One of our best experiences of 2000 was getting to know and work with Neil Innes, some 25 years after becoming a fairly rabid fan. It remains a vivid memory of high school hearing “The Intro and the Outro” for the first time, so vivid in fact that I mistakenly assumed mine to be a universal rite of passage. We had the idea to invite Neil to the U.S. to play a few shows, backed by us, and on this date in 2001 we performed the second (and penultimate) one, in Cambridge at the House of Blues (a location considerably less, shall we say, House of Blues-y than your average establishment bearing that name, and one that unsurprisingly has closed). Our repertoire comprised a wide range of Bonzo Dog Band, Rutles, and more recent material–Neil even agreed to “Piggy Bank Love” despite it turning out that he’s not the singer on Gorilla (James and I sang it instead). And now for something completely different, in both 2006 and 2009, we found ourselves on the First Avenue stage in Minneapolis, providing a little local color with Bob Dylan’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (aided by Why?) at the former show, and the Gestures’ “Run Run Run” (all by ourselves) at the latter.
