Durocs

Enthusiastically embracing the mantra "We shall overdub," Durocs was the performing alias of producers and songwriters Scott Mathews and Ron Nagle. Nagle, born in 1939, was a native San Franciscan with a passion for both art and rhythm & blues. After graduating from San Francisco State College, he began teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961, and when the British Invasion hit, he teamed up with some friends and students to form a band called the Mystery Trend. The group became regulars on the San Francisco psychedelic ballroom circuit, and recorded a handful of tunes that failed to chart. The band broke up in 1968, and two years later Nagle recorded a willfully eccentric solo album, Bad Rice, that was produced by Jack Nitzsche. Meanwhile, Mathews was born in Sacramento, California in 1955, and began playing piano, guitar, and drums before he reached his teens. When he was 15, he jammed with Elvin Bishop at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, and formed the band Ice (featuring future Journey singer Steve Perry) when he was 16. Mathews developed a passionate interest in studio work, and in 1974, he met Nagle, who was writing songs and recording them in a studio he was building in his home. Mathews and Nagle became fast friends and collaborators, writing songs (two of which popped up on Barbra Streisand's album, Streisand Superman, earning them some healthy royalty checks) and creating both music and atmospheric audio effects for movies (Mathews collaborated with Nitzsche on the recording of the soundtrack for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, while Mathews and Nagle contributed to the audio design of The Exorcist, Sorcerer, and Cat People). Nitzsche was impressed enough with Mathews and Nagle's studio efforts that he helped them land a deal with Capitol Records, where they cut an album as Durocs (named after a breed of pig known for its keen ears and large genitals). Mathews and Nagle's album, simply titled Durocs, was released in 1979, and featured the two men playing nearly all the instruments (sax player Steve Douglas, a veteran of dozens of Phil Spector sessions, was one of the few guest musicians brought in for the project); the album earned enthusiastic reviews, and Durocs' cover of Gene Pitney's "It Hurts to Be in Love" charted in Europe, but it failed to catch on in the United States, and proved to be the Durocs' only LP. The group "reunited" in 1999 to contribute a track to the Skip Spence tribute album More Oar, and Mathews and Nagle have continued to periodically work together as songwriters and producers, most notably on John Hiatt's album Riding with the King. Nagle continued to work in visual art and has been a well-respected ceramic sculptor, while Mathews has maintained a busy schedule as a producer, songwriter, and instrumentalist.
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