A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
My record collection
[254] Rutles Highway Revisited (CD)
This is my original CD copy of the Rutles Highway Revisited album - the tribute to The Rutles compiled by Kramer, with all the Shimmy Disc usual suspects, that leads off with Galaxie 500’s cover of Cheese and Onions.
When I started researching this post it started to get so messy, there’s so much I could write about this record, or more specifically about my long and loving relationship with the pre-fab four - here’s a quick bulleted list of the run up to that…
- The Beatles were an important part of our growing up from as early as I can remember. There is, somewhere, a 1/4” reel to reel tape of me and my brother talking while the Twist & Shout EP was playing in the background - we’re singing along to Do You Want To Know a Secret. I’d guess I was probably five or six at the time so 1969 or 1970.
- We had lots of Beatles records, singles and LPs but the love was truly cemented in 1973 with the release of the Red and Blue compilation albums.
- In 1974 The History of The Bonzos was released, my dad brought home a copy… on the same day that he brought home a brand new music centre. I loved it, and loved Neil Innes because of it.
- I was probably a bit young for Monty Python’s Flying Circus at it’s TV peak, but Rutland Weekend Television was required viewing (1975 to 1976)
In 1978 I remember sitting with my cousin and watching The Rutles (aka All You Need is Cash) and later that year I got the album, I suspect for my birthday in May, but possibly for Christmas. Later still I got a pre-recorded VHS copy of the film that got a lot of plays.
I loved The Rutles, for a while probably more than I loved The Beatles, and sometimes I still do love them more.
So… come 1990 when Rutles Highway Revisited was released the chances are I’d have bought it anyway… but, by then I was already a Galaxie 500 fan so there was absolutely no way this wouldn’t get into my collection.
I bought the CD at (I think) Big Star Records in Wimbledon before a football match… I bought a lot of records and CDs at Big Star before football matches.
The CD is just like you’d expect a Shimmy Disc compilation to be, a muddle of the great and the odd, but it doesn’t get any better than the opening track. The covers are mostly pretty straight (Daniel Johnston’s Baby Let Me Be being a notable exception to that) which makes me think that Kramer was a big fan since he was all over this compilation, most of the covers were recorded at Noise New York and produced by him.
The sleeve notes were credited to Neil Innes and supposedly is an interview with Rutles band member Ron Nasty… the interview contains comments on each song - here’s what he has to say about Galaxie 500’s contribution:
DEBBIE: O.K., here's the first track. It's by GALAXIE 500.
RON: Another bloody sequel! Which one have they done?
DEBBIE: "Cheese and Onions."
RON: I like the start, I think this lot have got something, probably constipation, they're obviously high on laxatives...yep, they're speeding up...heading for the lavatory...aaaahh...nope! Ah well, back to the laxatives.
Rutles Highway Revisited sleeve notes
The song credits on Rutles Highway Revisited read all songs written by Neil Innes … which they were of course. Except that 50% of the royalties and all the publishing were handed to ATV Music/Northern Songs - this interview Neil explains the problems with publishing (7min 54sec in).
BUT… if you look at the sleeve notes for the box set (and the recently released Uncollected Noise New York ‘88-‘90) the credit reads Innes, Lennon, McCartney - what I didn’t realise at the time was that credit was like that because of the Galaxie 500 box set release - here’s Neil Innes explaining in an interview in 2004:
It's a convoluted story but I think it's a band called Galaxie 500 back in the 80s I think they must have been, they did a kind of Rutles tribute album called Rutles Highway Revisited and they did a version of Cheese and Onions. This has only come to light because the record company wanted to re-release it as part of a sort of history of Galaxie 500 and so when they applied to Sony, Sony are now the publishers of all the original Beatles Northern songs, Sony told Galaxie 500 that they are not allowed to include my name as a writer's credit on Cheese and Onions which is amazing.
Dave's Gone By Interview (7th October 2004) -- Neil Innes
Neil Innes sadly passed away (far too soon) in 2019 - Dean Wareham wrote about him and Galaxie 500’s cover of Cheese and Onions for Rock and Roll Globe in January 2000:
Like most boys growing up in the seventies, I worshiped Monty Python and knew many of their routines by heart. I saw All You Need is Cash, probably when it came out in 1978. Flash forward to 1990, we were working on a Galaxie 500 album and our producer Kramer decided to create a tribute album to the Rutles, or perhaps you’d call it a mock tribute to a mock band — Rutles Highway Revisited. We recorded “Cheese and Onions” with Kramer adding the Beatles-esque production, reminiscent of “A Day in the Life.” And I know our “Cheese and Onions” came to the attention of Neil Innes some years later, as he talks about it in an interview on Youtube. When we came to re-release “Cheese and Onions” for the Galaxie 500 box set, our label Rykodisc discovered that Neil Innes had been stripped of his full writing credit on “Cheese and Onions”; it was now credited to Lennon/McCartney and owned by Sony/ATV Music who had sued. Which I find pretty incredible to this day — I mean, yes “Cheese and Onions” sounds vaguely like a Beatles recording and the lyric might remind you of any silly but self-important Beatles lyric, but to my mind it does not plagiarize any particular Beatles song. Someone out there — and I don’t know if it was McCartney or just the publishers — did not appreciate the humor.
Rock and Roll Globe: Rutles Highway Re-Revisited: In Memory of Neil Innes
Dean & Britta covered Cheese and Onions in their first COVID live-streamed show and dedicated it to Neil Innes:
Fortunately I also have this release on LP so it’ll be turning up again later and maybe I can concentrate more on the record then!
- Catalogue Number: 10/130
- Artist: Various artists
- Title: Rutles Highway Revisited
- Format: CD
- Bought from Big Star Records in Wimbledon for whatever they charged for CDs back then.