THE RUTLES - MILLSTONES
(Handstamp No. 201)


01. Baby Let Me Be
02. Blue Suede Schubert
03. Between Us
04. It’s Looking Good
05. Goose Step Mama
06. I Must Be In Love
07. We’ve Arrived
08. Now She’s Left You
09. Number One
10. Love Life
11. Good Times Roll
12. Doubleback Alley
13. Piggy In The Middle
14. Let’s Be Natural
15. Get Up And Go
16. Living In Hope
17. Plenty Of Time

(total time: 43.55)


General Notes:

Ron Nasty – guitar, vocals
Dirk McQuickly – bass, vocals
Stig O’Hara – guitar, sitar, vocals
Barry Wom – drums, vocals

This Rutles rehearsal tape was rescued from a terrible bootleg purchased a long while ago. It contained the music I’ve included here, but also included extended sections of pirated dialogue and music from the film, along with awful adits, clumsy fades and every other manner of amateur bootlegger nonsense.

Yet buried within this mess was some legendary garage recordings by the Pre-Fab Four, in rehearsal just prior to bringing their songs and trousers to the world.

In order to prevent these rare recordings from being released to the public, McQuickly sued Nasty and O'Hara, Wom sued McQuickly, Nasty sued O'Hara and Wom, and in all the confusion, O'Hara accidentally sued himself.

So it is only by special arrangement with Parlourphone that I am finally able to bring these recordings to fans at dimeadozen, in really super-duper kinda good audiophilesque sound.

Here then, is The Rutles’ “Millstones.”


Recording Notes:

Ripped from the silver cd “Rutles Rehearsal” (Goldtone #GT-013). I used Soundforge 8 to edit out the pirated film material, insert nicer fades, normalize, and resequence the tracks based on my purely subjective view of an appropriate song order. Also some hiss was corrected with some very modest ParaEQing at 6320Hz and 7290Hz.


Art Notes:

I’ve enclosed some simple artwork, in tribute to Ed Rudy, as a pdf file. If printed without scaling, cut out roughly along the guidelines, and folded in half, it can and hopefully should form a cd-sized “booklet.”


iwalkedwithazombie@comcast.net