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.”
A decade later, McKean and Guest performed together in a band whose record label announced, mid-tour, that there was no more money for flights and they would henceforth be traveling across America in a small car, their equipment tied to the roof. “It was 1979,” Guest remembers, “a period when a lot of people were high a lot. So now we’re in a car, being driven by our drummer, who was also, how shall we say, not sober most of the time. He would keep going on about health food, how good it was for you, and the whole time he’s …” He mimes frantic drug taking. “It didn’t seem funny at the time,” he adds, darkly.
A year previously, Guest had been staying at Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont hotel when he had overheard a jetlagged British rocker and his manager holding an interminable, agonizing conversation about whether the former had left his bass guitar in the airport. The character of Nigel Tufnel was born, lucklessly trudging around the US with his childhood friend and vocalist David St Hubbins (McKean) and bass player Derek Smalls (Shearer). All three co-created the film, which was largely improvised (though directed by Rob Reiner).
In theory, the gag should have worn thin over the last quarter century. The kind of music Spinal Tap satirized — grandiose heavy metal with lashings of lyrical sexism — has largely vanished, in part, it might be argued, because they satirized it. Even people who haven’t seen the film know the jokes off by heart: the drummer who choked on someone else’s vomit; the Stonehenge model that descends from the rafters, 50cm rather than 5m tall; the beautiful piano piece called Lick My Love Pump. The most famous of the lot, about the guitar amplifier that goes up to 11, has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. St Hubbins’ desperate cry of, “Hope you like our new direction!” might as well have been, so often is it invoked when a band bullishly refuses to play its hits onstage.
Furthermore, you might expect those responsible to have left Spinal Tap behind long ago. It’s not as if they haven’t other things to do. McKean is an acclaimed Broadway actor. Guest has created semi-improvised films — Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, For Your Consideration — that have made him one of the world’s most respected comedy writers and directors. Shearer is rumored to earn US$400,000 per episode providing the voices of Mr Burns, Ned Flanders and others on The Simpsons, and hosts a hugely popular satirical radio program, Le Show: it is that, not Spinal Tap or The Simpsons, that has earned him a star on Hollywood Boulevard. But Spinal Tap just kept going.
The trio have toured intermittently as the band ever since the film came out, amassing a lengthy roll call of superstars who’ve joined them onstage: Metallica, Pink Floyd’s Dave Gilmour, Cher, Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder, the Beastie Boys and Jeff Beck, the latter apparently unperturbed by his striking physical resemblance to Tufnel. In 1992, they released a “new” Spinal Tap album, Break Like the Wind — the cue for much bathos of the life-imitating-art variety. Their parodically sexist video for the single Bitch School was banned by MTV for being too sexist. When it became apparent that the album wasn’t going to be a chart-topping hit, McKean says their label withdrew financial support midway through the subsequent tour: if Spinal Tap didn’t actually end up playing second on the bill to a puppet show, as happened in the film, they still found themselves reduced to staying in “the kind of hotel rooms where you stood by the liquor cabinet and realized the floor was really wet and something really bad had happened there.”
On this tour they are performing out of character, without wigs or costumes, enabling them to include material from their other famed musical “mockumentary,” 2003’s A Mighty Wind, in which the trio played the Folksmen, a dreadful early 1960s folk band. They’re about to play Wembley and Glastonbury, the latter for the first time, in costume as Spinal Tap. And there’s a new album to promote, Back From the Dead, which largely consists of re-recordings of songs from the film’s original soundtrack. As Shearer notes, “The length of Spinal Tap’s fictional career in the movie is now eclipsed by the length of Spinal Tap’s career as a fake band. That’s a little: huh? What?”
Indeed, the ongoing career of Spinal Tap seems to baffle its participants as much as it would an impartial observer. “I don’t think we’ve ever known what the hell’s going on when we do Tap shows,” Guest says. “It’s possible the audience are effectively getting to see more of the movie when we play. You know, they know the songs, so anything we do onstage, whether we’re meaning to or not, is an extension of the film. Other than that, I wouldn’t understand what’s going on.”
The question of why they’ve chosen to re-record the songs from the film for the new album is equally confusing. McKean explains that the music in the film was supposed to sound like Spinal Tap playing live, but these versions, complete with “strings and horns,” are meant to sound like the actual records Spinal Tap is supposed to have released in the 1970s and 1980s: “This recording is more how those records would sound if they had really existed,” he says. If that sounds nit-picking, then at least it fits with the trio’s infamous attention to detail: the intricate history of Spinal Tap they wrote before filming began, “with biographies of all 37 people who’d played in the band;” the string of gigs they played around Los Angeles at the same time, to ensure their joke band was sufficiently authentic (“No one in the audience realized it was a gag,” says Shearer); the fact that every time they write a new Spinal Tap song — there are nine on Back From the Dead — they feel impelled first to come up with a suitable back story to explain its existence. “It gets very arcane,” Guest admits, “but that’s what’s great about this, the specificity.”
But there seems to be another, more prosaic reason. “We wanted the songs to sound better,” Guest says, “and we’ve accomplished that, I think.”
There’s something hugely appealing about the idea of Guest and co entering the studio, concerned that they hadn’t done Spinal Tap’s oeuvre justice, determined finally to give Sex Farm the treatment it richly deserves.
