Fifty years ago, The Rocky Horror Picture Show — a sci-fi/horror-flavored musical comedy based on a hit stage play — pranced onto silver screens and fell flat on its painted face. “It was a turkey,” concedes composer Richard Hartley, who arranged the score for the original London stage production and the 1975 film.
Before getting carved up for leftovers, that turkey was relegated to midnight screenings in New York City and Austin, where the gender-bending, transgressive love letter to old b-movies began attracting an audience unlike anything the world had ever seen. People saw it not once, not twice, but over and over, frequently dressing up as the characters and hurling things — toast, rice, puns, obscenities — at the screen. “Now, people go see it hundreds of times,” Hartley says of the film, which, remarkably, is still playing in limited theaters, making it the longest-running theatrical release in America ever.
Throughout this October, the cult film to crown all cult films is playing in a new 4k restoration (also on Blu-ray/digital) throughout the country, including a screening at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles on Oct. 15. On Friday (Oct. 10), a 50th anniversary vinyl edition of the soundtrack hits shelves. Lou Adler — who brought The Rocky Horror Show from the West End to U.S. stages back in 1974 and then co-produced the film — tapped creative director David Gorman to comb through archival material and design Rocky’s golden birthday package. “You know those videos of art restoration where someone’s sitting there with a Q-Tip going through an oil painting one millimeter at a time?” asks Gorman. “(It’s) a lot of that.” The result “completely respects the original artwork, but just enhances it,” he adds of the familiar yet fresh edition.
This gold-foil jacket edition also includes production diary excerpts and previously unseen photos courtesy of Hartley. The English composer recently hopped on a Zoom with Billboard to time-warp back to the ‘70s and walk us through his friendship with Rocky Horror mastermind Richard O’Brien and spill some secrets of the Frankenstein place.
I want to start at the beginning. You met Richard O’Brien through Jesus Christ Superstar, is that correct?
It was just after that. I met the director, Jim Sharman [of a 1972 production of Jesus Christ Superstar at London’s Palace Theatre; Sharman later directed The Rocky Horror Picture Show]. I auditioned the singers for Jesus Christ Superstar because the musical director was a friend of mine; he was about 40 years older than me, and he said, “You know, I think you’ll be better at finding voices that are slightly more contemporary.” Jim was doing a Sam Shepard play, and Richard was an actor in it, and he wanted me to write some music for it. So that’s how we met.
What was your first impression of Richard?
Well, he looked a bit strange, frankly. This character he played in the Sam Shepard play was a strange character as well. Anyway, we got on. He told Jim that he’d written this kind of musical. So we went round to his house quite late one night and he played us “Science Fiction” and then he played “Sweet Transvestite.” It was very odd. His wife, Kimmy, was there with Linus, who was three months old, and there he was singing about sweet transvestites, which I thought was a bit odd. Anyway, that was the environment. And he gave us a brief outline of the story, and that was the start of things. We just got on. We’ve never really had a bad word. We just respect each other. We’ve never come to blows — often in the theater, things can get pretty hairy.
But you worked well together.
When we started doing the show, everything was done so quickly. We rehearsed for three, two and a half weeks, I think. Richard would write songs overnight. There was no “Time Warp.” One of the girls, it actually was Little Nell, she said, “Look, this is a musical, there’s no dance routine.” And so he went home, and he came round to my flat the next morning. He said, “Look, I’ve got it here.” And he got to a bit before the chorus, and he said, “I need to get from here to here.” I said, “Okay, well, let’s do these chords.” And that was the chorus. I recorded it quickly on a cassette, he went off to rehearsals, I wrote it all out, and then we rehearsed it in the afternoon. That’s how it was done. “Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me,” that was written during rehearsals, and “Eddie’s Teddy,” that was added, too.
Sounds like you were flying by the seat of your pants.
Yeah. But I think that was the nature of it. It was not a polished show. That was possibly its charm, initially, anyway. Now it’s quite different. But back then, we had three singers: Richard could sing, Timmy – Tim Curry – could sing, and we had Julie Covington in the original show. And Julie had had a big hit singing an Andrew Lloyd Webber song. She had a fabulous voice. We just had three singers and the rest we just had to figure out as we went along.
