“I do apologize to the entire Houston community for being a dickhead, an arrogant, drunken asshole about the way I did that interview, just shitting on the whole scene,” says Connor Pursell, lead guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter for Houston’s The Nerve-Curlers. “I’m not into that gatekeeping bullshit anymore, like I was a part of it, but I’m not. I just want everbody to be inclusive and do their own thing and support each other. Yes I might not like your band but I shouldn’t be a dick about not liking your band and that is what I used to do back in the day.”
Pursell is referring to an interview I did back in 2017 with him and his previous band, The Escatones called, “The Escatones Say Your Band Could Very Well Suck.” I don’t think Pursell was as bad in that interview as he perceives himself to have been though; The Escatones ended in 2020 and The Nerve-Curlers emerged.
“So JT (Popiel) in November of 2020 moved back to Detroit to get his doctorate in history; he’s doing way more important shit than trying to be a fucking rock star in his mid-thirties, he’s like doing real shit and I fucking love him to death and I wish the best for him,” explains Pursell. “So when I started The Nerve- Curlers I could of easily kept The Escatones name, I write all of the songs, but I started that band with JT and I’d just feel like a phoney if I’d be the only original member of a band. So I wanted to start something completely different, the only thing that sucked about that is during the lockdown him and I were writing some of the best fucking music The Escatones ever did which will probably never get released unfortunately. So I just decided to try something else that’s why I changed the name.”
So the lineup for The Nerve-Curlers is, once again, Pursell, lead guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter; music scene veteran Ken Dannelley on drums, who was also the last drummer for The Escatones (Pursell says The Escatones had about 10 drummers); and Neil Jeffrey on bass. I didn’t get a chance to talk with Dannelley this time as he was on a cruise ship, nor Jeffrey who was away in Germany; Hey those two guys sure know how to get away for Thanksgiving break.
“The main difference between The Escatones and The Nerve-Curlers is, it still has that surf/surf-punk thing but at a faster tempo and it’s way more political than The Escatones,” explains Pursell. “The Escatones were never a political band, really, I mean I was always politically conscious but I’ve become more, with like the lyrics getting into the politics and stuff.
“When JT left, Ken and I were trying to do this two-piece thing but I like to have that lower, that bottom end you know, that bass, I can’t do the two-piece thing cause I like the solo too much I guess,” says Pursell. “So we got Neil, he was in a band called Smashed Idols and I played in bands with a lot of people and I’ve never met a nicer dude than Neil, man that guy is fucking cool as shit, like nicest dude I’ve met in my entire life.”
“My two biggest influences right now are Agent Orange and Chumbawamba,” says Pursell. “I got more into my roots, I went and saw Agent Orange in 2022 and I was like dammit this is why I got into this shit, and surf rock has always been a big thing for me, but I was like I can do political surf rock too, man.”
Pursell gave me a copy of a three-song sampler casette tape of music The Nerve-Curlers have recorded.
“It’s very Sylvia Plath-themed,” explains Pursell. “2020 affected us in a lot of different ways, everybody. We realized our worth as a worker in this country, I think it made us more empathetic, it made some people go crazy and want to fucking punch people, but that was a very depressing time in my life when I wrote those songs and “God Hates You (Sylvia Plath style)” was the single off of that but I don’t necessarily think those three songs reflect the way we sound now because we did that very early on so we do a lot more kind of surfy shit and like punk stuff you know and I’m so proud of Ken cause he can still play drums in three bands in his mid-fifties and all three bands share a similar style but are very different.”
“The song “Take Me Away” was when I had my mental breakdown in 2020. So I’m working at the restaurant in the early winter of 2020 and we just see all these Karens coming in and bitching about masks, and people violating the social distancing laws and this is pre-vaccine,” says Pursell. “So if I got it (covid) of course I would probably be fine but I’d feel guilty as fuck if I gave it to somebody else that would die from it and I had a very bad mental breakdown, became an insomniac for awhile and that’s what “Take Me Away” is about.”
The song “God Hates You (Sylvia Plath style)” is about-that’s another one of my depressing ones and the name Nerve-Curlers comes from a Sylvia Path poem called The Detective and one day I was reading a book of Sylvia Path poems and I was like man there’s so many potential good band names like Nerve-Curlers, awesome,” explains Pursell. “So that one’s a very depressing song about everybody dies alone kind of thing. Kind of cliche, like you’re never going to find a cure for cancer but I put it to a pop overbeat. It’s like ‘hey little bastard what do you want from me/they’ll never find a cure for cancer and you might as well stay asleep’ and I thought that was a pretty cool chorus and it’s pretty fucking dark but I think it’s kind of true but who am I to say? I’ve always been about writing really dark matter over a very poppy song, I like the mixture of that.”
