Rodney Rude, Not Guilty (1988)

I found not just this one record but a stack of Rodney Rude LPs. I remember buying them for 50c and $1. What for? Well, here’s how it went…you see my mum had an uncle who was dying of cancer. He died when I was about 10 or 11; it was the first funeral I went to. A year or so before that – dying, his voice squeaky, him a shadow of his former self (I didn’t see him all that often in my life but remember him as a huge, powerful man) and he instructed his wife to get his tapes (“get the tapes, get the tapes!”). We were all sitting around – extended family. Sharing a moment, knowing there weren’t many left with him. All he wanted to do was listen to his tapes of Rodney Rude and Kevin Bloody Wilson. The kids were deemed too young to listen to all this filth – fair enough given we were six and eight and twelve and s on. So we were in the other room. At some point we started sneaking down the corridor to listen in. We kept getting sprung and sent back to the other room. And then we’d crawl down the hall, reminding each other to shhhh as we got as close as we could to the profanity. Many of the parents were embarrassed – as they never listened to this sort of thing. But they were essentially granting a dying man one of his (simple) wishes. He was (momentarily) happy. He made a tape of some of the Rodney Rude and some of the Kevin Bloody Wilson. He gave my mum, his eldest niece, a copy. She used to listen to it – mostly (I guess) to be reminded of her uncle, of that time spent with him. I used to sneak listens to it after school when mum was at work. I didn’t really understand it or find it funny. But I worked hard to remember as much of it as I could so that I was able to perform the routines at school to shocked/impressed/baffled friends. That night we finally did make it in to the lounge to listen to the tapes; the parents giving up and deciding it was fine if we sat there – most of it going over our heads. I remember, particularly, Kevin Bloody Wilson singing some horrific material – so many c’s and f-words and I knew it was bad even if I didn’t really know what it meant. I didn’t get it – just as I didn’t get it when I committed the material to memory to share in the school yard just as I didn’t get it when I found a small handful of Rodney Rude LPs in a box in my parents’ house. I had bought them. I’ve never listened to them. I doubt I ever will. But they’re there – my reminder of the tape my mum had as a reminder of her uncle who laughed heartily at this blue (collar) humour. And then , between laughs, choked with all the dying breath he could muster.

The Vinyl Countdown is a document of every LP I listen to, brand new discoveries and old-old favourites; extremely pre-loved, previously abandoned or with the shrink-wrap having just been removed it’s all here at The Vinyl Countdown