Back in the 1970s, British musicians frequented American hotels. And one day in 1974, Christopher Guest, a young comedic actor and writer, happened upon a U.K. ensemble checking into the Chateau Marmont.
“Where’s your bass?” the manager asked one musician in a Cockney accent.
“Wot?”
“I said, ‘Where’s your bass?'”
“Wot?”
The conversation went several more rounds before the manager divined that the dimwitted bassist had left his bass at the airport. And at that moment, perhaps, the legend of Spinal Tap was born.
This Is Spinal Tap, the film, hit theaters in 1984 and defined the modern “mockumentary,” a genre that now includes such television classics as Parks and Recreation, The Office, Arrested Development and several subsequent Christopher Guest films.
Tap also ranks among the most-referenced films in popular culture, up there with the Holy Grail and The Blues Brothers. There is indeed a fine line between stupid and clever.
A Spinal Tap sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, hits theaters in September. A band memoir, A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever, arrives in stores around the same time.
Back in the ’80s, before the internet, Tap fans could only speculate at the real-life inspirations for the many unforgettable scenes and set pieces in the film.
Now, at last, we can reveal the truth. Here are the stories behind some of the finest moments in Spinal Tap.
The Band and the Film
Rob Reiner, Spinal Tap’s director, said he and Harry Shearer first conceived of a film about roadies, the workers who set the stage for a band on tour. Around the same time, Christopher Guest, Shearer, Michael McKean and Reiner worked up a sketch for a television special called The T.V. Show, a sendup of the old Midnight Special rock and roll show. They created British heavy metal alter egos. And they called the band Spinal Tap: “What could be more heavy metal than a painful medical procedure?” Reiner writes. The sketch aired in 1979.
Sometime later, the writers decided to combine the two ideas into a film about a rock band. The movie would be “a satire of rock documentaries,” Reiner writes. “It would be a mashup of The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s film about the Band’s star-studded farewell concert; Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same; the Who documentary The Kids Are Alright; and D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back.”
If you’re looking for references, here are a few: Reiner’s Spinal Tap interviewer, Marty DiBergi, is clearly modeled on Scorsese in Last Waltz. The scene where Tap gets lost backstage recalls a scene in Don’t Look Back where Dylan’s entourage meets the same fate. And, in my mind, the whole “Stonehenge” sequence in Spinal Tap references all the medieval, smoke-and-sorcery pretensions in Song Remains the Same.
Before filming Spinal Tap, Shearer embedded with a real-life British hard rock band, Saxon, on tour. The musicians took in shows by Judas Priest and AC/DC. All three bands would influence Spinal Tap.
The Musicians
Reiner insists Spinal Tap was not based on one band, nor were the musicians modeled on any specific rock stars: They were composites. But the writers acknowledge a few antecedents. David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap’s “preening frontman,” drew visual inspiration from Peter Frampton, the leonine-haired British pop star of the 1970s. Nigel Tufnel, Tap’s guitar hero, had a pageboy haircut that suggested a Yardbirds-era Jeff Beck. Bassist Derek Smalls was the archetypal “quiet one,” his manner based on the Who’s John Entwistle and the Stones’ Bill Wyman, with an S&M stage persona borrowed from Judas Priest.
The Umlaut
The writers added the symbol “as a nod to Motörhead and Blue Öyster Cult,” Reiner writes. “We placed the umlaut over a consonant as a nod to Tap’s stupidity.”
The Mini-Bread Scene
Backstage at a show, an addled Nigel Tufnel loses it over a sandwich platter adorned with miniature bread and full-sized cold cuts: “Everything has to be folded, and then it’s this. And I don’t want this.”
The inspiration: An early-’80s Rolling Stone article, told of Van Halen’s over-the-top contract rider, which forbade brown M&M’s. The screenwriters read it and worked up their own food-platter scene.
The Metal Detector Scene
Passing through airport security, bassist Derek Smalls sets off the metal detector. A guard’s wand howls each time it passes his crotch. Finally, Derek reaches into his pants and pulls out a zucchini – not a cucumber, apparently – wrapped in foil.
The inspiration: Christopher Guest had once watched a “well-known British rocker” walk into a guitar shop in Greenwich Village. “He was wearing leather pants and there was . . . a noticeable bulge in them. A baguette, basically.” The rocker, noticeably addled, proceeded to noodle with a $50,000 guitar. “But when he got up to leave,” Guest recalled, “the bulge in his pants had migrated. It was now down around his ankle.”
The ‘Kick My Ass’ Scene
No one turns up to a Spinal Tap signing in a record store. Artie Fufkin, the Polymer Records publicist (portrayed by Paul Shaffer), prostrates himself before the band, beseeching the boys, “Do me a favor. Just kick my ass.”
The inspiration: In the early 1970s, Harry Shearer was booked to perform at a music conference in Arizona with his comedy troupe, the Credibility Gap. The show was a disaster: No PA, no space for costume changes, and an indifferent, drunken audience. A promo man from Warner Brothers Records apologized profusely, telling the performers, “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you: Kick my ass.”
The Limo Driver Scene
Spinal Tap snubs a Sinatra-obsessed limo driver, who compares the band unfavorably to The Chairman: “I mean, when you’ve loved and lost the way Frank has, then you know what life’s about.”
The inspiration: Rob Reiner and actor Bruno Kirby had written a piece for an early-’80s cable-TV anthology series called Likely Stories. Bruno played Tommy Rispoli, a limo driver with a Sinatra obsession. You can see a bit of the original film in this clip.
The Wireless Guitar Scene
While playing a miserable gig at an air force base, Nigel Tufnel finds that his wireless guitar pickup is broadcasting random military chatter.
The inspiration: In the summer of 1982, Christopher Guest had attended a performance of Shakespeare in Central Park. “The actors had lavalier mics on,” he recalled. “All of a sudden, taxi calls started coming over on them: ‘Pick ‘er up at Fawty-Fifth Street! Take her ovah to Amsterdam!’ The actors didn’t know what to do. They were frozen, just standing there, not sure how to go on.”
“Big Bottom”
The most “enduringly popular Spinal Tap song,” Reiner writes, was his idea. Somewhere, perhaps on a bathroom wall, he had seen the phrase “The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’.” Michael McKean drew further inspiration from the Queen single “Fat Bottomed Girls,” whose sleeve “featured an amply buttocked woman atop a bicycle.”
“Dubly”
Throughout the Spinal Tap story, tension brews between the band and June Chadwick’s Jeanine Pettibone, David St. Hubbins’s ever-present girlfriend. In one scene, she weighs in on the production of the new Tap album and mispronounces “Dolby.” Then, she and David unveil Kiss-style zodiac masks for the band.
The inspiration: Jeanine may look like a refugee from Fleetwood Mac, but she is actually the sterotypical perception of “The Yoko of Spinal Tap,” a connection that Paul McCartney himself seems to have picked up. “We didn’t accept Yoko totally,” he told an interviewer in 1986. “But how many groups do you know who would? It’s a joke, like Spinal Tap.”
Tap and Troggs
Tap completists should also know that the filmed studio argument between Nigel and David pays homage to the Troggs Tapes, an infamous and expletive-laden row among members of the British Invasion band that brought us “Wild Thing.”
Daniel de Visé is a frequent AllMusic contributor and author of King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King and The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic.
