My date with Derek: This Is Spinal Tap turns 30, mock-rock fans still love to Smell the Glove

I once had sex with Derek Smalls, fictional bass player in the parody metal band Spinal Tap (played in the mockumentary by Harry Shearer).  Okay, that’s a misleading statement.  In fact, I fucked a facsimile of gentle Derek.  

Inside that flare-legged jumpsuit with a blatantly stuffed package, the slim-hipped creature I met & made love to was actually a young woman in a gender-bending costume.  Whatever.  This faux Derek was hot - albeit androgynously so.  I didn’t know whether to kiss him/her on the cheek or merely shake hands.  

Heterosexual by nature, I found the turn-on rather awkward.  Yet I’m man enough to admit that I grew an instant - uh - crush on him/her.  This led to satisfying coitus by night’s end.  That doesn’t make me a rock ‘n’ roll groupie, does it?  I’d hate to embody that cliché.  Let me explain by setting the scene.  

Voice-over by activist-actor Peter Coyote:  It was the fall of 2001.  The nation was at war again, in remote Afghanistan this time.  Even stateside civilians lived like there might be no tomorrow.  With W & his evil sidekick Dick in the White House, things got very weird for the next seven years.

So in late 2001, on a bracing Friday evening not long after my 41st birthday, I was attending a “fancy dress” (British for costume) party on the eastside of Madison, Wisconsin (USA).  It had a perennially hip humorous theme:  This Is Spinal Tap.  I had no idea that I was about to experience a reverse-Lola moment.  In the living room a big TV played the Show of Honor on DVD.  The party’s main action, however, was in the basement.  A lousy garage band played far too loudly.  But with a keg of beer flowing freely, nobody complained.  

I approached a medium-sized person dressed in a Derek Smalls get-up, complete with dark mullet, chinless beard & a messy nest of chest hair.  I struck up a conversation.  The alto-voiced lady-in-drag & I hit it off.  Before long we left to go shoot pool at nearby Mickey’s Tavern.  Only then did she remove the fake fur, revealing a friendly babe with a fantastic sense of fun.  Later that night I learned that she was blonde underneath the wig (& elsewhere). 

You know the movie, don’t you?  If not, here it is in a nutshell:  A mostly improvised 82-minute satire with several deserving targets, This Is Spinal Tap bombed at the box office upon release in 1984 - exactly 30 years ago Friday (August 1st).  A lot of people didn’t get the extended joke:  aging British rock band releases new album (Smell the Glove) & arranges a US comeback tour that turns out to be ridiculously doomed.  

It features a host of gifted comic actors doing cameo appearances.  Bruno Kirby plays an embittered limo driver, while  Howard Hesseman is a nasty rival band manager.  Billy Crystal & Dana Carvey play catering-company mime/waiters in New York.  Fran Drescher vamps as high-maintenance record-company PR flack Bobbie Flekman & David Letterman’s musical sidekick, Canadian import Paul Shaffer, says “kick my ass” as Polymer Records incompetent promoter Artie Fufkin.

The feature film was embraced by a growing legion of fans upon its VHS videotape reboot.  But the stars who created it got ripped off & supposedly never made any money from their red-headed stepchild’s subsequent success.  Nevertheless, the movie started a buzz - it had legs that still keep it moving after 30 years.  That’s an eternity, measured in the rapidly passing time of disposable pop culture.

Sample dialog:  Christopher Guest, as boyish bullshit-artist/guitarist Nigel Tufnel, telling fan & film documentarian Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner):  I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, and it's sort of in between those, really.  It's like a Mach piece, really.  It's sort of -

DiBergi: What do you call this?

Tufnel: Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump." 

Or dig the famous bit where Nigel explains to Marty that the volume knobs on his amplifiers go all the way to eleven.  But they’re no louder than standard amps, which only go up to ten.  Marty’s puzzled.  Why not just make the amps louder? he asks.  “But these go to eleven,” Nigel whines, after a long pause.  He’s a spoiled 30-something idiot, proud of his noisy toys.  

Less invention was required to author & improvise those scenes than you might think.  Reiner, Guest & company had done their research. In a recent conversation with Greg Kot & Jim DeRogatis of WBEZ-FM Chicago public radio’s outstanding program Sound Opinions, co-writer & then first-time director Reiner said that the scene where the bumbling Spinal Tap members get lost en route from the dressing room to the stage was based on a real incident involving Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, who reportedly got so stoned in the green room that they couldn’t manage to locate the stage entrance.

Reiner admitted that he based his enthusiastic documentary film-maker, Marty DiBergi, on Martin Scorsese.  Scorsese’s concert film about The Band, The Last Waltz (1978), inspired some of the looniness captured on celluloid forever by Reiner.  Amateur - yet accomplished - musicians Guest, Shearer & Michael McKean (as David St. Hubbins) played themselves into pop-culture immortality.  Most enlightened rock & film critics (Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert gave it two hearty thumbs up) agree:  This Is Spinal Tap is not only one of the best insider movies about the business of rock ‘n’ roll & its many greedy players, it’s also one of the best comedies ever issued by a Hollywood studio.

Saturday Night Live alumni Shearer & Guest, along with McKean & an ensemble of talented improv actors that includes Fred Willard (who appears in Spinal Tap as a clueless US Air Force colonel), Parker Posey, Jane Lynch, Catherine O’Hara & Eugene Levy, went on to make several more satires.  They deftly skewered the Sixties folk-music generation in A Mighty Wind (2003).  They lambasted purebred-dog competitions (Best in Show, 2000) & community theatre (Waiting for Guffman, 1997).   They even used their sharp comic wits against their own kind, sending up vain Hollywood actors in For Your Consideration (2006).

