance, as a pop performer, on Billboard's Hot 100 when it peaked at #91 in 1979. 

If his three other studio albums, including …From the Vaults, consisted primarily of covers, Curry turned to Michael Kamen and Dick Wagner, with whom he had worked on Read My Lips, as producers and writing partners for Fearless. At the time, Wagner was best known for his work with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed, and KISS, while Kamen had also worked with a number of prominent recording artists, most notably David Bowie, for whom he had served as arranger and multi-instrumentalist on 1974's Diamond Dogs Tour. Kamen's career as an Oscar-nominated movie composer, however, wouldn't kick into overdrive until a few years after his work with Curry. Kamen, 55, died of a heart attack in 2003.

Oddly, A&M would promote Fearless as the work of a neophyte, rather than that of an experienced singer, even though Curry had been performing professionally since at least 1968 when he joined the London cast of Hair. That was the point at which he met O'Brien of future Rocky Horror fame. 

As A&M's promo pack for Fearless would have it, "Curry is no long-term rock and roller who thrashed out Chuck Berry songs at sock hops in high school. He entered the form untrammeled by the weight of its traditions and has conquered it through the force of his own wit, intelligence, and panache. His first album, Read My Lips, was the work of a talented innocent who put himself in the hands of an acknowledged master, Bob Ezrin. Fearless is much more than simply an improvement. It is, instead, a quantum leap to a whole new level of creativity and involvement. Curry wrote no songs for his first album: on this latest release, he's written words for six of nine." The album's sole non-original is a cover of Joni Mitchell's "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire." Notably, he also covered Mitchell's "All I Want" for Read My Lips, so he was clearly a fan of the Laurel Canyon legend, even if his style and hers don't quite mesh. 

As before, Kamen and Wagner played in the band assembled for the recording, which took place at New York's Hit Factory and Massachusetts' Long View Farm Recording Studio. Kamen is credited with piano, oboe, and synthesizer and Wagner with lead and acoustic guitar. David Sanborn, a year away from his first #1 jazz album, 1980's Voyeur, provided the obligatory New Wave sax. In his All Music Guide review of Fearless, outsider musician Eugene Chadbourne describes Sanborn's playing as "slurpy," adding that it is "thrust in thy face like a jumbo-size drink of the same distinction."

In A&M's promo pack, Curry goes on to explain the thinking behind his writing, "I've always had scripts before, but now I'm blundering toward what I feel. The idea is to progress toward some kind of honesty." 

It's my belief that Curry wrote all or most of the lyrics that make up "I Do the Rock" and that Kamen wrote all or most of the music. There's no reason why an American like Kamen wouldn't have some familiarity with the British figures, except they tend to be a little more obscure than the American ones, like "Best," a reference to footballer Pete Best, and "Meg," a reference to Princess Margaret. That said, Curry and Kamen were born only two years apart, so the list is just as specific in a generational sense to both men. 

Over the years, the name-heavy song has been compared to Jim Carroll's "People Who Died," Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," and R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)." 

During the course of four minutes and 51 seconds, Curry cites 46 public figures, divided into five sections involving literature, music, politics, sports, and gossip. That's a fairly tidy description of a song that's actually a little messier than that, but it would take hours to discuss each figure, so I won't—and I'm not sure that I even could--but I began by mentioning Edith Sitwell, because she struck me as the least obvious figure with which to open a pop song, and also the possibly the one closest to Curry's heart. 

Even assuming that he was wholly responsible for the lyrics, though, I make no claims that "I Do the Rock" is telling us exactly who he was in 1979, or even now at the age of 75, but rather that it was an expression of his interests at the time, and an indication of the kind of songwriter he could've become if given sufficient encouragement to hone his skills. Instead, he leaned primarily, but not exclusively, on cover songs for his final album before packing in his pop music career for good. 

In 1980, he told The Washington Post that he didn't have anything left to say. As he put it, "I'm proud of the records--they had three or four good songs, which isn't bad… But frankly, it just got too hard. I did like 100 cities in America, I did a continental tour, I worked with studio musicians, did one-night stands--the most exhausting way of living known to man. By the time I got round to the third record, I didn't really feel that what I had to say was going to be heard, or particularly worth saying. So I quit."

Because Tim Curry has always kept his private life private, I scoured the lyrics on all four of his albums for clues, specifically regarding his sexual orientation, but came to no definitive conclusions. Though he claimed, in 1979, to be progressing toward honesty as a songwriter, that's one area where he remained opaque, and he has continued to take the same approach in interviews, in which he otherwise comes across as quick-witted and self-deprecating--an extension, if you will, of the persona he projects in "I Do the Rock." 

