Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium has fair claim to have seen it all. Elvis played here, as did Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Patsy Cline. Hank Williams was fired after turning up drunk one too many times. In 1968, the Byrds got a frosty reception from the crowd who sat in the venue’s wooden pews, as much for the length of their hair as for their music. And yet even that seems less improbable than what’s happening on the stage tonight: three sixtysomething actors are performing a selection of songs from a film 25 years old to a response verging on mild hysteria. Presumably for the first time in the Ryman’s history, the phrase, “This song is called Big Bottom!” rings around the auditorium. The resulting cheer nearly takes the roof off.
Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean are midway through a North American tour celebrating the silver anniversary of the release of This Is Spinal Tap and its unchallenged position as the greatest rock satire in cinema history: the tale of a gormless, deluded but ultimately endearing British heavy metal band and the indignities heaped on them as they tour America. It is a film that has caused Tom Waits to cry (“I’d like to hear that,” Shearer chuckles) and innumerable hard rockers to claim it was based on them, at first indignantly — a band called Foghat angrily alleged Guest, Shearer and McKean had bugged their tour bus to gather material — and then, as time went on, with increasing pride. The only person apparently immune to its charms is Liam Gallagher, who, his brother related with relish, stormed out of a Tap live show in protest at the jokes, having apparently believed Spinal Tap was a real band, the film a serious documentary. “It’s fair enough,” Shearer says. “I was under the impression for some time that Oasis was a real band.”
If nothing else, Gallagher’s reaction highlights This Is Spinal Tap’s unerring accuracy and attention to detail. When the film was released, Guest says, British interviewers at first refused to believe the trio were American, so convincingly had they nailed Spinal Tap’s English accents (a situation possibly further confused by the fact that Guest is the US-born son of a British peer: his full title is Christopher Haden-Guest, 5th Baron Haden-Guest). Furthermore, all are accomplished musicians. Before Spinal Tap, Shearer had focused on comedy and acting, working with Jack Benny as a child, then on Saturday Night Live and in The Credibility Gap, a radio comedy troupe also featuring McKean. Guest and McKean, who had been friends since acting school, had both attempted to run entwining careers as musicians and actor/comedians. They had success — Guest doing musical parodies for National Lampoon, McKean as Lenny Kosnowski, leader of a band called Lenny and the Squigtones, on the sitcom Laverne and Shirley — but their efforts also provided them with a crash course in the kind of anticlimax that became Spinal Tap’s trademark.
In the mid-1960s, McKean had joined the Left Banke, a “baroque pop” band whose combustible relationship was not helped by the fact that their hits were agonized paeans of unrequited love written by the keyboard player about the lead singer’s girlfriend — on their biggest hit, Walk Away Renee, he neglected even to change her name. McKean joined after the original lineup had split up, just in time to be groomed for stardom — “We got bought clothes, instruments, had our photo taken trying to look like the Beatles in Central Park.” Before he’d played a note, the band had split up again: “I kind of grabbed my clothes and instruments, and sneaked out the back door.”
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