No page in history, baby - that I don't need,
I just want to make some eardrums bleed!
- Spinal Tap, "Heavy Duty"
There's such a fine line between stupid and . . . clever. And David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel - the creative duo who, in the words of bassist Derek Smalls, "are both like, uh, like poets, like Shelley or Byron, or people like that" - have always straddled that Rubicon with a sensibility of startlingly moronic genius.
St. Hubbins, Tufnel and Smalls, of course, are - along with a new drummer soon to spontaneously combust, like many others before - Spinal Tap, the British Invasion dinosaurs played by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer in Rob Reiner's 1984 cult classic This Is Spinal Tap (R, ****), which is back on the big screen, at United Artists Riverview.
The "if you will, rockumentary," as faux director Marty DiBergi (Reiner) refers to the movie that came in 29th in the American Film Institute's ranking of the 100 best celluloid comedies, also will be released Tuesday on DVD ($26.98).
The bewigged boys in the band may have pretended to not be in it for posterity's sake - focusing instead on the pursuit of "Big Bottom" and Marshall amps that go all the way to 11 - but the mythical band's page in history is secure. "We may die, but we won't go away," McKean/St. Hubbins says in character on VH1's new special Where Are They Now? Spinal Tap, which will be shown at 5:30 p.m. today and 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Spinal Tap endures because its Murphy's Law satire of rock-and-roll life is so hilariously dead on.
Any musician on a tour where everything that can go wrong does go wrong can relate to a universe that operates on Tap-ian principles: An 18-inch Stonehenge stage prop is in danger of being crushed by dancing dwarves. Nobody shows up to a record-store signing despite the efforts of overeager promo guy Artie Pufkin (Paul Shaffer), and Tufnel boldly makes the effort to "rise above" the "complete catastrophe" of backstage cold cuts accompanied by miniature slices of bread.
Reiner's feature debut arrived at a critical juncture in rock history, as the countercultural stars of the '60s aged into easily lampoonable classic rockers, and MTV helped usher in an age of self-conscious irony.
Just as Spinal Tap shrewdly skewered all that came before it - the scene where the band gets lost backstage in Philadelphia is a subtle send-up of a similar moment in the Bob Dylan documentary Don't Look Back - rock bands that go before the camera must be careful that their backstage life doesn't appear too Tap-ish.
"We exist in the post-Spinal Tap era," Phish keyboardist Page McConnell told Entertainment Weekly in regard to the jam band's new concert flick, Bittersweet Motel, due out Friday. "Nobody wants to look like Tap on-screen."
And as the movie's cult status grew, it entered the pop-cultural language. As critics and fans debate whether Whitesnake or Iron Maiden or Cinderella is "the real Spinal Tap," embarrassingly awful, unironic pop-music moments - say, Garth Brooks dressing up as Chris Gaines - run the risk of being labeled, like, totally Spinal Tap.
One of the kicks of going back to Spinal Tap is spotting all the later-to-be-luminaries in the supporting cast. As Karl French's encyclopedic This Is Spinal Tap: The Official Companion (Bloomsbury) details, Dana Carvey and Billy Crystal play mime waiters, Anjelica Huston is the set designer, Fran Drescher is label rep Bobbi Flekman, and Patrick Macnee plays record mogul Sir Denis Eton-Hogg.
In the spirit of postmodern overkill, the DVD adds 105 minutes to the movie's 83-minute length. Of all the outtakes included from the film, whose dialogue was almost entirely improvised, most were wisely left on the cutting-room floor. The two exceptions are a scene in which the band signs the all-black Smell the Glove cover with a black marker, and one in which limo driver Bruno Kirby strips down to his skivvies to sing "All the Way."
There's all sorts of stuff, though, that Tapheads will be unable to live without: One is an appearance on the Joe Franklin show in which the New York TV host doesn't seem to know the band isn't real. Four videos are included - "Bitch School," from the 1991 reunion album Break Like the Wind, among them.
Just to show that Tap is serious about not going away, the band played a Los Angeles gig this week with its new drummer, Sam Smales, described as a 35-year-old Ohio toilet-paper salesman. And naturally, there's Spinal Tap activity on the Internet. A new so-bad-it's-good pretentious headbanger, "Back From the Dead," can be downloaded for free from the band's Web site, http://www.tapster.com
All this commercial Tapioca comes, naturally, on the monumental occasion of the film's 16th anniversary. Does that make David, Nigel and Derek stupid? Yeah, stupid like a fox.
Dan DeLuca's e-mail address is ddeluca@phillynews.com
