Rock 'n' roll fans have been treading air for too long, settling more for less. Where's the attitude? Where's the defiance? Not that scripted tabloid so-called naughtiness that gets played out for the TV, but real, honest-to-badness transgression. Too fast? Too loud? Too bad.

It may be bold to say that one man and one record could stop the bleeding, but Texas guitar wildman Nick Curran's new "Reform School Girl" is the best rock ‘n' roll record to come out in years. It's bodacious, salacious, savage, and raw, recorded in one month by a young man who plays like Johnny "Guitar" Watson - if Watson's head was on fire - and howls like Little Richard.

At 32, Curran has already lived the life. At 19 he left his hometown of Biddeford, Maine, to hit the road with "The Blonde Bomber," Texas rockabilly legend, Ronnie Dawson. From there he went on to play guitar in honky-tonk honey Kim Lenz's band, The Jaguars, before moving on to trot the globe with The Fabulous Thunderbirds 2004-2007. All the while, Curran continued to record and play with his own vintage blues outfit, Nick Curran and the Nitelifes, which won a W.C. Handy Award for Best New Artist Debut with its album, "Dr. Velvet." The Nitelifes have since morphed in to Nick Curran and The Lowlifes.

Curran is fearless. He's faced vampires on HBO's "True Blood," has come face to face with cancer, and conducted this interview while barreling down the Jersey Turnpike in excess of 75 mph. We talked about his recovery, his heroes, and why he loves vintage rock 'n' roll.

Curran says that he appreciates the "attitude and the raunchiness" of the founders of the genre. "They kind of said whatever they wanted. When I was about 10 or so, and starting to really listen to my own music, that's when Guns 'N' Roses came out with ‘Appetite For Destruction' and that kind of flipped me out, because they were swearing all over the place. I really liked the guitar playing on it; it was rocked-out bluesy guitar playing. And I really liked The Stones when I was little, and The Ventures. The first tape I had was ‘Thriller' by Michael Jackson. I've kind of been all over the place as far as the music I like. But it's all related."

And harnessing this relativity is what gives Curran's sound such a focused wallop. "To me, all those musics are the same thing, just a different period in time," he says. "You listen to Howlin' Wolf and then you listen to The Misfits...the guitar tone sounds exactly the same."

Curran kicked off young. His dad played in a band and constantly spun the blues around the house. "Around 3, I really wanted to play drums," Curran says. "So my dad got me a Muppet drum set. Supposedly I could play beats at that time. I remember being about 5 and going to shows with my dad and him letting me sit in on drums on a couple of songs. Then when I was 9 I got a guitar for Christmas and it was kind of all over from there."

Curran quickly became an amalgam of everything he heard, though Curran's style today is instantly recognizable with its tight, rhythmic twang and tube-amp abuse.

"When I was a teenager and starting to play in bands, I think I was still trying to play like other people," he says. "I really think my style has developed into my own sound in the last handful of years."

The teenaged Curran had quickly slipped into playing blues guitar. Then he saw a high-octane rockabilly performance from King Memphis. "I was like, ‘Whoa man, what is this?'" he says. "And that got me into Gene Vincent, you know, Eddie Cochran, Joe Clay, Ronnie Dawson."

Curran credits the late Dawson for helping him find his own style. "When I was 19, I started playing with Ronnie," Curran says. "That's when I started to figure out my own kind of deal. He encouraged me, ‘Man, play like yourself. Take everything you like and turn it into rock 'n' roll.' He never wanted to be pigeonholed. He just wanted to be rock 'n' roll. And that's stuck with me even now."

Curran applied this creed to his playing in The Fabulous Thunderbirds, an already well established band with a distinct sound. "It was me playing, but I definitely wanted it to sound like the Thunderbirds," he says. "I tried to do my own thing with it. And that's what Kim [Wilson] liked. When I first joined the band he'd let me do a handful of songs a night - and he never really did that before, so that was cool... Even in that band I'd think, How would Ronnie approach this?"

The same question rang out when Curran was diagnosed with tongue cancer last year. He faced it fearlessly, head on. "Man, it was weird," he says. "Because beforehand I was more freaked out, ‘What if it's this, what if it's that?' And when they told me it was like, ‘OK, what do we do to get rid of it?'"

An aggressive round of radiation and chemotherapy coupled with holistic treatments resulted in Curran being deemed cancer free as of last month.

So Nick Curran and The Lowlifes is currently on the first leg of its "Fuck Cancer Tour," where the crowds are getting bigger and bigger due to the incredible buzz around "Reform School Girl." Regardless of the crowd's size, it still gets 100 percent of Curran's slash 'n' burn guitar and his raspy yowl over the Lowlife's modern vintage boogie.

"Even if there are five people there," he says, "I want it to be a rock 'n' roll show and make it like we're playing for 10,000 people."

Hell, that's what Ronnie would do.

Nick Curran and the Lowlifes

Part of Bop Fest

Sunday, July 18

Village Gate Courtyard, 274, N. Goodman St.

4:30 p.m. | Free | 271-3354, myspace.com/curranrock