That time RuPaul bang-banged on the ‘Love Shack’ door & the tin roof has never recovered

Today marks the 65th birthday of RuPaul Charles, who isn’t just a drag queen but the queen of drag—as he once famously corrected Jimmy Fallon—and a pop culture universe of his own.

You’re here reading Queerty right now, so we presume you know Mama Ru is the Emmy-winning creator and host of RuPaul’s Drag Race, a best-selling author, an acclaimed recording artist (the first queen to ever chart on the Billboard Hot 100), and an actor whose credits include classics like To Wong Foo & But I’m A Cheerleader.

How about we take this to the next level?

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But what many people don’t know is that RuPaul’s first major screen role? It was as a background dancer in a funky little spot known as the “Love Shack,” baby!

That’s right, a few years before he was the “Supermodel Of The World,” Ru was a video vixen for quirky new wave rock band The B-52’s biggest and most enduring hit single.

Though RuPaul was born and raised in San Diego, as a teen he and his sister moved to Atlanta to pursue a career in entertainment, performing in theater, appearing on public access TV, and becoming a staple of the city’s arts & music scene.

By that point, the Athens, GA-based B-52’s had already achieved widespread success, thanks especially to their surprise debut hit “Rock Lobster,” but in ’85 founding member Ricky Wilson sadly passed from AIDS-related illness, leading the band to take a step back from the spotlight.

Eventually, the group began recording music again, which led to their 1989 comeback album Cosmic Thing. Whereas lead single “Channel Zero” was a modest alternative radio hit, “Love Shack” blew the damn roof off, especially in the era of MTV.

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The track was inspired by a specific club called the Hawaiian Ha-Le, a spot off the highway between Athens and Atlanta that didn’t look like much, but nevertheless held wild Bohemian parties where predominantly Black and queer folks would gather. With queer members like Fred Schneider & Kate Pierson, the band would frequent the club, so the track was designed as a ode to the place “where love rules.”

When it came time to shoot the video, the B-52’s wanted it to pay tribute to the community they found at the club, so they brought in plenty of their friends and peers from the scene and threw a house party—including a then 29-year-old RuPaul Charles (who, despite the Georgia connection, the band didn’t meet until he lived in NYC).

Sure enough, he can be spotted at various points throughout the video. As Schneider told Yahoo! Music back in ’17, Ru was “already really working on his look, his star look,” And, indeed, he looks disco-chic in full drag, wearing a halter top, matching hot pants, sky-high hair, and a very ’70s-esque threaded headband.

In a subreddit for r/rupaulsdragrace, some fans reflect on seeing the icon for the first time in “Love Shack,” remembering him as “the coolest person and best dancer” in the clip and an undeniable star. One commenter even notes it was not uncommon, whenever the video would play, for “someone (usually a guy) [to] point out that ‘that’s actually a man.'”

Even though Ru isn’t directly identified as such within the video, this was one of the earliest positive depictions of an actual drag queen in mainstream media for many young viewers, shown to be glamorous and the life of the party.

And as the story goes, the band wanted the clip to feature a nod to the classic musical variety show Soul Train, but they were out of their depth when it came to getting a line-dance started, so they turned to Ru for help.

“The big story—and the B’s always remind me this—is that they wanted to do a Soul Train line. They couldn’t,” Ru once recalled to Billboard. “It wasn’t going right. So I had to step in and say, ‘OK, listen. This is how you do a Soul Train line.’ It’s like two wheels that are sort of smashing pasta out; it’s like a pasta machine. The two wheels have to be rotating. So when the two people are going down the middle, the line is actually in rotation, so it replenishes the two new people that come down the middle. They were very impressed by the fact that I was able to do that.”

And the rest? It’s herstory, mama! “Love Shack” went on to win Best Group Video at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards, and a few short years later Ru would be getting his own play on the MTV airwaves thanks to his debut album Supermodel Of The World, which featured the club track “Stinky Dinky”—co-written by Fred Schneider!

Of course, Ru and the band would continue to stay in touch over the years and influence one another’s work, both directly and indirectly. Speaking with Yahoo! Music, Schneider called Ru a “gay treasure” and noted how the band found inspiration as they came up around Atlanta’s drag scene in the late ’70s & early ’80s.

Years later, RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 8 featured a girl group challenge called “New Wave Queens,” in which Bob The Drag Queen, Thorgy Thor, and Acid Betty performed the song “Street Meatz”—a very clear allusion to The B-52’s, and “Rock Lobster” in particular.

The very next season, members Schneider, Pierson, and Cindy Wilson appeared as guest judges for a (very ill-advised) cheer battle Maxi Challenge, where one of the teams was dubbed “The B-52 Bombers” in their honor. And when Jaymes Mansfield and Kimora Blac found themselves in the bottom two, they had to lip-sync to—what else?—”Love Shack,” bringing it all full circle.

In any event: Happy Birthday, Mama Ru! Thanks for making the whole shack shimmy for 65 years now. Here’s to the next 65!

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