The Rutles
The song below will give you a taste of the Rutles, one of the most elaborate and longest-running pop parodies ever. Eric Idle came up with the idea while hosting Rutland Weekend Television, a Brit tv series in the mid-70's. He soon found an inspired collaborator in Neil Innes, a fellow with a real talent for conjuring up insane and catchy novelty songs; he wrote several for Monty Python. The idea was fleshed out over time until a whole Rutles universe was created.
I suppose I should point out that it was a spoof of the Beatles. Every album, every event in their storied career has a strange counterpoint in the Rutles' own story. Ron, Dirk, Stig, and Barry are John, Paul, George, and Ringo, respectively.
The Rutles came to America in a big way (well, maybe not as big as The Ed Sullivan Show) in 1978, after a couple of test runs on Saturday Night Live. SNL producer Lorne Michaels, a hardcore Beatle fan if there ever was one, fell in love with the concept immediately and convinced NBC to produce a special called The Rutles- All You Need Is Cash. The resulting 'story of the Rutles' did not draw a huge audience, perhaps because it was filled with so many in-jokes that only die-hard Beatles freaks would catch all the references. Another problem was that at times, it paralleled the REAL Beatles story so closely, it hardly seemed like a parody at all!
Still, there were many funny moments and the songs by Innes were fantastic; they were the real highlights of the production. 'Doubleback Alley,' 'Let's Be Natural,' and the priceless 'Piggy In The Middle' (see below) were brilliantly catchy spoofs of Beatles's songs. In fact, an entire album of them was put together in an elaborate 'Magical Mystery Tour'-type packaging and released by Warner Brothers, to middling success. One of the songs, 'I Must Be In Love,' even made the top 40 in Britain. George Harrison loved the project and appeared in the TV special in a cameo.
The Pre-fab Four, as they came to be called, lived on in the years after the show, maintaining a cult following and re-appearing in the mid 90's with a new album, Archaeology, which oddly enough coincided precisely with The Beatles' own Anthology TV series and albums.
I suppose I should point out that it was a spoof of the Beatles. Every album, every event in their storied career has a strange counterpoint in the Rutles' own story. Ron, Dirk, Stig, and Barry are John, Paul, George, and Ringo, respectively.
The Rutles came to America in a big way (well, maybe not as big as The Ed Sullivan Show) in 1978, after a couple of test runs on Saturday Night Live. SNL producer Lorne Michaels, a hardcore Beatle fan if there ever was one, fell in love with the concept immediately and convinced NBC to produce a special called The Rutles- All You Need Is Cash. The resulting 'story of the Rutles' did not draw a huge audience, perhaps because it was filled with so many in-jokes that only die-hard Beatles freaks would catch all the references. Another problem was that at times, it paralleled the REAL Beatles story so closely, it hardly seemed like a parody at all!
Still, there were many funny moments and the songs by Innes were fantastic; they were the real highlights of the production. 'Doubleback Alley,' 'Let's Be Natural,' and the priceless 'Piggy In The Middle' (see below) were brilliantly catchy spoofs of Beatles's songs. In fact, an entire album of them was put together in an elaborate 'Magical Mystery Tour'-type packaging and released by Warner Brothers, to middling success. One of the songs, 'I Must Be In Love,' even made the top 40 in Britain. George Harrison loved the project and appeared in the TV special in a cameo.
The Pre-fab Four, as they came to be called, lived on in the years after the show, maintaining a cult following and re-appearing in the mid 90's with a new album, Archaeology, which oddly enough coincided precisely with The Beatles' own Anthology TV series and albums.
posted by gbj at 10:49 AM
3 Comments:
So when you think about it, they beat Spinal Tap to the parody band thing, in a sense. I don't know whether ST was spoofing particularly on any one band so much as metal in general. I have to listen to these songs; I only know the Rutles from SNL.
I used to have 'All You Need Is Cash' on video but I haven't seen it in years. If you ever run across it in a video store, it's definitely worth seeing. The scene where they send up 'I Am The Walrus' is TOO funny.
Yeah, I don't think Spinal Tap was aimed at any one band. I love the scene where the band runs around and around the corridors beneath the stadium and can never find the stage...
. . . and keep having to re-psych themselves up. " . . . Rock and ROLL!! . . ."
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