All around the musical village
The alarm-clock chased the vulture.
The sands ran through the hourglass -
Pop! goes your culture.
…………..(old children’s song)

“Good evening,” said Neil Innes, as he stepped out onto the Hughes’ Room stage last Thursday. “It’s wonderful to be.”

He opened with “I’m the Urban Spaceman“, ended it after 30 seconds, smiled at the audience and said, “Thank you. That was a medley of my hit.” I laughed, though I remembered that he had started his show at Edinburgh Festival 20 years ago with the same song and line. But then he’d performed the whole song, and now it was just a thumbnail from his (and my) past.

I first saw Neil Innes in 1969 in Boston, when he was a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a UK band of art-school graduates who were heavily into surrealism and dada art. They performed a 30 second Neil Sedaka parody called “Kama-Sutra“, a painfully extended blues song (“Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?”) in which Neil played a guitar with a four foot long neck, explaining sotto voce that, “this next song will feature a long guitar solo.” Other songs included an electric trouser press, and a female mannequin leg with built-in theremin, which made screeching sounds if you moved your hand close to it. There were about a dozen members in the band, and they were quite wonderfully manic.

They were opening for the Grateful Dead, and I may have been the only person at the Boston Tea Party who had come to see the Bonzos, whose popularity in America was somewhere below cult. That was also the evening I fell in love with the Dead, and became a deadhead for a considerable number of years: a deadhead being a fan for whom Grateful Dead concerts were collective spiritual mystical experiences for which the music served as a sacramental catalyst. Really, you had to be there.

But the combined concert was wonderful, and like so much that was happening at that time in the late 60s felt culturally important, as though new doors were being opened for the first time, and the world into which they would allow us to enter was different, better, more enlightened than the one behind us. We were there as the world changed, and we were part of that change. It was a transcendent concert.

The Bonzos had their “Urban Spaceman” hit (produced by Paul McCartney, number one in England for fifteen minutes), released a number of funny and clever albums that I loved though mass audiences did not, and dissolved and went their various ways. Neil became associated with Monty Python, and earned the title “the seventh Python” for his pains. Pythonatics might know him as Sir Robin’s minstrel in Holy Grail, or one of the singing Bruces in “The Philosopher’s song”. After the Pythons disbanded, he and Eric Idle worked together on “Rutland Weekend Television” and eventually emerged as “The Rutles” (“the prefab four”) an affectionate pastiche of the Beatles. So close to the original were their songs that a number of them were marketed as Beatles bootlegs: Neil could do a stunning John Lennon vocal. And they had inside help on the Rutles from George Harrison, a long-time Python sponsor and fan.

It was after the Rutles when I saw Neil for the second time, at the Edinburgh festival around 1989, twenty years after that first concert. He played a solo show, and was screamingly funny, both about himself and about pop culture, which he skewered mercilessly. I remember “Godfrey Daniel”, an Elton John imitation that had inflections and music note perfect, with savage lyrics (“It’s more than doorknobs that come off in your hand.”). It was a memorable concert, given that in five days in Edinburgh I’d been to over 20 concerts and plays; the festival is that kind of a place. But even then I could see that Neil was off the cutting edge, looking back at those who had been on it. It was a delightful and entertaining evening, but it wasn’t going to change the world, nor was that its intent. Both he and I were now in our forties, and we weren’t pretending to be whom we had been in our twenties.

I hadn’t heard much about him for awhile, except in 1996 when there was a second Rutles album, “Archeology” that came out shortly after “The Beatles Anthology”. It featured glorious imitations of the late Beatles, perhaps most spectacularly in Innes’ “Eine Klein Middle Klasse Musik” which sounds a lot like “Come Together” (“Loneliness is all that people ever share, smuggling their pain though ‘Nothing to Declare’, living next to people who agree to disagree, happy in a pie-chart society. “) with a video that shows parodies of iconic Beatles’ images. I loved the album, and would put it on in the background of late evening conversations with friends who would look up about four songs into it with a very puzzled look, and say, “That’s a Beatles song I’ve never heard. Where does it come from?”

And now twenty years post-Edinburgh, Neil was playing at a small club in Toronto. I checked with a few friends; no one was free or interested. But I decided to go… there aren’t many performers whom I’ve seen over six decades, and I was curious, though not terribly hopeful. I walked in, and the usher offered me a seat at the back; the front tables, reserved for the diners, were all filled. I decided to walk up front, and see if I could charm my way into an empty seat. But there was no need; I met Sid and his family, a friend I hadn’t seen in five years who had known the Bonzos back when, and there was an empty seat at his table, and synchronicity worked like clockwork.

It was a far better concert than I would have dared to hope, largely because Neil was doing new material, and when he did go into the past, he would play Bonzo Dog songs that hadn’t been released, or a song he’d written for “Holy Grail” that hadn’t made the cut. So there were a few songs I knew, but a majority of the material was new. Some was parodic (“Where has all the money gone, I’m only asking. What have all the bankers done, we’d like to know?”), but most was more like Ray Davis’ work with the Kinks, social commentary, “I need the real world, give me face-mail in the meat zone”. (“Meat zone” is a real geek term for the offline world.) It was interspersed with a lot of very funny patter, “Women do generalize, but men don’t.”, “This one is for all the people who think democracy can be dropped out of a plane at 40,000 feet.” But there was a touch of wistfulness, never more than in his second encore, “Old Age Becomes Me.”

And then it was the end of a delightful evening. I talked briefly to Neil at the end of the show, as he signed albums, cds, and posed for pictures with other grey-haired fans. I thanked him for the pleasure of having seem him three times, in three different countries, at twenty year intervals, and wondered in which country I’d see him in in another twenty years. We looked at each other and I could see we had the same thought – perhaps in our final country.

The culture of the 60s is long gone, now merchandised to teenagers as an iconic brand consisting of tie-dyed shirts, long hair, and a peace sign. And as I went home, the song that kept running through my mind wasn’t any of the hugely pleasurable songs I’d heard that evening, and not even any of the Bonzo’s or Rutles’ work. It was the closing verse of an old song by Harry Nilsson,

I had my copy of Neil Innes’ latest release in my pocket, autographed “To Peter, Love Neil”, and it’s a fun album with a few songs I’m looking forward to hearing again. And I do hope I get to see him again. But he’s no longer shaping pop culture, and I’m no longer looking to be shaped by it. And perhaps that is as it should be, for men of our vintage. Old age becomes us.