Almost a year now…
…and rock and roll heaven is a little drunker.
March of 2006, shortly after playing a show in front of maybe a dozen folks at The Knitting Factory in NYC, Nikki Sudden died in his sleep of complications related to a congenital heart defect (certainly not helped by the fact that Sudden was maybe last sober sometime in 1980).
Nikki was the real folk blues. He and partner in crime Dave Kusworth were Jack Sparrow before there was Jack Sparrow, richly re-imagining the legends of Keith Richards and Mick Taylor, only substituting mammoth amounts of cheap wine and liquor for the heroin. Nikki was also about as beloved a musician among fellow musicians and club owners and promo wonks as you’d find. Everyone in the industry of a certain age has a fairly hilarious “yeah, I got falling-down drunk with Nikki Sudden” story.
I doubt Nick Godfrey would want anyone mourning him much–he was much more of the binge-drinking wake sort. In that spirit, here’s a rare video of Nikki and Dave and the Jacobites (Kusworth, decked out in furs and leather pants with an electric yellow guitar basically is the embodiment of rock and roll badass here). Enjoy, but be careful about catching a contact buzz!
And just for fun, another video from the same period of The Jacobites, with Kusworth taking vocals (if you can find a used copy of The Bounty Hunters–Kusworth’s post-Jacobites band–cd called Threads: A Tear-Stained Scar buy it and thank me later.)
Popnarcotic 