A Little Side Project That Lasted 30 Years (with Another Celeb Encounter)

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

In 1980, slightly bored and in our first stages of preparing to leave San Francisco, our keyboard player Joshua (aka Raoul) came up with an idea of a one off gig saluting the worst (by our own reckoning) songs to make the top 10. In the process, he christened the Rick and Ruby offshoot The STUPEDS (Society To Undertake the Preservation of Endangered Dumb Songs), though it was mostly through his own initiative that the project ever got off the ground.

We would do several incarnations over the ensuing years, and in early 1985, I managed to book us at Hollywood’s then-trendy Club Lingerie on Sunset Blvd. The gig sold out, as some journalist friend of Joshua’s wrote an article about the band that appeared in the Sunday LA Times only a few days before. We were actually booked as an opener for a Jackie Wilson tribute act, but that would switch the day after the article came out. Sadly, the only thing that really came out of that gig was a return gig at Lingerie later that spring.

Flash forward to 1988 and after sitting in the Comedy Store’s good graces as a solo standup for just over two years, I was able to book The STUPEDS to play The Comedy Store Main Room where we took 60% of the door. The club did virtually nothing to help us promote the show, yet we still drew about 100 paying customers on a Sunday night. We got panned by Variety, whose reviewer clearly didn’t get that by presenting the annoying songs in rapid fire medleys without changing anything would be entertaining and funny, whereas the reviewer from the late lamented LA Herald-Examiner completely got it and loved us for it.

More importantly, among the attendees were Bill Murray and his brother Brian Doyle-Murray, who were both impressed enough that we were invited to join them at a restaurant called Imperial Gardens, a rather posh Sunset Blvd. Japanese restaurant (It’s now a Mexican restaurant called The Pink Taco). Raoul and I were a bit late getting there due to some bad boy behaviour. We decided we had to get shitfaced because we were so angry with the short shrift we felt the club had given us. Not surprisingly, the stuff we scored was mediocre, and my partner was justifiably angry with us for nearly missing an opportunity to hang with Bill Murray over petty nonsense.

What did transpire when a rather inebriated me and Raoul finally arrived at the restaurant was Murray offering to book us for a party at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan. This party was part of the celebration that had been going on for a couple months marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of Atlantic Records, which is still going now at age 74. More about that in a bit, but as we were leaving with Murray at the restaurant, he burst into a verse of the 1972 hit “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)” by one-hit wonders The Looking Glass, and we responded with impeccable backing harmonies. Murray could add to his many accolades that for a short time he would be an honorary STUPED.

I met with him a few days later on the set of the movie he was filming (“Scrooged”) and we talked about the particulars as I was the only band member that actually lived in LA. He gave me the details about the party and I passed that information on to Raoul. For the rest of the band, it was flights from San Francisco to JFK, with ground transport and lodging provided at a funky hotel right across the street from Madison Square Garden. For me it was slightly more complicated, as I was headlining for a week at Finney Bones comedy club in Phoenix. Fortunately there were flights that were convenient on either end, and since the New York gig was on a Thursday, I’d only miss that one night, though a very hung over, jet-lagged me had to do two shows on the Friday.

We saw Murray that afternoon and he assured us he’d be at the party and would happily sing “Brandy” with us. However, our spies said he came in the front entrance to the venue, decided he didn’t like the vibe and immediately left. Our set went very well though, even though no offers from Atlantic Records came down the pipe. I did get the company’s founder/CEO Ahmet Ertegun to autograph an original company sleeve from a 1953 record I brought for the occasion. I didn’t even realise until I looked at video later on that I interrupted him talking to Mike Rutherford of Genesis and Mike + The Mechanics.

Ultimately, nothing came from the gig, but we could all say we had a really great time, and Atlantic footed the bill for everything, including the ridiculous phone charge we made calling my partner in LA (whom I would marry two years later) from Raoul’s hotel room. I would also run into Bill Murray once again, in 1995 at The Comedy Store. Richard Pryor, in declining health due to multiple sclerosis, was still able to perform in the mid-90’s, and was doing weekly Wednesday performances, health permitting, at The Store. It was at one of those Wednesdays I was scheduled well after Pryor had done his set. I was hanging in the front area of the club, and my wife was with me. She said to me “Look who’s over there,” and it was Murray, who had just watched Pryor’s set. I walked up to him and said, “Hey, you remember The STUPEDS?” He did, and we had a nice chat, though we didn’t talk about the Roseland gig, nor did we launch into a chorus of “Brandy.”

As for The STUPEDS, we remained a cult favourite in San Francisco even after I had moved to UK. We would continue to do gigs if I was in California, including a 2006 show at Cobb’s Comedy Club in SF that sold out a 400-seat room on a Monday night. The gigs were few and far between, but fun when they happened, and we would keep reuniting until 2012, when our long time lead guitarist extraordinaire, Jeff Kane, succumbed to cancer. Still, I listen to the recording of that night at Cobb’s, and marvel at what a good band we could be. It was just our choice of songs that sucked!

August 28th, 2022



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