“All of it was performed in maximum overdrive on a bed of rockabilly, blues, and R&B, which earned Nixon some friends in the roots rock community but had enough punk attitude — in its own bizarre way — to make him a college radio staple during his heyday,” the All Music Guide wrote.
“I’m a rabble-rouser who does humorous social commentary within a rock-and-roll setting,” he told The New York Times in 1990. In another interview with the paper, he described himself as a voice of “the doomed, the damned, the weird.”
Born Neil Kirby McMillan Jr., on 2 Aug, 1957, in North Carolina to a father who owned a soul music station, Mr. Nixon was drawn to music from a young age because, he said in 2017, “it’s exciting, it’s dangerous, and it makes the church people nervous.”
In the 1980s, he began performing with Richard Banke, better known as Skid Roper, in San Diego. Their third album, “Bo-Day-Shus!!!” was the first to make the national charts, thanks to the satirical song “Elvis Is Everywhere.” The song, which posited that Elvis was responsible for everything from building the pyramids to making ships disappear in the Bermuda Triangle, and its music video, got the attention of MTV, which made him an occasional host in 1988.
He went on to record several more albums, both solo and with other collaborators, including with the backup band the Toadliquors, and also worked as an actor and radio D.J. In recent years, he became a radio host on Sirius XM, where he hosted the afternoon show on the Outlaw Country channel under the name “the Loon in the Afternoon.”
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