The 100 Greatest Rock & Roll Movies of All Time: #1
1. The comedic geniuses behind England’s loudest band confused audiences, depressed rock stars and made a satire that will never be toppedThis Is Spinal Tap (1984)
The precise moment of a band’s genesis — even a fictional band — can be tough to pinpoint. For Spinal Tap, the rock & roll creation of Christopher Guest (“Nigel Tufnel,” lead guitar), Michael McKean (“David St. Hubbins,” guitar and vocals) and Harry Shearer (“Derek Smalls,” bass), it was a sketch for a 1978 TV show. But the seeds were sown four years earlier, when Guest observed an addled English rock band checking into L.A.’s Chateau Marmont.
“The bass player was talking to the manager,” Guest recalls, slipping into Nigel’s soft-spoken, simpleton British accent. “He said, ’I don’t know where my fucking bass is.’ 'Where did you leave it?' 'At the fucking airport.' 'You left your bass at the airport?' 'Dunno.' This went on for a half an hour, and I thought, here we go.”“Collectively, we were aghast at what was representative of rock & roll on movie screens in those days,” added Shearer. “We said, 'Why can’t anybody get this right?'” A cringe-inducing depiction of a never-was metal bad embarked on a doomed comeback tour. This Is Spinal Tap not only “gets it right” better than any movie ever — Blender had trouble finding a dissenting opinion — it’s nothing less than the Rosetta Stone of all film satire. (“Spinal Tap was the single greatest influence on The Office,” Ricky Gervais has said.) An unlikely accomplishment, considering the “mockumentary” — “That’s a word none of us enjoy,” grumbles Guest — was a commercial flop.
Tap, directed by Rob Reiner, is improvisational virtuosity on an unprecedented scale, and was shot like a real documentary using only a brief treatment as a road map (a method Guest adapted for Waiting for
Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind). And while the band’s genre-spanning discography traffics in ham-fisted clichés, the characters themselves are nuanced and curiously sympathetic. Viewers who wouldn’t know Deep Purple from Deep Forest can still connect with David and Nigel, harmlessly petulant childhood pals whose deteriorating relationship drives the story, and whose climactic reconciliation during a particularly touching rendition of “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” packs more wallop than a thousand romantic comedies combined. But for anyone with even a passing interest in pop, Spinal Tap is every bit as knowledgeable about rock history and the machinations of the industry as any movie featuring a band that isn’t, you know … fake.Lifelong music geeks, Guest, Shearer and McKean not only wrote the pitch-perfect songs for all of Tap’s incarnations, including the psychedelic “(Listen to the) Flower People” and the dunce-metal “Sex Farm” but also developed an entire intricate backstory for the band, only a fraction of which is evident in the finished product.
“We didn’t know what questions Rob was going to ask us in the interview scenes,” Shearer says. “So we all had to be on the same page. In a 'real' movie — one with written dialogue and a conventional narrative — nobody would do this much work.”
Further inspiration came from the unintentionally comedic pomp of the Led Zep film The Song Remains the Same, while real-life war stories fueled minutiae like the in-studio meltdown between Nigel and David, modeled after an infamous tape of the Troggs arguing. “That was something people who worked in studios knew about,” says McKean, the trio’s resident rememberer of arcane shit. “We needed those details because in order for the comedy to work, we had to believe it ourselves.” Shearer, who hung out with English metal troglodytes Saxon to learn that playing open bass strings allowed for easier fist-pumping, says, “I’m prouder of the stupidity we stumbled into than any of our own inventions.”For all of Spinal Tap’s accolades, the movie’s ability to depress the likes of Steven Tyler and Ozzy Osbourne — both of whom McKean says found the movies uncomfortably true to life — is what gives its creators the most satisfaction. “To bum out a famous rock star,” Shearer marvels, “is the best seal of approval you can get.”
THE BEST ROCK AND ROLL MOVIE
