TIGER ARMY'S NICK 13

Tiger Army captain Nick 13 gets comfortable with country music

By The Burg Staff on Jun. 22, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Country Gentleman: Tiger Army's Nick 13

The original class of ’77 punks may have been looking to a new kind of future — or, “no future,” as the case may be — in their efforts to eliminate the excesses of the prog-rock and glam bands that ruled the day. But it’s no secret that groups like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were perfectly comfortable drawing on the past as they stripped rock and roll down to its raw and raucous essence. The Pistols famously amped up not one but two of ’50s rockabilly star Eddie Cochran’s hits, “C’mon Everybody” and “Somethin’ Else.” The Clash went so far as to rework “I Fought the Law,” the 1959 Sonny Curtis tune that the Bobby Fuller Four hit paydirt with six years later, on their second album. And long before he had his first mohawk, Joe Strummer was singing pub-rock r&b tunes with the 101’ers and greasing back his hair in the style of young punks from the ’50s, not the ’70s.
     What began as something of a happy or, perhaps, inevitable accident has, over the past four decades, coalesced into and persevered as a punk/rockabilly hybrid known to most as “punkabilly” (Think Reverend Horton Heat). And in the last 10 years, thanks to a coterie of LA bands centered around Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong’s Hellcat imprint, punkabilly has morphed into the more colorfully outrageous “psychobilly,” although you could make a fairly persuasive argument that the Cramps invented the style out of whole cloth way back in ‘79 with the release of Gravest Hits. But that’s a whole other story.
     Tiger Army, a perennial Warped Tour favorite fronted by the dark, brooding, neck-tattoo’d Nick 13 (nee Kearney Nick Jones), have been one of the more accessible and successful self-proclaimed promulgators of psychobilly. They’ve toured with Social Distortion and Morrissey, and their 2007 album Music From Regions Beyond cracked the top 50 in the Billboard charts, in part because, excepting stand-up bass and just the slightest touch of twang, the single “Forever Fades Away” wouldn’t sound out of place on a Green Day album.
In fact, given Nick 13’s penchant for wearing black eye make-up and writing darkly romantic songs with titles like “Ghosts of Memory,” “Through the Darkness,” and “Incorporeal,” he may want to consider changing the band’s genre designation to “gothabilly” or “horrorcore.”
At least for now, Nick can put that decision on hold because his latest venture, a self-titled solo album on the country/folk label Sugar Hill, is about as far from punk as the Grand Ole Opry is from CBGB’s.
     With Nick playing cowboy chords, Lucinda Williams-sidekick Greg Leisz and multi-instrumentalist James Intveld co-producing and playing alongside legendary Nashville steel guitarist Lloyd Green (of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo fame) and a bunch of other studio pros, “Nick 13” isn’t just country, it’s old-time country or, as Nick himself has been calling it in interviews, “hillbilly music.” The disc, which made a surprise debut at No. 22 on Billboard’s “Top Current Country Albums” chart last week, opens with the walking stand-up bass line, pedal-steel flourishes, and downhome fiddle solo of “All Alone,” as Nick puts a contemporary twist on an old C&W theme with lines like, “A tattoo in pen and ink/Spells her name upon my arm/F-o-r-e-v-e-r/Her love was here but now it’s gone.”
     Singing in a high-and-lonesome voice that bears an eerie resemblance to Chris Isaak’s, Nick throws a bone to Tiger Army diehards by reprising two of the band’s songs here: “Cupid’s Arrow” turns up as a twangy ballad with a touch of Byrdsy jangle, and “In the Orchard” is slowed to a dreamy Roy Orbison slow dance. And his characteristic fascination with the morbid — a Tiger Army staple — rears its head in the plaintive “Carry My Body Down,” where, against weeping pedal steel and cowboy chords, he wonders, “Will they carry my body down?/Will they take it from the river/After I’ve jumped in and drowned?” Indeed, it’s a safe bet that at least a few of the tunes on Nick 13 will find their way into Tiger Army sets when he returns to the band after this successful country sojourn.
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