RockyMusic

Happy Halloween, everyone! Justin "Muzzle" Carpenter was kind enough to donate a truly fantastic Halloween gift for us all: http://www.rockymusic.org/mp3scat/rhs-belascolive/. These sound files (both MP3s and lossless FLACs) are from a live recording made on March 14th, 1975 of The Rocky Horror Show's original run at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway. It features performances by Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Richard O'Brien as Riff Raff, and Meat Loaf as Eddie/Dr. Scott. The quality is excellent, and the recording is of the complete show (including all dialogue). Do yourself a favor and check it out!

John Davey was nice enough to contribute another music video to the site: Angel In Me by Richard O'Brien. It is Richard's one and only music video, produced in 1998 by Medical Records to promote the Absolute O'Brien CD. He appears in full costume as the Mephistopheles Smith character - hooves and all. If you enjoy the music, I highly recommend picking up a copy of the full CD. It should still be available in the U.S. for only $12 direct from Oglio Records. It's a bargain.

Speaking of hooves, I recently added new album pages for the Mephistopheles Smith Cloven Hooves Tour 2007 CD-R as well as for Paul Pecorino's Perfectly Frank CD. The first was available only at the theater for dates on the recently concluded tour, while the second was a 2003 cover album with a limited production run of one thousand CDs in Germany.

I added a new page for the Let My People Come: A Sexual Musical original cast album LP. This doesn't actually have anything to do with Rocky Horror at all, but most Rocky Horror people that I've shared it with have enjoyed it. I first came across "Let My People Come" when I accidentally received a CD of it from John Davey, that had been intended for Sal Piro. It's a raunchy and fun musical from 1974 written by Earl Wilson, Jr. that featured lots of nudity, sex, and coarse language (one of the songs is titled The Cunnilingus Champion of Company C, and was involved in a copyright infringement lawsuit by MCA Music). MP3 sound files are available, and I also scanned a number of cast photos that were published in the July 1974 issue of Playboy Magazine.

Several new videos have been added, including three rarities contributed by John Davey. First we have the (in)famous performance of Do The Swim by Little Nell in which her swimsuit has some serious wardrobe malfunctions (you just couldn't keep Nell's breasts covered in those days!). This uncensored video was originally aired in 1975 for an episode of "The London Weekend Show", but was later used as an outtake on "It'll Be Alright on the Night" in the U.K. and reappeared in censored form some years later on "TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes" with Dick Clark in the U.S. Also from the same show is a rare performance of Stilettos and Lipstick.

Another rarity is Meat Loaf's 1992 video of Paradise By The Dashboard Light, released to promote the film Leap of Faith in which Meat Loaf plays Hoover the bus driver. In this video, Meat Loaf parodies his role as Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show by performing in an Eddie costume in front of a movie screen that is playing his original Paradise By The Dashboard Light video. Many thanks to John Davey for sharing these with us!

Seventeen new sound files are available, courtesy of an anonymous fan in Australia who discovered a live tape recording he had made over three decades ago: http://www.rockymusic.org/mp3scat/rhs-austr75live/. They're from a 1975 audience recording of the final Sydney performance of The Rocky Horror Show in its original Australian run, just before the transfer to Melbourne. The cast is completely different from the 1974 cast album, with the exception of Sal Sharah as Riff Raff. You may also recognize the Magenta/Usherette, Robyn Moase, who was later featured as Deadpan Dolores in Richard O'Brien's 1982 musical The Stripper (also produced in Sydney). The sound quality is quite decent, and it's very nice to hear audience reactions and such from a time when audience participation wasn't the institution that it is today.

Happy New Year! To ring in 2007, I decided to launch a completely new version of RockyMusic.org. The last time I updated the web site was at the end of the previous decade, so this may be a bit of a shock for some...:-) All areas have been updated with additional content, and most importantly (to me) it's all in a database to make updates vastly easier. Some entirely new sections have also been added including forums, documents (scripts, interviews, etc.), and videos. Probably the most important change is that everything uses tags to assist with organization (and let me run wild on some tangential topics that didn't really fit anywhere previously!). Not everything from the old site has been ported over yet though and furthermore some of it likely never will be, so I'm also keeping the old RockyMusic.org online as an archive. Take some time to look around, and be sure to register at the discussion forums. Enjoy!