It also makes an improbable suggestion about Spinal Tap’s continued appeal: that it might rest not on the jokes, but on a genuine love for the music, in both audience and band. Watching the crowd in Nashville, it’s easy to forget that these songs are meant to be gags, intended to satirize the awfulness of heavy metal.
They laugh at the trio’s onstage banter, but when they play Stonehenge or The Majesty of Rock, they react as any other audience would to a favorite band trotting out its classics. They howl their approval the minute they recognize a song. They pump their fists and do that devil’s horns thing with their fingers. No one seems to be doing it ironically.
Shearer nods: “You can’t get onstage and play music you hate or want to make bad. If you’re playing crap music or have contempt for what you’re doing, where the hell is the fun? Of course, we wrote it with the intention that it be credible that a band could have some kind of career playing this music, so it had to be at least borderline credible that someone might be ignoring the stupidity of the lyrics and enjoying the music.”
Shearer and McKean laugh easily, but Guest arrives trailed by a reputation for being rather hard work. His Wikipedia entry includes a section devoted to his “offstage demeanor” in which the phrase “off-putting” figures heavily, and an interviewer who found him “rude, condescending and intolerable” is quoted. He’s none of those things today, but he is grave and unsmiling. On a couple of occasions, I assume he’s being deadpan and laugh at something he says, and he shakes his head: “I’m not,” he says flatly, “trying to be funny.”
At another juncture, I lightheartedly remark that the famous scene where Nigel Tufnel throws a tantrum because the slices of bread in Spinal Tap’s backstage catering are the wrong size must make it hard for Guest to complain if his own catering genuinely isn’t right. He looks blank — “We aren’t difficult Hollywood people that travel that particular path, we have modest backstage demands” — before launching into an exhaustive list of his meager dressing-room requirements. “We ask for fruit, bananas specifically. We ask for a chocolate bar each, a specific brand of chocolate bar. We ask for coffee. A couple of bottles of wine.” As he goes on, he sounds not unlike Harlan Pepper, the character he played in Best in Show, who couldn’t stop himself from continually demonstrating his ability to name every variety of nut in the world.
But you can tell when Guest is being funny, because he transforms into Nigel Tufnel and says something snortingly hilarious. When the conversation turns to how Spinal Tap might be coping with the ongoing collapse of the music industry, Guest starts explaining that the bandmembers probably haven’t noticed: “If you’re deluded, you live in a place where there isn’t everyone else’s reality. The last time people saw Nigel, he was raising miniature horses and complaining that he couldn’t find a jockey small enough to race them, as if it was a possibility that he might find a guy two feet [0.6m] tall, you know: I haven’t done looking yet. For a guy like that, to say to him, there’s this world where record companies barely exist any more …”
His voice tails off, replaced by a familiar British drone, rich with the entitled effrontery of a thick, chippy rock star and laden with pregnant pauses, during which his mouth hangs open slightly. “What do you mean? No, it’s not going wrong at all. That’s what you don’t understand. It’s going right. This is what you don’t know. That’s where you’re stupid, you see. You don’t get it at all. You look around and see something, I see a different thing. My thing happens to be right. I see great promise.”
It’s confusing: a man who gives every appearance of having no sense of humor suddenly revealing himself to be the funniest guy in the room. But then, as has already been established, much of Spinal Tap’s world is confusing. Despite Guest’s steely assurances that there’s no similarity between Spinal Tap’s on-screen misadventures and the experience of touring as Spinal Tap, the line between actors and characters does seem to blur occasionally. Every now and again, one of these erudite satirists says something about music that might have come from the lips of the people they’re satirizing. Shearer enjoyed last night’s gig in Atlanta not merely because of the audience reaction, but because the band played “balls out”: “It’s almost physics. It’s an interchange of energy. The audience gives it to you and you give it back.” I know what he means, but still, say it in a gormless English accent and it would be tough to distinguish from the golden philosophy of Derek Smalls.
Guest, meanwhile, has endorsed Marshall amplifiers in character as Tufnel, which boggles the mind: a mythic rock star famed for being so stupid he hasn’t actually fathomed out how the volume knob on an amplifier works, being paid to recommend amplifiers to other musicians. When touring, Shearer says, they’ve run into “all the stuff that’s in the film — silly promotion men, strange groupies,” the latter apparently undeterred by the fact that the rock star they want to sleep with doesn’t actually exist.
“A satirist’s dream is you make fun of it, then it’s all fixed,” Shearer smiles. “The reality is you make fun of it, then go and do it yourself, and you wind up thinking, how stupid am I? I knew how this was going to be, and it is, and I’ve signed up for it.”
He keeps signing up for it, the audiences keep turning up in their thousands, and the cult of Spinal Tap shows no sign of waning. Back at the Ryman, the gig pauses for questions and answers. “If I were a woman,” declares one teenage boy, “I’d let all three of you have me, one after the other.” Someone else raises a hand. “Could you give us some background into Spinal Tap’s formation?” he asks. “You mean,” says Shearer, “as if we were a real band?” And the audience cheer and thump the backs of the pews in approval.
Note: Back From the Dead is out on June 22, the anniversary DVD in September.
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