Hard to imagine now but Rob Reiner’s pioneering mockumentary
This is Spinal Tap! was only a modest success when it was released in 1984. Indeed, many of the rock musicians it parodied originally either didn’t get the humor―or, in some cases, “got it” all too well. Aerosmith’s Brad Whitford told
Spin magazine that “the first time Steven Tyler saw it he didn’t see any humor in it. That's how close to home it was. He was pissed! He was like, ‘That’s not funny!’” Eddie Van Halen reportedly watched
Tap with a highly amused audience, yet personally didn’t find much to laugh at. “Everything in that movie had happened to me,” he groused.
Behind the movie’s eventual cult success lies a convoluted history of creative partnerships, hard work, and lucky breaks that stretches back to the early ’70s and a Los Angeles radio comedy troupe called the Credibility Gap. Though founded by a local news director and originally consisting of other radio pros, by 1971 it had evolved considerably, with young writer/comedians Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, David L. Lander, and Richard Beebe becoming its mainstays. McKean and Shearer would eventually become Tap’s David St. Hubbins and Derek Smalls, respectively.
Though sometimes confused with surrealist contemporaries the Firesign Theater, the Gap’s foursome had a more satirical bent, lampooning both politics and pop culture.
One memorable routine even finds them updating Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s On First” routine, with a long-suffering concert promoter trying to explain his line-up―the Who, Guess Who, and Yes ―to a confused newspaper ad salesman.
Music was always key to the Gap’s success, especially its brilliant, if haphazardly-released albums. Their Capitol release
Woodshtick and More re-imagined Woodstock as a gathering of Borscht Belt comics in the Catskills, while
“Foreign Novelty Smash,” with non-sensical German lyrics set to a bouncy ’70s pop beat, was even “honored” by being included on Rhino’s World’s Worst Records Vol. 2 anthology. Two years later their sole, ill-fated release for Warners included the ambitious
“Something for Mary,” a medley that skewers the era’s overblown gospel musicals and rock operas alike.
“(Warners) had hired us to do an odd little recording for one of their conventions,” Harry Shearer later explained. “The idea was, they were going to release four new albums and the fifth was going to be a ringer, and this was to be excerpts from it. So we wrote a take-off on rock operas, ‘Something for Mary.’ It dealt with the birth of Jesus from the point of view of Joseph, the odd man out. We recorded it in an hour. It was a joke.”
When Beebe went back into radio fulltime in 1975, McKean and Lander soon found themselves cast as semi-regulars on one of the era’s most popular TV shows,
Laverne & Shirley, where they played greaser-geek neighbors Lenny Kosnowski and Andrew “Squiggy” Squiggmann, respectively. Such was Lenny & Squiggy’s popularity that Casablanca signed them to a record deal―which is where another piece of the Spinal Tap saga fell into place.
Recorded live at the Roxy, the goofy, ’50s-spoofing
Lenny and the Squiggtones album of ’79 found Lander and McKean working with a stable of musicians that included Kiss’ Peter Criss sans make-up on drums, with Michael McKean’s clean-cut former college roomate, Christopher Guest, on guitar―credited as none other than Nigel Tufnel. Here are downloads of the album’s
side one and
side two, courtesy of WFMU.
Shortly thereafter came the first incarnation of McKean/Guest/Shearer as Spinal Tap, part of budding director Rob Reiner’s unsuccessful ABC sketch comedy pilot
The TV Show, where Loudon Wainwright III played Tap’s keyboardist. While the three comedians went on to briefly appear in different
SNL line-ups (Shearer twice), they also spent time with Reiner trying to develop
Spinal Tap via a modestly produced video demo. (Watch the demo here:
Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3.)
“We had made this demo feature,” McKean explained, “and we showed it to some backers, hopefully to get them to put up money for it. We didn’t have a studio anymore. The studio we were working for when we made the demo went out of business. We were kind of shopping it around, and people said, ‘They’ve got to be more like Kiss. They’ve got to be more outrageous, with flame-throwers and everything.’ We would say, ‘No, no. The thing is they’re mediocre. The thing is they’re not even interesting.’”
Other nuggets of Spinal Tap history:— McKean: “Chris had a character, a great cockney guitar-player rocker character, and the two of us roomed together years ago in college and always talked about how great and funny rock and roll was when it had pomposity that didn't pay off. You see it in all forms of music, but there was something about stadium rockers, when the stadium would go away and suddenly they're playing in these little dives. It just struck us as funny.”
— The name “Nigel Tufnel” is a spoof of “Eric Clapton,” while the character’s visage and persona is clearly based on Jeff Beck―who became such a fan that he solos on the band’s 1992 studio album,
Break Like the Wind.
— Harry Shearer developed the character of Derek Smalls after spending time on the road with Saxon in 1981, used some of that band’s anecdotes in the film and based his character largely on bassist Steve “Dobby” Dawson.
— The film’s infamous mini Stonehenge set is rooted in a real incident. When Black Sabbath ordered a Stonehenge set for their
Born Again tour, the measurement was mistakenly translated, as Geezer Butler recalls: “The people who made it saw 15 meters instead of 15 feet. It was 45 feet high and it wouldn't fit on any stage anywhere so we just had to leave it the storage area. It cost a fortune to make but there was not a building on earth that you could fit it into.”
— Asked if anything in the film echoed Led Zeppelin’s own experiences, Robert Plant admitted “getting lost on the way to the stage. That was us, playing in Baltimore. It took 25 minutes to do the hundred yards from our Holiday Inn through the kitchen to the arena.”
— McKean: “Carmine Appice was in a band and they had a drum riser in a bubble that rose from the middle of the stage hydraulically. And one night it didn’t open, and he assumed that that must have inspired us. We didn’t hear about it; we just wrote it in because we thought it was funny!”
— When Spinal Tap played
SNL in 1984, Guest, McKean, and Shearer also appeared as another fake music act, the acoustic group the Folksmen. That faux folk trio would also appear briefly in the band’s 1992 television special
The Return of Spinal Tap, centered around the band’s show at London’s Albert Hall. In 2001, the Folksmen opened for Tap on a brief American tour, and two years later starred in their own Chris Guest-directed mockumentary,
A Mighty Wind.
— In 2007, Spinal Tap reunited yet again to
take part in the Live Earth events.