Right. The original actor who played Eddie, before Meat Loaf, wasn’t really a singer, was he?
Not really, no, no. And he couldn’t play the saxophone either.
Speaking to your arrangement work, I’ve read somewhere that Richard O’Brien doesn’t write music — or at least didn’t at the time — so you did a lot of the transcription. You would listen to the songs and write it out for everyone.
Yeah, yeah, that that’s what I did. I could read and write music, I started to play the piano when I was five. I went from Mozart to Elvis when I was 14. But no, he can’t, so Richard would just play the songs, we’d record them, and then I’d write everything out. Going into rehearsal, there was no arrangement, so I would start teaching the songs and then we’d figure out if we needed to add backing singers or add harmony. We’d do it on the fly. Once we got the format, then in the evening, I’d start arranging it for the bass part, the drum part, the guitar part, and – well, we only had a four-piece band. Originally, the bass player played the saxophone, so when we made him the saxophone, the guitar player played the bass. I mean, it was it was fringe theater at its finest. It was do-it-yourself.
And you were in that original band, correct?
Yeah, yeah. I had a Farfisa organ. You remember Farfisa? They started being very popular in the late ‘70s. I love that organ. That had a fabulous echo chamber. When we needed thunder, I used to hit it because we didn’t have any sound effects.
So it debuted and you’re out there playing those first few shows. What was it like watching the audience response?
Well, the audience… we weren’t sure. The first preview we had we did “Over at the Frankenstein Place.” Up until that point, there was not much reaction. But when they sing “there’s a light” and then the chorus comes in and sings “over at the Frankenstein place,” people got it. They just started laughing because it’s funny. It starts with that sinister bass line, that tension, and then suddenly it all gets released when they sing “over at the Frankenstein place.” The stage was a cinema screen: It was all acted in front of a cinema screen. The band was behind the screen and we could see the audience through it. Suddenly they got it. It was a riot, really. People just laughed the whole time. It was only 45 minutes long originally.
I didn’t know that.
We couldn’t start until 10 o’clock because we were upstairs at the Royal Court, so we didn’t interfere with the players downstairs because there was a band going on.
The stage versions of “Science Fiction/Double Feature” are faster, they have a little more energy. And it was originally sung by Patricia Quinn on stage. In the movie, Richard sings it slowly – why did you make it different?
The way Pat sang it was — what’s the German expression? – Sprechgesang. She spoke-sang it because she was playing an usherette explaining what was going on. Essentially the idea was that this was an old cinema that was going to be refurbished, so she was talking about all her life watching the movies. We thought that as a film would be too theatrical. “Science Fiction” was the first song Richard sang to Jim and I when we went round that night, and I just always loved the way he sang it. When it came to the film, I think Fox wanted a famous person. I said to Lou, “Well, you know, Richard, should sing it,” and Lou agreed. And so that’s what happened. And then we decided to use Pat’s lips — it’s like Man Ray, you know, the famous photograph [Observatory Time: The Lovers] — because she was furious. I said, “Well anyway, darling, they’ve got your lips. They’ve got a bit of you involved.” We blacked her out — we had to clamp the head because we didn’t want the head moving — and then she mimes to it. And I got a big string orchestra, so it feels it like an old-fashioned opening title.
When you were scoring the movie, was it fun to stretch out a bit and play around with a bigger budget?
Yeah, and also to get a really good band. The arrangements are the same, essentially, although we had a couple more players, and probably better players. Well, one of the guys who was in the original stage show, he played as well [Count Ian Blair]. For the movie, Jim and I thought perhaps it should be a little more Gothic as it was going to be in that old Gothic house in the studio. My favorite got band was Procol Harum, so I got the drummer [B.J. Wilson], and a guitar play from them [Mick Grabham]. And then mate of mine (Dave Wintour) was a bass player — he played on Tommy — and then a guy [John “Rabbit” Bundrick] was playing with Bob Marley, his keyboard player, a Texan guy. And then me. The drummer, B.J., is sadly no longer with us. He added a lot to the soundtrack. We had a great time and we cut the tracks in four days. There wasn’t an enormous amount of money. We had a great engineer [Keith Grant], he engineered “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and the Troggs and Dusty Springfield. It was a bit of a party time. It was good fun.
