Me neither. I looked it up. I knew of “The Cover of the Rolling Stone” and “Sylvia’s Mother” from when I was a little kid. I used to see them on music shows. Midnight Special? I knew the backstory of Rolling Stone from something I saw on a tv show.
But a swipe isn’t a mockumentary. There have been insulting songs for a long time, but IMO this genre requires exageration presented with a straight face as reality.
When I first heard The Cover of the Rolling Stone, I had never heard of the magazine. I thought they were talking about the band The Rolling Stones, and “cover” referred to an album cover. The song made no sense to me.
Eric Idle has commented that anyone married to John Lennon has to have a sense of humor.
I like to think she knew exactly what was going on here:
Yeah, “Bad News” is pretty much Spinal Tap, and came out a year earlier. But it was released as an episode of the TV series “Comic Strip Presents…”
I agree that The Rutles was the first, though. So while “Bad News” predates Spinal Tap, it wasn’t the first.
One of my favorite fun facts is that Bad News did a cover of Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s terrible, truly bad. And the iconic guitar solo is the worst part. The guitarist that played that abysmal solo? Brian May.
That’s my experience exactly! I even checked record stores to see if Dr Hook ever made it on a cover of a Rolling Stone(s’) album. What did I know - I was 11. But I attempted to verify!
I mean, I would say "I was on the cover of Rolling Stone, not THE Rolling Stone. No definite article for magazines.
And to show how even more dumb I was, at the near same time (1974) Buck Owens did a cover called “The Cover of the Music City News”, which I understood was a magazine, but couldn’t figure out how that paralleled a Rolling Stones album.
“the” is probably there to fit the song meter.
Ol Shel can…change the meter! It’s his song, after all…
Yoko did. I had the usual ignorant knowledge of Yoko until I went to a major retrospective of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Excellent stuff, full of meaning, surprises, and insights, with great execution and a sense of humor. Could totally understand Lennon’s attraction to such an artist.
If we’re not limiting ourselves to filmed mockumentaries, there is a book that was published on Jan. 1, 1978 - Mark Shipper’s Paperback Writer. It’s a very funny satire written as a non-fiction book about the Beatles’ rise to fame, breakup, and reunion in 1979.
There’s another novel Once There Was a Way by Bryce Zabel, which is written as a non-fiction account of the Beatles never breaking up.
The strangest Beatles alternate history is Paul is Undead by Alan Goldsher, where the Beatles are all zombies. Except for Ringo, who is a ninja.
Paul is Undead is that rare book that I couldn’t even get halfway through.
It cemented my antipathy to “zombie media”… writing a zombie version of a biography (or really, anything) is just too easy.
I liked Paul is Undead.
I’ll admit I wasn’t impressed with Goldsher’s follow-up My Favorite Fangs, a vampire parody of The Sound of Music. That felt like Goldsher was repeating the same joke.
From the uploader on IA:
"An early mockumentary, more social commentary, on how pop music just uses and spits outs musicians.
Just like The Monkees were a made up band for a TV show, this movie created a band. Patrick Greussay, Stephane Vilar, Didier Leon, Didier Malherbe and Jacques Zins and a couple others were pulled together to create “Rollsticks”. They would later go on to other bands through the years including Calcium and Gong.
Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap is considered the first mockumentary but this one could give it a run for the money. The attitude of the participants is the key difference. Marc’o was making a social commentary while Reiner was poking gentle fun."