You may be wondering, whatever became of my faux Derek?  We dated a few times, but we didn’t deploy disguises or engage in role-playing.  We had some good clean (sometimes naked) fun.  But she lost interest faster than I did, for a change.  Derek’s real name was Sara & she was a gem, but we lived 75 miles apart.  At least I have a good memory tied to that great movie, in that mad era in American history.  

This Is Spinal Tap may be 30 years old, but it still smells fresh as a new glove to its many admirers around the world.  As David St. Hubbins philosophically put it, “It’s such a fine line between stupid & clever.”  Rock on, Tap!  Milwaukee’s Shank Hall awaits your next tour.

NOTE:  Here's a link to the excellent Sound Opinions podcast featuring the Rob Reiner interview about Spinal Tap:  http://www.soundopinions.org/show/451/#robreiner

[© 2014 by J.C. Mrázek]

Neko Case on Sound Opinions & other Chicago radio gems (past & present)

One of the few advantages of living in the cultural wasteland of post-industrial Racine (Wisconsin, USA) is that it lies on the northern edge of receptivity for Chicago FM radio.  On a recent Saturday morning I got to hear a special broadcast of WBEZ's syndicated Sound Opinions program, featuring a frank & funny interview plus acoustic mini-concert with Neko Case, who's currently on tour with her own backing band (including vocalist Kelly Hogan, a Wisconsinite).  It was recorded in January at The Hideout, the Chicago alt-country/indie-rock club where Neko tended bar in the early 2000s.  

Still living on her Vermont farm, Neko released her sixth solo album this autumn, featuring her first batch of truly confessional songs.  I have attached a link to the podcast below for those of you who can only access this weekly program about popular music, hosted by eminent Chicago rock critics Greg Kot & Jim DeRogatis, via the World Wide Web.  Be sure to catch the desert island jukebox feature, a Harry Nilsson song produced by John Lennon circa 1976.  And stick around for the closing voicemail messages from listeners around the USA, one of my favorite parts of this excellent syndicated show.   

WBEZ (91.5 FM), of course, is the same public radio station that gave us Ira Glass's brilliant NPR storytelling program This American Life.  You can occasionally hear the always charming & insightful Michael Phillips (a Racine native & fellow alumnus of St. Cat's Class of '78), chief film critic for the Chicago Tribune, on WBEZ's Filmspotting program.  

Years before I discovered public radio (in Madison, 1980), I enjoyed listening to legendary Chicago disc jockeys Larry Lujack & John "Records" Landecker on WLS, a 50,000-watt monster audible at 890 AM across much of North America in those days.  Their sardonic comments on Top 40 music, its shrinking AM audience & current events (e.g. Mayor Jane Byrne's ill-advised 1979 stay in the Cabrini Green housing project) made all those obnoxious commercial-radio ads bearable.  I still remember fondly the sly leer in Landecker's voice when, introducing a song by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, he recited its sophomoric double-entendre lyric:  "When you're in love with a beautiful woman, it's hard..."  

Around 1975, on the soothing blue dial of my wood-encased Marantz stereo receiver, I discovered Chicago's WFMT (98.7 FM).  That early stereo station, mainly a staid classical & jazz outlet, blessed Chicagoland for decades with author/raconteur Studs Terkel's incomparable daily talk show.  Studs interviewed all manner of artists, musicians, intellectuals & social rebels, from Bob Dylan (c. 1963 - "No, it's not an atomic rain.  It's a hard rain.") to Mahalia Jackson to Gloria Steinem.  The program always closed with Studs's exuberant nod to Woody Guthrie:  "Take it easy, but take it!"  WFMT also loosened up late on Saturdays when it broadcast a mix of folk music and hip humor called The Midnight Special, where I first heard the quirky comic dialogues of Mike Nichols & Elaine May as well as Arlo Guthrie's 1967 satirical counter-cultural masterpiece of a song, "Alice's Restaurant Massacree."  

Sometime in the 1990s I grew to love WXRT (93.1 FM), "Chicago's finest rock" - and one of the few commercial radio stations in the country that still plays blues records from time to time.  It happened to be on 'XRT that I first heard Neko Case's catchy 2009 singles "This Tornado Loves You" & "People Gotta Lotta Nerve," a fierce animal-rights themed vengeance ballad ("You know they call them killer whales / still you're surprised...").  

And so, finally, I come full circle back to Ms. Case, who began her music career as an art student in Vancouver (BC, Canada), a woman brave & sensible enough to discuss her mood funks & love troubles on global radio without sounding self-indulgent.  I'm grateful to her & to the best of Chicago radio.  Although I only lived in the Windy City for 2 months (in the year 2000, in a friend's high-rise condo on Lake Shore Drive, with a view of Wrigley Field a mile to the west), it holds a special place in my memory thanks to some of its gifted broadcasters.

Well, that's enough nostalgia for now.  Good radio will never die because radio is the most intimate medium humans have yet devised.  The Internet, that insatiable digital behemoth gobbling up most analog media, might co-opt it, but it can't kill radio broadcasting entirely. 

Picture the World Wide Web as a raging robot Godzilla:  having arisen from the contaminated Pacific waves, he approaches Fukushima wielding a bullet-train car in one paw while stomping on an ancient Buddhist temple.  Suddenly he hears an abandoned radio playing Sinead O'Connor's eerie soprano rendition of "Nothing Compares 2 U."  The techno-lizard pauses to listen.  A silicon tear wells up & drops.  The beast retreats into the ocean.  Sublime radio strikes again!

LINK:  http://www.soundopinions.org/