Audience Participation / Rocky Horror Picture Show Rocky Horror Picture Show Audience Par-Tic-I-Pation Album Soundtrack CD

Principally recorded live at The 8th Street Playhouse, New York. Includes liner notes by Sal Piro.

This album contains audience participation bits recorded at a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

After its initial theatrical release in the fall of 1975, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the movie version of The Rocky Horror Show, a British musical set to a rock & roll beat that parodied 1950s science fiction and horror films, began to be played at midnight weekend showings at the Waverly Theater in New York's Greenwich Village, attracting a cult audience. Fans came week after week, elaborating on the movie's own satiric style by shouting out comic interjections of their own invention, dressing up like the characters, and using a variety of props (rice thrown during a wedding scene, etc.). The phenomenon spread across the country, blooming into a full-fledged cult. In 1983, Ode Records, which controlled the rights to the soundtrack, issued this double-LP (now a double-CD) set recorded at the 8th Street Playhouse in New York (where the original midnight run had moved to) with the initial batch of enthusiasts tossing out their favorite self-written lines while the film unreels before them. Not surprisingly, many of those retorts are obscene, but they are usually good-natured and very much in the spirit of the film, even if its many double entendres are necessarily rendered single. This is not an album for anyone unfamiliar with the movie already, and maybe not one for anyone who is not, or is not interested in becoming, a member of the Rocky Horror cult. But aficionados who first experienced the film in one of those midnight showings complete with its usual revelers might enjoy this album as a souvenir of that experience. ~ William Ruhlmann