I wore out the Beatles when I was in high school and college. I can’t listen to them any more. But I can listen to the Rutles and get the same kind of pleasure.
It was a parody, and the fun of any parody is to see how the correlate with the original. It was never intended to be the type of thing that brought loud guffaws, but rather smiles of recognition.
It’s also a pastiche, which is the opposite of a parody. The songs were not to ridicule the originals but to lovingly imitate them.
And, though I’ve been a fan of Neil Innes since before you were born (well, since 1968, when I got my first Bonzo Dog Band album), I’m not silly enough to think he’s a better songwriter than the Beatles. His work is clever but he’s no Beatle.
I’ve heard Innes say that it was very easy to write songs that sounded like the Beatles in their recognizable phases. That is, it was easy to write pop songs from their mop-top days, it was easy to write psychedelic songs or sitar bits reminiscent of the Beatles’ ***Rubber Soul ***days, and it was easy to write songs that sounded like tracks from ***Sgt. Pepper ***or Let It Be. What was HARD, he says, was writing a simple McCartney-esque love ballad.
Well, hey, if it were EASY to write a song like “Yesterday,” Innes would have done it himself back in 1965!
I always loved his Dylan spoof, here seen from the Secret Policeman’s Ball. The first few times I saw Jimmy Fallon doing his Neil Young bits, this is what I thought of.
True.
But he did write some great songs back in the 60s. No “Yesterday,” of course, and only one actual UK hit, but his work with the Bonzos at that time was critically praised (if not popular). He later wrote songs for Monty Python (e.g, “Brave Sir Robin,” which he sang in Holy Grail).
He was the Bonzos’ Paul McCartney (Vivian Stanshall was their John Lennon).