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Posted on Sat, Sep. 12, 2009 10:15 PM
Plug in to Spinal Tap, the ‘Unwigged’ DVD
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To a person of a certain age, one only needs to hear a couple of lines before surrendering to the laughter that is as irresistible and inevitable as a bulge in a pair of 1980s leather pants.
I couldn’t wait, so as soon as the DVD arrived, I popped it in and fast-forwarded to track 27:
The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin’
That’s what I said
The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand
Or so I have read.
These, of course, are the immortal lyrics to “Big Bottom,” part of the prodigious output of history’s greatest fake rock ’n’ roll band, Spinal Tap. What adds to the fan’s delight, however, is seeing the songs performed, not by Nigel, David and Derek but by the three versatile artists who portrayed them in the movie … and played the instruments … and wrote the songs.
Earlier this year, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer — liberated from stage makeup, big hair and industrial sound gear — embarked on a 29-city tour performing fan favorites from the mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” to mark the film’s 25th anniversary. They also included their tunes from two other treasured movies of that subgenre, the folk-music farce “A Mighty Wind” (when, as the Folksmen, they performed such classics as “Blood on the Coal,” billed as the only song in music history to combine a railroad tragedy and a mining tragedy), as well as “Waiting for Guffman” (set in a fictional Missouri town).
Such an undertaking would not have been possible but for the continued enthusiasm of baby boomers’ kids for the sophisticated silliness of Guest, McKean and Shearer. So it’s entirely fitting that “Unwigged & Unplugged,” the concert video just out on DVD, came from the suggestion of a fan after the trio’s Atlanta stop halfway through their tour.
Tom Roche isn’t just any fan, but a supervising editor at Georgia’s video production powerhouse Crawford Communications. I’ve known him since his pioneering work on the Adult Swim series “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” which merged vapid celebrity interviews with 1960s Hanna-Barbera footage into a comically perfect mashup, long before anyone called it that or called Cartoon Network Adult Swim.
In an e-mail, Roche explained that he felt the concert series was an utterly unique experience and that many fans of the “Spinal”/“Mighty” ouevre who didn’t live in one of the tour cities (Kansas City, for example) would have no idea what they were missing.
“It shouldn’t be a surprise how well they play, but for most fans it’s a revelation,” Roche said. “They are spoofing heavy metal as always, and now they spoof the ‘unplugged’ concept at the same time. So all the wonderfully abysmal Spinal Tap lyrics, usually difficult to discern, are left naked in the cornfield.”
Roche’s enthusiasm might have been tempered had he known that the early stops on the “Unwigged” tour were beset by technical glitches.
“I had terrible sound problems — it was basically a struggle just to do it,” Shearer told me. By the time the show rolled into Atlanta, “we were just into the phase of enjoying it, because we’d solved our sound problems, and somebody comes and says, ‘Boy, this is good enough that I’d like to see it on DVD.’ So we started talking about it.”
Posted on Sat, Sep. 12, 2009 10:15 PM
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