Did it feel different? Do you realize, “This project is special”?
I thought from the stage perspective, this was different. We had a musical that was a really big success before we did the film. But it didn’t sound like a normal musical. Apart from Hair, there wasn’t another musical that sounded like The Rocky Horror Show. When we we’re doing the show, we thought after the first week that we’d probably run another couple of weeks, but not 50 years.
Fifty years later is incredible. Over the decades, was there a moment when you thought, “Okay, this is never going away“?
Early on, we went to a convention in New York: Richard was there, I think Tim was the only one who didn’t come. We didn’t know what to expect it. This is about 1978, ’79. We went on stage and did “Time Warp” and everybody did a few things, and then they showed the movie. There must have been well over 1,000 people there. I sat with Richard, and that’s when we heard them: people talking, shouting. I said to him, “This is funnier than the film.” We thought it was something special. I’d never seen anything like that before. Now, people go see it hundreds of times.
And it’s being restored for its 50th anniversary by Disney. When it came out, it was so transgressive, it’s funny to think about Disney having anything to do with it.
Exactly. Absolutely. That’s really strange, isn’t it?
“Once and a While,” a Brad song, got cut from the movie. Did you feel bad to see the song go?
Not really. The film is very slow compared to the stage show. We cut a verse out of “Superheroes.” Personally, I never thought it worked on stage, so we just decided to cut it. I don’t think anyone was that sorry to see it go, although Barry (Bostwick) sang it very well.
What other songs changed for the movie?
“Time Warp” was the first one we cut and it sounded great. When we got the singers in, Jim, the director, had this thing about Wizard of Oz — the Australians do have a big thing about The Wizard of Oz — so he said, “Could we make it a bit like the Munchkins?” I said “yeah, okay.” So we slowed the whole thing down half speed, and then they sang it at pitch. When we speeded it up, we got this sort of Munchkin sound. When you listen to it, you can just hear it. We mixed it in very subtly. When you see all those Transylvanians, it makes them look even weirder.
That’s wild. A few years later, you reteamed with Richard on Shock Treatment, which I think is a bit underappreciated, or at least misunderstood.
It was completely misunderstood. I mean, it was a bit of a mess, because it was rehashed from a sequel that we’d written. Richard had written a (Rocky Horror) sequel. Timmy didn’t want to do it, Susan Sarandon was too expensive by then, so songs were ported over. There’s a song in Shock Treatment called “Breaking Out,” we have this post-punk band. That was the first song in the (planned) sequel: “I’ve been nine months on deposit / That’s a long time in the closet.” Because Rocky finds Frank’s body in the rubble and takes him to Dr. Scott to bring him back to life. That’s how it started, that was the song. There was a stage version of it in London about six or seven years ago, and he partly rewrote bits of it which emphasized the fact that it was about reality TV, which didn’t exist when we did that (film). The main character was more of a Murdoch, kind of Trump figure manipulating people. And it was all about 15 minutes of fame. And it only ran for three weeks, but it made sense. Also, I think there was a bit of miscasting in that film, but that’s just my opinion.
As you look back on 50 years of Rocky Horror, what’s your main takeaway?
It’s been great fun. It was a huge part of my life at the time. I just find it amazing that the stage show is still on in England at the moment, and the film has brought so much joy. A couple of years ago I went to I went to Liverpool to see a matinee on a Friday and there were 1,200 people there. Now, I think it’s more about the audience than the show, because they’ve made it the success that it is. Well, obviously, that’s what always happens, but with this particular show, the audience is specific: it’s part of the film. When you think about the original version that we did, there was this cinema screen, and the actors acted out the show in front of the screen. Now, when you go to the cinema see it, there’s a film playing, and everybody acts out the film in front of the screen. It’s bizarre.
That’s a crazy cosmic bookend.
I’m staggered, frankly. It’s different to comprehend. I think it’s liberated a lot of people for various reasons. It has changed a lot of people’s lives. “Don’t dream it, be it” has been taken to the nth degree with Rocky Horror.