Three musicians sit in a garden, faces solemn because they are being filmed and are explaining how their drummers keep mysteriously dying. One drummer expired in “a bizarre gardening accident,” and that’s all that is said.
Of the subsequent drummer, as Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) says, with some delicacy, “The official explanation was, he choked on vomit.”
Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) adds, “It was actually someone else’s vomit.”
The three talk over each other, with Derek saying, “Well, they can’t prove whose vomit it was.”
David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) puts in that Scotland Yard couldn’t check for prints, and Nigel declares, “You can’t really dust for vomit.”
Please. Who thinks of that? The crew of “This Is Spinal Tap,” the 1984 spoof “rockumentary” that was Rob Reiner’s directorial debut, must have had fun. Beloved by some but at first no commercial success, the endlessly comedic film eventually washed into wider consciousness, popularizing phrases such as “These go to 11” (about amplifier volume, but applicable otherwise).
This is your chance for a repeat or first-time viewing of a cult classic. “This Is Spinal Tap” is coming to the Crystal Theatre on May 28, as a benefit for KDNK.
Megan Passmore, station director, said via email, “We brainstormed a bunch of [film] ideas, and this one was a crowd favorite among staff and the events committee.”
Other KDNK showings, usually music-related, have been “The Commitments,” “Twenty Feet from Stardom” and “Pirate Radio.”
The community radio station, in its second year of operation without federal funding, has budgeted to bring in $674,800 in revenues (including from grants, foundation income, donations and memberships) this year, with events accounting for $49,800. Offsite happenings include the Labor of Love auction, bingo, a Dandelion Day beer garden, and, at Mountain Fair, a shift at the Cantina tent, where Carbondale Arts shares weekend tips with local nonprofits. Passmore said KDNK is on pace: “I’m grateful to the community.”
My connection to “Spinal Tap” stretches back to even before it opened. In graduate school in New York, I took a course from Judith Crist, a well-known and acerbic critic of the time (but when she loved movies, she really loved them), who got our class into an advance screening. With a dawning realization that the film was a parody, my student friends and I felt as if we had discovered it. (Some early viewers thought it was real.)
Similarly, my friend Virginia Vitzthum, who saw it in Maryland with friends from her college radio station, said, “We couldn’t believe this movie existed. It felt like it was made for us.”
“This Is Spinal Tap” mocks the vanities and excesses of rock bands, specifically (purportedly) the British metal group Spinal Tap, through ups and downs and a calamitous tour in America. The film also takes on the genre of adulatory rock documentaries: Reiner appears throughout as a filmmaker, Martin Di Bergi, loosely based on Martin Scorsese, who put himself into “The Last Waltz” (1978).
When Scorsese first saw “Spinal Tap,” Reiner said in a 2022 British Film Institute interview, “he was a little upset I was making fun of him, but now, over the years … he’s come to love it.”
Having guessed the film was much ad-libbed, I’ve found it was entirely so.
“There was no script and so it was all improvised … we had an outline with a very loose arc to the whole thing,” Reiner said in a filmed Emmy TV Legends interview in 2011. Christopher Guest and Michael McKean originated the rock-star characters in 1978, in a three-minute scene on a satirical television show produced by Reiner. They built on the characters (including at parties) for years.
Vitzthum, who went on to become a critic for salon.com, said “I’ve seen ‘Spinal Tap’ at least 10 times, and new jokes are always revealed.”
Chris Kalous of Carbondale named his hugely (I almost said enormously) popular climbing podcast The Enormocast after a ‘Spinal Tap’ joke, when the band members hear that rival rockers are playing the sold-out “Enormodome.” For some time Kalous referred to his and his wife, Steph Bergner’s, infant son as the Enormobaby, although these days young Miles is probably not called the Enormothirdgrader.
And oh, the cameo goldmine. Billy Crystal and Dana Carvey are mimes; Anjelica Huston designs an imitation Stonehenge; and Paul Shaffer, Fran Drescher and Patrick Macnee appear.
Today my nostalgia is suffused with sorrow, following Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner’s, violent and heartbreaking deaths. Rob’s other films include “Stand by Me” (1986), “The Princess Bride” (1987), “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), “Misery” (1990), and “A Few Good Men” (1992), but I immediately mourned him for “This Is Spinal Tap.”“I also thought of ‘Spinal Tap’ first when I heard the horrifying, sad news,” Vitzthum said. “It was my Rob Reiner movie.”