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Cheese, Onions, & Hormones: Rutles Highway Revisted.
As I was getting’ down to some Strawberry Hill-inspired whoopee with Mrs. LaStu No.6 last night (met her in my Shakespearean Traffic School night class last month), my mind moseyed to the wide-eyed days of my ’68 Dodge Dart a-boppin’ and The Rutles a- rockin’.
Could it be nearly forty years since these four hucklebucks from Liverpool conquered Vespucci’s terra firma namesake? Forty years! Seems more like forty minutes ago hair one sprouted down southern LaStu and "Hold My Hand" blared out of the ol’ Emerson transistor radio. The arrival of The Rutles in our fair burg was seismic...like going from Frank Capra to Russ Meyer faster than boiled basin water to Malt-O-Meal, I tell you what! If you were alive and near a Zenith in February 1964 and didn’t catch the Pre-Fab Four on Ed Sullivan you must’ve been a communist, dead, or both!
‘Twas the summer of ’65 and this scribe was setting ladyfingers ablaze in French class when word got out The Rutles were to play a show in Black Oak. I was bouncing off the walls like Silly Putty at a sorority formal! Dirk, Stig, Nasty, & Barry were about to ferry their Mersey-beat to my hometown, and I was more determined than Charles Bronson in The White Buffalo to lasso me a pair of tickets. How else was I going to charm the brassiere off of Melinda Lee Feldbaum, Queen of Rutherford B.Hayes Junior High? Getting into that show became more important that Brylcreme for the strapping, young, and randy LaStu. Luckily the town drunk was the bastard son of Sidney Corntoe, the local concert promoter at the time. All it took was a two bottles of Old Harper and the Vicster was on his way to Rutle-dom.
Held at Muleskinner County Fairgrounds, the bill for that cavalcade of limey pock-marked mop-toppedness were Herman’s Hermits (I distinctly remember Peter Noone wearing a housecoat onstage), The Cyrkle, Cilla Black, The Fugs, Peter & Gordon (who got into an argument over which one was Peter), Chad & Jeremy (who confused themselves with Peter & Gordon), Freddie & The Dreamers, The Easybeats (who were booed off stage for being Australian), and then finally The Rutles in all their tight-trousered glory. All the X chromosomes in Muleskinner dampened those bleachers faster horseflies on a San Antonio rib roast once those wily Liverpudlians tore into Goose Step Mama. I recall Melinda Lee (my 8th grade prize) passing out when Barry Wom warbled Living In Hope...and then nineteen and a half minutes and seventeen songs later, The Rutles left the stage like free snacks at the Piggly Wiggly. I had witnessed history and soiled my trousers simultaneously.
You can do the same via Rhino’s boffo DVD release of this definitive Rutland documentary...dry trousers not included.
Am I in luck? I must be in love!
I must be...Vic La Stu.
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