Any Questions? - Ruby Ruby

We came up with this song parody of Louie Louie while Scott (MC2P4) was working for Donnelley Directory Talking Yellow Pages in the Summer of 1991. Every year they would have an employee awards ceremony called the Ruby Awards. At the ceremony, they would serve breakfast and have drawings for prizes but the main purpose was to recognize outstanding work by employees during the past year. A Ruby Award was the honor that was given to each of the outstanding employees.

Scott thought that they needed a theme song for the awards ceremony so he told them that he was going to write one. They encouraged him to do so but we're sure that they never really expected him to deliver one.

Scott came back to the studio and told me what he had promised to do. He said that he'd already started to work on lyrics for it and had based them on the tune Louie Louie. He titled his song "Ruby Ruby". Though I was apprehensive about doing a parody of a popular song and, of course, thought that it was "beneath" us, we agreed that it could be fun to do if we did it in an "Any Questions?" way. So, we asked LTJTHC (Tim Harrell) to help us pull it off and away we went.

The recording session was quick and fun. For drums, LTJTHC played his Yamaha DD-5 which was MIDIed to my E-mu Pro/Cussion. I pulled out my Rickenbacker 4003 bass, which had been lying dormant since I was mainly playing synths by this point, and ran it through a nice distortion patch on my Korg A3. We recorded our tracks live to a Tascam 38 1/2" 8-track reel-to-reel machine that we had purchased from Larry Lee Fiber. I only have one version of Ruby Ruby on tape so, after rehearsing, I assume it only took us one take to record the drums and bass. I dialed in one of my signature A3 vocal effects for Scott and he sang his parody lyrics. We mixed it down and mastered it to cassette (this is before CD-R recording was common/affordable) and it was done.

Scott took the cassette in to work and, even without hearing it, his bosses said they'd use it for the awards ceremony. As the ceremony started, the Ruby Award Princess wearing her white dress, high heels, tiara, and carrying a Ruby scepter hit the catwalk. Our song, Any Questions? - Ruby Ruby, began to play and the employees erupted with applause for both the princess and our song.

Not too bad for a song parody! Check it out...