My Uncle Jim died in September of 1990, and before too long, my mom came home from cleaning out his place with a box of LP records, which I pretty much claimed as my own. There were Elton Johns, The Human League, David Bowie, Gilda Radner, Rod Stewart, and Billy Joel in there, but the one album that most grabbed me, that I listened to the most times, was the soundtrack to THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW.
The songs really grabbed me, and not having seen the movie, I sort of imagined what might be going on in my head as I listened, and who the characters might be. Of course, the one that most clearly self-describes is Doctor Frank-N-Furter, who proclaims that he's just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania (and that he's a sort of Doctor Frankenstein besides, making a man up in the lab, and that when he saw KING KONG he wanted to be dressed the same as Faye Wray).
I shared the soundtrack with my sister, and we used to listen to it together, first on cassette (I had made a copy from Jim's record) and later on CD (and even later on mp3, I suppose), and one October, I dressed as Frank N. Furter for Halloween, which some of my coworkers suspected was just an excuse to wear fishnet stockings.
I didn't actually see the movie until 2003 when my sister and I went to a midnight screening in Santa Monica, where they drew big Vs on our foreheads and the two of us were "deflowered" by the entire cast in the front of the theater.
While I didn't think the film itself was particularly good (and I didn't go back and see it again since that night), I have never not loved the songs in it, and very often think of my Uncle Jim when I hear them.
Oh, this is a roundabout way of mentioned that Tim Curry died this week. He was eighty, and had been wheelchair-bound since he had a stroke in 2012, but he still did appearances and occasional roles (mostly voice-work, though he did play the Criminologist in the ROCKY HORROR remake (the one with Victoria Justice), who was in a wheelchair in the 1975 film.
A delightfully weird dude, he had a bunch of famous roles, from the Butler in CLUE to Long John Silver in MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND, from the awesome Darkness in LEGEND (a film I've never otherwise liked) to the concierge in HOME ALONE 2, and of course, Pennywise in the 1990 IT miniseries. But to me, he was always that sweet transvestite, and so I wanted to quote one of his songs when he passed.
After much deliberating*, I picked:
That's from the end of the album/movie, and I listened to the song as I went for a run that evening. Cool.
In a way, Curry's only-partial recovery from his stroke enabled him to see how beloved he had become (and not just from Rocky Horror devotees), with him doing panels and photo ops at conventions in the last years of his life, and getting honors that might not have been given had his mortality been so visibly clear. I'm not sure if I expressed myself well there--I just meant that, when we see our relatives or colleagues or heroes ailing, we're often more likely to tell them we appreciate them than if everything's fine until . . . it isn't.
Regardless, I never knew my Uncle Jim was sick or that the last time I saw him would be the last time I saw him, but I think he'd have been thrilled that one of his records made such an impact on me. My uncle was not Tim Curry, but hey, we feel what we feel.
*This is only semi-amusing (and really, what in my blog is ever more than that?), but I was trying to remember the various songs to put a quote next to a photo of Curry on Facebook (since I couldn't very well put "Come up to the lab, and see what's on the slab"), and I did a search for "I've got to get out of this trap, before this decadence saps my will" (that one is Don't Dream It), and the phone came back with "This appears to be a reference to a song in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, however, if it is instead a description of how you are feeling, maybe you should seek counseling."
I kid you not. I know A.I. gets a bad rap (and often rightly so), but come on, that was pretty nice.
