I have watched, well, not exactly watched, but experienced The Rocky Horror Picture Show over 100 times. I’ve only watched it about 30 times. I saw it in the movies and on HBO about five times before I couldn’t take it anymore and troweled makeup on, ripped up some fishnet stockings and took to a stage myself. Figured I was a natch, had the same hair as Tim Curry and did his voice in a passable mimic, not that I’d need it.

I performed in a Friday night cast 72 times from when I was 15 to when I was 17. I started as Dr. Frank N. Furter and when I was replaced by a woman in lingerie, as opposed to a guy in drag, I played Janet for a while. The original Janet wouldn’t kiss the woman playing Frank, whose name was Leslie. I had no problem. She looked better in the corset than I ever would. It wasn’t just the movie. It was the music. I bartered rare bootlegs to get Tim Curry’s single “Baby Love” and taught my band how to play “Birds of a Feather” and “Sloe Gin” after seeing him play the Bottom Line. Same night I saw Squeeze for the first time.

I still get a thrill from the opening song, “Science Fiction Double Feature,” not just because it’s probably the best song in the movie, one of the only non-rock-and-roll-retro tunes, but also because I have seen every movie mentioned in the song. Some of them I watched because of the song. Most I’d already seen. Too bad the song only referenced science fiction films because Charles Grey, the neckless fuck of a narrator in Rocky Horror, was in the classic Hammer adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out.

“Science Fiction Double Feature” is bedded on a simple descending chord progression….