A true New Orleans
original, Charlie Cuccia first came to the notice of audiences
throughout the Southeast region during the 1970s as a
pompadoured guitar player leaping from sixfoot stages,
duck-walking across crowded dance floors, and fixing audience
members with his google-eyed stare – and all the while playing
an endless series of killer rockabilly and rock-n’roll guitar
licks.
“Actually I started
out playing clarinet,” he admits. “My mom loved Pete Fountain.”
But by the age of ten, he’d acquired his first guitar and
immediately started learning Chuck Berry riffs, eventually
branching out to absorb influences as diverse as Keith Richards,
Bruce Springsteen, Carl Perkins, and Leo Nocentelli of New
Orleans’ pioneering funk quartet, The Meters.
As the out-front
headliner on this hard-rocking effort, Cuccia clears a swath
through some well-known classics and some not-so-expected
standards, like his parade-beat seduction of “Mack the Knife” or
the romantic blues of “Rainy Night in Georgia.”
Paying tribute to the
Crescent City’s deep R&B tradition, Cuccia also turns in
sizzling versions of Chris Kenner’s “Sick and Tired” and Lee
Dorsey’s “Get Out of My Life, Woman,” along with blues-tinged
renditions of classic rock like Gary U.S. Bond’s “New Orleans,”
Chuck Berry’s “Nadine,” and Springsteen’s “Spirit in the Night.”
A self-penned
instrumental, “The Snake,” gives Cuccia a chance to deploy some
neat rockabilly licks, while a six-minute version of the Bob
Dylan anthem, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” clearly
establishes him as a blues-slinger supreme.
All in all, this is a
truly original and totally convincing demonstration of
rough-hewn, tightly deployed, rockabillytinged, hard-rockin’
rock’n’blues that’s bound to become one of your
surprise-discovery favorites.