When “This Is Spinal Tap” premiered in 1984, many viewers thought the film was a real documentary about an actual band, albeit one pitifully down on its luck. (In one scene, the group is billed below “puppet show” on a theme-park marquee).
The confusion was understandable. The band’s songs — like “Big Bottom” and “Sex Farm” — were indistinguishable from metal anthems on the radio, while scenes of rock ’n’ roll life on the road rang true.
That’s because a lot of it was drawn from real life, from the backstage squabbling to the disappointing venues. Further adding to the confusion was the band itself: a collection of real musicians who came together to star in a mockumentary about a fictional band, then went on tour as a real band, performing at sites like Wembley Stadium and Carnegie Hall but headlining as their fictional characters.
In “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues,” opening Friday, the blurring between rock fiction and reality continues. In a recent video interview, the director Rob Reiner joined members of the band — Michael McKean (who plays David St. Hubbins), Christopher Guest (Nigel Tufnel) and Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls) — to discuss six elements from the “Tap” movies that riff on elements of rock lore — or, in some cases, created a bit of their own.
‘This Is Spinal Tap’
Backstage Blues
At an arena in Cleveland, the band gets lost in a maze of tunnels on its way from the green room to the stage. The scene was inspired by a similar incident in the early 1980s, when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers got turned around inside a large German entertainment complex and ended up inside the venue’s indoor tennis court (the scene was included in Cameron Crowe’s documentary “Heartbreakers Beach Party”).
Shearer himself got lost backstage at a Grateful Dead concert in Madison Square Garden and found himself walking into the site of a lightweight boxing match. “I shared that story with everybody, and that contributed to the pot, too,” he said.
Over the years, musicians have told their own “Tap” stories. In 1993, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton were playing at the Apollo Theater, McKean said, and the two of them got lost underneath the stage. “At the exact same moment, they looked at each other and said, ‘OK, now we’re in that movie.’”
Green Room Grouses
In a green room in Chapel Hill, N.C., Nigel complains about the food offerings backstage. The bread slices are far too small for the cold cuts, for one thing, while some of the olives have pimentos, but others don’t. “It’s a complete catastrophe,” he declares.
The scene was inspired by the infamous Van Halen contract rider that contained a strict edict against brown M&M’s. “We knew we wanted to do a takeoff on backstage riders,” Reiner said. The extended sequence about tiny bread and pimentos, however, was pure improv. “They just put platters of food out there, and Chris just started riffing on it.”
McKean added: “I don’t think the props department went out of their way to put down an outlandish bunch of props. It was a pretty decent spread, actually.” This wasn’t always the case, however, when Spinal Tap played live. “In Detroit, on our first tour in 1984, there was a pitcher of water and half a sandwich wrapped in cellophane,” Guest recalled.
Stonehenge
When the band commissions an artist to create an 18-foot-tall set piece for the anthem “Stonehenge,” Nigel scribbles the dimensions for the presumably huge, awe-inspiring structure in inches, not feet. The result: a tiny Stonehenge prop dwarfed by the band and even by the two little people hired to dance around it. Black Sabbath experienced a similar mix-up with a Stonehenge structure in 1983 — in that case, a 15-foot-high prop ended up 15 meters, about three times taller than expected.
“They started their tour about two weeks before our film came out, and they got really upset, saying that we stole the idea from them,” Reiner recalled. “It was idiotic — how could you make a film, put it together and get it into the theaters two weeks after they started touring with this? To me, that was a very heavy metal moment, that they would actually think we could do all that in two weeks.”
‘Spinal Tap II’
Sellout Moments
In the sequel, Derek is reduced to hawking Bruegel-themed cryptocurrency. “My mind keeps going back to 1967 when the great rock band the Who put out the record ‘The Who Sell Out,’” Shearer said. “The whole point of that record was how stupid and unbelievable it would be for rock bands to get involved in commercials and adverts. And now we’re living in that world.”
Derek’s crypto commercials recall similar rock-star pitchmen from the past: Lou Reed peddling Honda scooters in the mid-80s; Alice Cooper, with a nod to his 1972 single “School’s Out,” promoting back-to-school supplies for Staples. And then there’s the pre-fame Stones. “You can still find the 1964 Rolling Stones Rice Krispies commercial online,” McKean said, referring to a jingle the band wrote and sang. “You can hear the Stones selling the snap, crackle and pop.”
Later in the sequel, Spinal Tap’s concert promoter tries to steer the musicians away from traditional merch like hats and T-shirts in favor of something more suitable for their presumably aging fan demographic: stair lifts, say, or walk-in bathtubs. “I saw a commercial that made me laugh so hard,” Reiner said. “It was Terry Bradshaw, who used to be the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and he was selling these walk-in tubs. He’s sitting in one of them with, like, a shower cap on, and I was like, ‘How does that work?’ It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen.”
Band Conflicts
In the first “Tap,” the friendship between David and Nigel is roiled by the entrance of David’s girlfriend, Jeanine, who has her own ideas for the band based on, among other things, her love of astrology. The rift eventually drives the group apart, a scene with obvious echoes of the breakup of the Beatles being blamed on Yoko Ono. Did Paul McCartney, who appears in “Spinal Tap II,” ever ask Reiner, hey, was that about us? “No, but it’s obvious,” Reiner said, laughing. “We never talked about it, but it’s pretty obvious.”
In the sequel, the conflicts between David and Nigel continue. At one point, the two are going at each other in the studio, their feud coming to a head. Enter McCartney, who, unseen, quietly observes the blowup intensify. “Is it like this all the time?” he asks.
McCartney first met the members of Spinal Tap in real life purely by chance when he, the band and Michael Jackson were all gearing up for tours at the same rehearsal facility in Los Angeles. McCartney came to their studio, Shearer recalled, “and we were sort of speechless.”
He added: “After about a minute he says, ‘Hey fellas, give us a tune.’”
“We weren’t going to do a Beatles song,” Shearer said. In the end, they went with the Stones tune “Start Me Up.”
New Gigs
When the sequel opens, the musicians have moved on in their careers. David is playing in a mariachi band; Nigel is performing on electric guitar in an otherwise all-acoustic band, at the Puffin, a small pub.
“That’s what happened with pub rock in the early ’70s in England,” McKean said. “You were either opening for Bowie at some enormous venue, or you were nowhere. But right in between those two were people going, ‘Let’s get together and play at the pub.’”
The stars recalled seeing this sort of thing happening to bands and musicians of every stripe. “If you’re a musician, you want to play, until you physically can’t play,” Guest said. “You have to play. That’s what you do. And if you’re not in a position to dictate what that circumstance is, you play where you can.”
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