RIFF RAFF
No. You've arrived on a rather special night. It's one of the master's affairs.
JANET
Oh, lucky him.
MAGENTA
He's lucky.
BRAD and JANET look at MAGENTA, surprised by her voice.
MAGENTA
You're lucky, I'm lucky, we're all lucky.
There is a demo tape from 1973. It’s an amateur single-track cassette tape recording - a cracking voice and butchered acoustic guitar. Traffic sounds bleeding in from the street. A few loose backing vocals drift in and out from across the room. Fart noises made into the microphone at the end of a particularly folding rendition. The voice belongs to Richard O’Brien, and in this lost demo tape, a copy of which surfaced for purchase and download once and briefly in 2015, he lays down from top to bottom the first draft of The Rocky Horror Show, a 1973 niche stage musical that became a movie that became a cult, still screened and performed across the world over 40 years later. In the demo, some of the phrasing is strange. Odd extra verses disorientate those who know the music well. Melodies go rogue, extra bars hang and drag. O’Brien is at times shiveringly flat. But it’s all there: Science Fiction/Double Feature, Over at The Frankenstein Place, Sweet Transvestite, I Can Make You A Man/Hot Patootie, Dammit Janet, Rose Tint My World. You can hear the script, too. “I would like, if I may,” he says in Riff Raff’s strangled androgynous tenor, “to take you on a strange journey.” And didn’t he just.
In 1972, O’Brien had just been fired from a production of Jesus Christ Superstar over a disagreement with Andrew Lloyd Webber. He wanted to play Herod like Elvis, but Lloyd Webber wasn’t having any of that. Out of work, he sat down in his Maida Vale flat to write “the musical he wanted to see”. He completed Science Fiction/Double Feature by Christmas. He was 31 years old. The Rocky Horror Show opened Upstairs at the Royal Court Theater in Chelsea on the 19th of June 1973. Directed by Jim Sharman, the production starred Tim Currie as Frank N. Furter, Patricia Quinn as the domestic Magenta, Nell “Little Nell” Campbell as tap-dancing, vampy Columbia, and O’Brien as Frank’s mutant ‘handyman’, Riff Raff. It was a critical success, winning the Evening Standard award for Best Musical that year.
TITLE SEQUENCE - CAST AND WRITING CREDITS
CHORUS
Science Fiction - double-feature Dr X will build a creature See Androids fighting Brad and Janet Anne Francis stars in Forbidden Planet Oh - at the late night, double-feature Picture Show.
With producer Lou Adler and musical director Richard Hartley on board, Rocky Horror made its way to L.A. In 1975, the film version went into production. Fitted with a tweaked title, The Rocky Horror Picture Show featured O’Brien, Quinn, Currie and Campbell in reprises of their original roles, with the addition of Barry Bostwick as Brad and a little-known Susan Sarandon as Janet. A swaggering, spectacular pre-Bat Out of Hell Meatloaf plays Eddie, the failed creation. It was pure counterculture. A punk spectacle from the very first chord. From the moment a pair of disembodied Man Ray-esque bloody red lips float out of the void to sing the opening lines of Science Fiction/Double Feature before dissolving pointedly over the cross on top of the Denton Episcopal church, the fantastically queer phantasmagoria of what reviewer Robert Ebert described as a “horror-rock-transvestite-camp-omnisexual-musical-parody”. Funny, raucous, joyful and dark, The Rocky Horror Picture Show set about its deliriously degenerate work.
GUESTS (inc. RIFF RAFF, MAGENTA & COLUMBIA)
Sha la la la That ain’t no crime.
ROCKY
Oh, no no, no no.
GUESTS
Sha la la la That ain’t no crime.
ROCKY
No no no, no no.
GUESTS
Sha la la la That ain’t no crime - That ain’t no crime.
It was glorious. It was a dismal failure. After a horrendous test screening in Santa Barbara, the film ran for a few weeks, before being pulled entirely while producer Lou Adler and 20th Century Fox tried desperately to find it an audience. It would find its feet in ‘76 with a regular midnight screening at the Waverley Theatre in New York. Slowly, they came. They never stopped coming. Today, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of the biggest film earners of all time, pulling over $140 million off a $1.2 million investment in North America alone. Weekly midnight screenings have kept scores of independent theatres in the green for years. That terrible cassette tape demo had morphed and grown into an absolute sensation.