Nonetheless, I've always believed that even the most private artists tell us who they are through the songs they sing and the roles they play, not necessarily individually, but collectively, and Curry has consistently avoided traditional masculine leading roles. As he once told People magazine, "I like risky parts--abrasive characters the audience won't necessarily like." 

That was as true of the auteur-driven films and plays he did in the UK in the 1970s, like Dennis Potter's Schmoedipus and Jerzy Skolimowki's The Shout, as the commercial projects he did in the US in the 1980s, like Ridley Scott's Legend, for which he underwent a laborious makeup process to play the demon Darkness, and my personal favorite, Alan Moyle's teen runaway saga Times Square, in which he plays a rabble-rousing disc jockey.  

In 1988, Curry relocated to the US from Britain. Though he experienced a major stroke in 2012 that has made it difficult for him to continue with the more rigorous stage and screen roles of his past, he's kept busy with voice work and public appearances, particularly those involving The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Like Edith Sitwell, he never married, but he has known love. All he'll say about that publicly is that it didn't last. 

When all is said and done, Tim Curry will be best remembered for Rocky Horror. He was the first actor to play Dr. Frank-N-Furter, and he even made suggestions that original London director Jim Sharman incorporated into the stage production. 

Though I was among the young and impressionable audience members who saw it several times at midnight screenings in the 1970s and '80s, I've never assumed that Curry was that character, but it drew on his strengths as an actor, as a vocalist, and as an unconventional sex symbol in a way that made him an LGBTQ icon. As culture bloggers Tom & Lorenzo put it in a celebratory 2020 blog post, "In many ways, The Rocky Horror Picture show represented one of the biggest cultural triumphs of the queer art community immediately post-Stonewall." They go on to note that "Curry's Frank N. Furter provided a shocked public an image almost none of them had wrestled with prior to 1975: the image of a pansexual non-binary figure who was hot and down to fuck." 

If Curry remains proud of both play and film, it's overshadowed much, but certainly not all, of the work he's done since. Significantly, he originally saw his pop career as a way to get away from Rocky Horror and to create a new identity. That's why he refused Lou Adler's suggestion that he cover Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "I Say a Little Prayer" on his debut with its proto-Rocky Horror couplet, "The moment I wake up, before I put on my makeup."

It's my hope that Curry's pop career, brief as it was, will also be remembered. When A&M released The Best of Tim Curry in 1985, they did their bit to help the cause. Joked Curry at the time, "They couldn't call it the Greatest Hits, because there weren't any." Funny line, but it isn't quite true. 

If "I Do the Rock" was his best song, and indisputably his most popular, it wasn't his most personal. Oddly, the most personal wasn't written by Curry at all, but rather by Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen, and it appears on Read My Lips. In "Sloe Gin," he sings, "I'm so fucking lonely and I ain't even high/I'm so fucking lonely and I feel like I'm gonna die." It's possible that this nakedly emotional lament simply represents a role that Ezrin and Kamen created for Curry, but when he sings the lyrics, you believe him. 

In a development typical of Curry's pop sojourn, guitarist Joe Bonamassa would title his sixth studio album, which topped Billboard's blues chart, after his expletive-free cover of the song. "Sloe Gin," which Curry had originated nearly 30 years before, would become one of Bonamassa's signature numbers. 

When Tim Curry tells us in "I Do the Rock," that that's all he can really do, he sells himself short. Maybe he was just playing the role of a rock & roll star, but he could, and did do, a lot more. And I'm glad he did. 

And now here's the video for "I Do the Rock." Thank you for listening. 

 

Images: 1) Tim Curry / photographer unknown, 2) Edith Sitwell with her brother Osbert in about 1920 © Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis  via Getty Images, 3) Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics, Faber & Faber, 1933 Penguin Books, Ltd, 1971 / Vulpris Libris, 4) Richard O’Brien and Tim Curry at the 1974 Evening Standard Theatre Awards, Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Getty Images, 5) Read My Lips (1978) / Wikipedia, 6) Michael Stipe as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, circa 1978 / Flustered Mustard Theatrical Productions, St. Louis, MO, 7) Tim Curry as Robert Graves in Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout, 1978 / Films Incorporated, 8) Tim Curry and  Ian McKellen in Amadeus, circa 1981 / photographer unknown, and 9) Tim Curry as the narrator in FOX’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 2016.