NICK RATTIGAN
by MATTHEW JAMES-WILSON
Nick Rattigan has experienced what it means to play music in the world of DIY from a range of experiences in three com-
pletely different contexts. Going from playing house shows in Reno, to playing The Smell in Los Angeles, to playing local venues in New York where he currently resides, Nick has grown enormously as a musician and performer from when he first started the band Surf Curse with his best friend since high school, Jacob Rubeck. Although the two have made music together long distance for the past couple of years, Nick’s current focus has been his solo project, the name of which he changed from TELE/VISIONS to Current Joys a few weeks after I met him and conducted this interview. Since moving to NY this past fall Nick has put out one of his most vulnerable and consistent albums yet, Me Oh My Mirror, and is now navigating where to go with new music in a new city with his new name.
Where are you from and where do you live currently? I am from Henderson, just outside Las Vegas, originally. But then I moved to Reno for school, And now I live in Brooklyn. Do you have any formal training in music, or are you self taught? When I was eight I started taking drum lessons because my brother was taking guitar lessons and I didn’t want to be like him. But then around like, high school I realized you cant write songs if you’re just playing drums all the time and everyone just wanted me to play drums in their band, so I started teaching myself guitar and I had a friend who taught me some stuff, But basically I just learned guitar myself over internet tabs. I learned through playing songs off Ultimate Guitar, so I never really learned how to read notes or anything but I just learned through reading tabs of a bunch of System of A Down and Flogging Molly songs because that’s what I was listening to at the time. So basically thanks to Flogging Molly and System of a Down I learned guitar (laughs). . How did growing up in Las Vegas affect your music? Oh man, it’s just a cultural hub of the world (laughs)! I still got influenced by all the same things I probably would have growing up in another city because me and my friends would just watch things on the internet and read interviews about all these others bands, so we pretty much lived in the same world except like miles away from it, or like 3 hours from LA and miles away from any other city were these things were actually happening. We would watch videos from The Smell and live performances from Glasslands and Cake Shop and all these places I would have loved to see. We’d read about bands and stuff, so I think the only way it affected our music negatively was none of that stuff was happening in our area.
Like, if Animal Collective came out, it would be the show of the year or the month and we’d all go, but there was no real music scene, so when we would start bands or want to play anywhere we didn’t really have anywhere to play. I had a band in high school and we would just play the worst places possible. There was one record store and we played there once and got heckled right in front of my parents by these really skeezy guys just awful, awful, Vegas people, so that was kind of a negative experience. I guess there was just nowhere to really express our own musical outlets. But we still got to take it all in. We got to take in different music scenes, we just didn’t get to create our own. It was just a lot of screamo and hardcore and stuff. After moving to Reno though, that’s when it all changed, because there was this place called The Holland Project which was an all ages DIY venue and art space so when we were creating things we could actually play live and do shows and have people come out, it was a whole different world. There was a scene there! In Vegas there wasn’t a scene. How did you meet Jacob Rubeck and how long was it before you started Surf Curse? We met in eight grade. I remember I thought he was insane. Well not insane. But the coolest kid, because he came up to our lunch table and was talking about all these movies and all this crazy stuff and kept saying “fuck fuck fuck” a lot he just talked really fast, and then I found his Myspace and he had the Velvet Underground as his background and I was so intimidated by how cool he was and stuff. Then we hung out through a mutual friend and we all formed a band together. But then Jacob got kicked out of the band on my birthday. It was my birthday party, and Jacob got kicked out of the band because this other guy said he couldn’t play bass, so Jacob got kicked out of the band but you know, we still hung out and were great friends because we’re both into the same music and movies. I think without Jacob I would have never gotten into any of the music I’m
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