Hot patootie Bless my soul I really love that rock and roll (four times)
My lifelong fascination with The Rocky Horror started the same way The Rocky Horror did - with a cassette tape. More specifically, a bootleg rip of what is by general consensus understood to be the most consummate version of the musical’s book – producer Richard Hartley’s 1975 recording for the motion picture soundtrack. I found it in a jumbled box of tapes in the garage. I had seen the movie before – wide-eyed and cross-legged on the dull shag carpet of my grandparents’ house. I was eight years old then. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. My grandmother wasn’t sure I should be looking at it. But my real connection to the work – the root of my obsession with it – is that soundtrack recording. When I found that tape at age 10, I had just gotten my first drum kit. I spent a feverish summer holiday in my mother’s garage with a cheap tape player and a set of airplane headphones, stumbling over every drum part, every fill, until I knew them by heart. Today, as a working musician, I can tell you that everything you need to know to lay the foundation of a rock ‘n roll musical education is on that record. That soundtrack is in my body – in my spine, my cells. The arrangements throb, swagger, flair. The basslines are killer, the keyboard work is outstanding, and that crazy electric guitar sound is enough to keep you up at night. I know it’s kept me up. It’s a work I’ve been coming back to for over 20 years.
FRANK
It was strange the way it happened. One of those quirks of fate really. One of those moments when you seem irredeemably lost: you panic; you’re trapped; your back’s against the wall. There’s no way out, and then suddenly, you get a break. (He cracks the bones in his hand) All the pieces seem to fit into place. What a sucker you’ve been. What a fool. The answer was there all the time. It took a small accident to make it happen. An accident!
MAGENTA & COLUMBIA step forward one each side of him.
MAGENTA & COLUMBIA (softly)
The soundtrack that lodged itself in my spine was recorded at the legendary Olympic Studios in Barnes, London, in 1975. Engineered and mixed by Keith Grant, the recording took place in Studio Two, which was already the cornerstone of the London recording scene in the glory days of British Rock ‘n Roll. The Stones, the Beatles, Procol Harum, Hendrix and The Who all recorded seminal works in that room. In fact, two members of the band who tracked the Rocky Horror session where members of Procol Harum and one played in The Who. The Stones spent so much time at Olympic that Mick Jagger chose the décor and furnishings. When you listen to that recording, there’s something about that sound. That warmth, and depth. Listen to The Who’s Is It In My Head? and Science Fiction/Double Feature back to back and you’ll hear what I mean. It’s an alchemical product of the warmth and sonic signature of Studio Two’s custom-built Helios mixing desk. It sounds like that place. It sounds like that time.
That day, O’Brien was 31 when he made that demo. Here was proof that you could conjure something out of thin air – something from nothing, pulled like ectoplasm out of a mind in pain. This is the closest thing we have to magic. Bowie’s makeup artist Pierre La Roche designed the makeup for the film. Little Nell had a thrift stall in Kensington Market across the way from Freddie Mercury’s boot stall. (“He would tell me about his band. Good luck with that Freddie!”)
1974. Publications Act No 42
… for the establishment of “a Government-appointed Directorate of Publications, headed by a Director of Publications ... [which] is responsible for the appointment of committees from a list of persons approved by the Government,: operating in various parts of the Republic, which are charged with the task of deciding whether publications (excluding newspapers), objects, films, and public entertainments referred to the committees by the Directorate are ‘undesirable’.
“In determining whether a publication is undesirable, the author’s motive is irrelevant ... [and] a work may be found to be undesirable if ‘any part of it’ is undesirable”
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was banned in South Africa, but not in Lesotho. The Maseru Holiday Inn put on a stage version in 1979. In the film, there’s an NP flag stuck into a pineapple in the ballroom snack spread. Not only are a racially mixed group of Transylvanians camply thrusting their pelvises behind it, but it’s also upside down.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a wonderful case study in the importance of creative risk, the joys and freedoms of creativity, and being brave in art. Look what happens, if you just make the demo.
VOICE OVER
Science Fiction - double-feature Frank has built and lost his creature Darkness has conquered Brad and Janet The servants gone to a distant planet Oh - at the late night double-feature Picture Show - I want to go - Ohh - To the late night double-feature picture show.
THE END
Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe to our newsletter to get more just like it, sent straight to your inbox every week.