The final song on the casette is called “Looking Glass.”
“The third song “Looking Glass” that’s kind of looking in the mirror kind of thing, when you’re looking in the looking glass there are no thoughts at all so it’s like you’re looking, hey maybe you have nothing to fucking say so that’s kind of what that song is about and it’s kind of like a nod at JT because he would always say ‘well I can look in a mirror.’ “Looking Glass” is basically about fears and mental illness and aspiring to do something else cause your looking at yourself and you don’t have an answer to do it and you think you’re like a piece of shit phoney-I could word that better obviously but that’s kind of what that song is about.”
“The songs we’re going to record next are going to be pretty political and a lot of surfy stuff put in there with a lot of love of pro wrestling too cause Ken and I are huge pro wrestling nerds,” Pursell says. “There is still good wrestling and there’s still great music and those were like my two biggest loves in life as far as like an artform goes and I hate it when people shit on pro wrestling as being fake cause I’m like dude they don’t have an off day, they don’t have a union, these fuckers put their bodies on the line seven days a week they only get like 20 days off a year. There’s like a similarity between that and music, you don’t get an off day there, it’s like a traveling circus but it pisses me off when people like, say wrestling isn’t a real sport. Yes it’s pre-determined but how you get there can totally fuck your body up and that lifestyle is very similar to touring in a band.”
“I don’t know what your take is on the Palestinian movement but I hate what’s going on over there I’ve studied that region rigorously my entire life and they’re all genetically aligned from the Canaanites but I don’t like that hospitals are getting bombed and you’re not allowed to criticize that or you get called an anti-Semite it’s like Netanyahu’s government is just another far right-wing government and I’ve been listening to way too much Chumbawamba these days, they were an anarcho punk band that made it to top ten radio with “Tubthumping” and you have to watch the new documentary that came out on them called I Get Knocked Down, it’s on Amazon Prime.”
“We’re only going to do EPs from now on we’re not going to do full albums cause the attention span of people can’t handle an entire album so I just want to record three or four songs at a time and release that on casette because casette is the cheapest thing to do that on and casettes are making a huge comeback,” states Pursell.
“I just want to continue to play and record and I would love to get more politically active these days outside of that but I’d like to combine the two. I would consider myself pretty much a socialist, I’m a leftist for sure the big diference between capitalism and socialism is people think you can’t have free markets in socialism, that’s wrong,” explains Pursell. “In socialism you don’t privatize human necessity so I’m getting more into the politics and I just want to help people out, the downtrodden, that’s my thing now, that’s what all these new songs that we haven’t recorded yet are about, not all of them but a lot of them, and I just want to do my best to help society and that’s all.”
“One thing I would love to mention is we did The Escatones reunion show back on July 3rd with The Mydolls and they were like the best local band in my opinion, like they’re all kind-hearted souls and R.I.P. to Kelly Younger of Really Red that was Linda’s husband, and they’ve always been so supportive to any of my music endeavors, the same with Bob Weber from Really Red and Jeff Walton from The Judy’s, they’ve all been really cool and supportive with everything younger going on here and they were the basis for Houston music in my opinion as far as punk rock or post-punk or whatever you want to call it.”
“I’d also like to give a shout out to JT, brother in fucking arms, we did so much shit together,” exclaims Pursell. “I would love to do another Escatones reunion show up in Detroit because the Escatones reunion show in Houston was one of the best Escatone shows we ever had in Houston. We used to never draw a crowd here and that place was packed to the pont where i could actually crowd surf during a song. Where we’re all you fuckers when we we’re an actual existing band!”
“I don’t know but I’m going to continue to play music, probably still work in the fucking service industry for the rest of my life, but I’m never going to stop writing songs until I die I guess,” concludes Pursell. “Rock and roll and punk will always live as long as there are pissed off Americans, and not even just pissed off Americans, just pissed off people across the world.”
The Nerve Curlers perform Saturday, December 2 at 7 p.m. at Bohemeo’s, 702 Telephone Rd with 500 Megatons of Boogie and The Genzales.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
