The Rutles!
Who among us is not a fan of the Prefab Four? Who can’t remember where they were when Ron, Dirk, Stig, and Barry appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show? Who could forget the riots when they played the concert at Che Stadium? Who could forget the outcry when Dirk announced that he was now drinking tea? Or that the decisive moment in western civilization was when the Rutles went their separate ways in 1970? They were the greatest band the world has ever known. Just ask Salman Rushdie. 😆
In reality, the Rutles were a post-Monty Python project of Eric Idle’s. With music written by Bonzo Dog alum and “Seventh Python” Neil Innes, the short film All You Need Is Cash parodied the life and times of the Beatles. (There is a second film, but I’ve never seen it as it was merely a rehash of the old footage and Innes wasn’t involved creatively.) Two albums were released — a soundtrack album, The Rutles, with the music from the film, and then in 1996 The Rutles Archaeology, a take-off on The Beatles’ Anthology albums. Innes’ music for The Rutles was brilliant in that it sounded authentically Beatles, yet was completely different. (This came back to bite him, however; some of the Rutles songs are now officially credited to Lennon/McCartney/Innes when the Beatles’ publishing company sued for plagiarism. For this reason, I want to see a Rutles expansion for The Beatles Rock Band. It’s just… right. 💡 )
There’s an interesting Rutles fan project I just discovered today — LUNCH.
Imagine the Beatles’ LOVE sound collage for Cirque De Soliel. Now, imagine that someone did the same thing for the Rutles and they called it LUNCH. As Steve Mainucci of The Examiner puts it: “Lunch features 45 minutes of Rutles classics remixed and resequenced in similar fashion to that done by another group four years ago in a similar lovefest. Parody is the name of the game.”
The entire album streams on the LUNCH website. It’s like the early days of Rutlemania, all over again!
It would be pretty awesome if this could have an official release, but that’s highly unlikely. So I’ll have to content myself with listening to it through the website while drinking another cup of tea. 😉
While I’m on the subject of The Rutles, this time about the official releases, for fun I put together the songs on the two albums into a kind of “chronological” order, assuming that The Rutles were a real band and the two albums contained songs from random points in their career:
- Goose-Step Mama — The Rutles
- Under My Skin — Archaeology
- Number One — The Rutles
- Hold My Hand — The Rutles
- I Love You — Archaeology
- Blue Suede Schubert — The Rutles
- Baby Let Me Be — The Rutles
- Baby S’il Vous Plait — Archaeology
- I Must Be in Love — The Rutles
- With a Girl Like You — The Rutles
- Between Us — The Rutles
- Lonely-Phobia — Archaeology
- Living in Hope — The Rutles
- Ouch! — The Rutles
- Now She’s Left You — Archaeology
- Easy Listening — Archaeology
- It’s Looking Good — The Rutles
- Joe Public — Archaeology
- Doubleback Alley — The Rutles
- Major Happy’s Up And Coming Once Upon A Good Time Band — Archaeology
- Rendezvous — Archaeology
- Good Times Roll — The Rutles
- The Knicker Elastic King — Archaeology
- Nevertheless — The Rutles
- Back In ’64 — Archaeology
- Piggy in the Middle — The Rutles
- Love Life — The Rutles
- Cheese and Onions — The Rutles
- We’ve Arrived (And To Prove It We’re Here) — Archaeology
- Let’s Be Natural — The Rutles
- Another Day — The Rutles
- My Little Ukelele — Archaeology
- Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik — Archaeology
- Hey Mister! — Archaeology
- Get Up and Go — The Rutles
- Lullaby — Archaeology
- Don’t Know Why — Archaeology
- Shangri-La — Archaeology
- Rut-A-Lot — Archaeology
- Imitation Song (Neil Innes’ website)
Listening to The Rutles in the way, even though twenty years span the actual recording sessions (with another fifteen years for the one-off “Imitation Song”), actually works. 😎
Now I feel like listening to the Bonzo Dogs…