Just in time for the Halloween season, host Kenneth Womack is joined by original “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” cast members Barry Bostwick, Nell Campbell and Patricia Quinn (“the fab three”) to talk about the movie’s milestone anniversary and the one thing they have in common with The Beatles on this special edition of “Everything Fab Four,” a podcast co-produced by me and Womack (a music scholar who also writes about pop music for Salon) and distributed by Salon.
The longest-running theatrical release in film history, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is celebrating its 50th year with a tour featuring Bostwick, Campbell and Quinn, a DVD/Blu-Ray release, commemorative book publication and more. As the cast members discussed with Womack, the enduring power of “Rocky Horror” lies in its “amazing” songs that were “pure rock & roll” (from writer and musician Richard O’Brien), its inclusivity and its fandom – not unlike The Beatles (though as Campbell tells our host, he’s “so Beatles-oriented that he sees them in everything!”).
For Bostwick’s part, he said he graduated high school in 1963, so it was in college that “we all were waiting for the next Beatles album – it was such a celebration, such an event. We would leave campus and go to somebody’s apartment and listen to the fresh vinyl.” As for Quinn, she recently spent time in Abbey Road Studios, where that Beatles magic was originally created, working on the spoken word limited edition “Rocky Horror” vinyl. “I live near there in London,” she told Womack, “but to actually be inside, it was wonderful.”
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For Campbell, it’s “the liberation [“Rocky Horror’] has given people to express themselves and just to be themselves” that makes it so great. But, as she ultimately explains, it couldn’t have happened with just anyone. “Like with The Beatles, because it’s those four . . . it’s a kismet getting together of a certain group of people. And I think that’s very much what ‘Rocky Horror’ was. If you take any one person out of that equation, you wouldn’t have it.”
“Everything Fab Four” host Kenneth Womack is the author of a two-volume biography on Beatles producer George Martin and the bestselling books “Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles” and “John Lennon, 1980: The Last Days in the Life.” His latest book is the authorized biography of Beatles road manager Mal Evans, “Living the Beatles Legend,” out now.
Tickets for Everything Fab Four Fest are now available to purchase on Eventbrite. For more information, please visit the festival’s website.
