Spinal Tap

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Fact Sheet

Musical genre:

Spinal Tap is a semi-fictitious heavy metal rock band, from the 1984 Rob Reiner film, This Is Spinal Tap. The film was a make-believe documentary (a "rockumentary", as Reiner coined it) that satirized the excesses of bands like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, among others. The band exists both as a fictitious entity, whose members are the characters portrayed by the actors, and also as a real entity, in that the actors have performed and released recordings as a band under the name.

The band's name is officially spelled with an diaeresis (two dots) over the letter 'n' to satirize the use of "heavy metal umlauts" in the names of other heavy metal bands such as Motörhead. Obscurely, this is a construction that only exists in the minor Jacaltec language of Guatemala.

The band was originally created by actors and comedians Michael McKean (as David St. Hubbins), Christopher Guest (as Nigel Tufnel) and Harry Shearer (as Derek Smalls) for a 1978 ABC comedy special, The TV Show. Soon after, the three comedians teamed up with Reiner to turn the idea into a full-length film. Much of the film was ad-libbed, and several dozen hours of footage were shot before Reiner edited it down to the released film. A 4.5 hour bootleg version of the film exists and has been traded around between fans and collectors for years. A ten hour version is also rumored. The most recent DVD editions of the film include one hour of deleted footage as an extra feature.

A memorable segment of the film occurs when a miniature replica of Stonehenge is lowered onto the stage behind the band and two dwarves come on stage to dance around it. The band members were expecting a full sized 18-foot replica, but were instead presented with an 18-inch model due to an error on the napkin it was designed on.

The film starred—in addition to the three members of Spinal Tap and Reiner, who appeared as the maker of the documentary—Paul Shaffer, Fred Willard, Fran Drescher, Bruno Kirby, Howard Hesseman, and Ed Begley Jr.. Dana Carvey, Anjelica Huston, and Billy Crystal also had small roles in the film.

Spinal Tap reunited in 1992 for an album of new material, partly produced by T-Bone Burnett, and a concert tour.

They later made a guest appearance on The Simpsons, a television show in which Harry Shearer is also one of the principal voiceover actors. In this animated appearance the band continued their disastrous track record, as a balloon "dark lord" prop failed to inflate properly over the heads of the crowd, and one of the band members was blinded by the laser light show.

In 2000 a new song, "Back from the Dead" was made available for download from the official Spinal Tap website (http://www.spinaltap.com/home.html).

The 2000 "Special Edition" release of This Is Spinal Tap on DVD is noteworthy for its innovative commentary track, which features the three principal band members commenting on the film entirely in their fictional alter-egos, and often disapproving of how the film presents them.

In 2002 the United States Library of Congress deemed the original film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Film critic Roger Ebert selected This is Spinal Tap as a Great Movie alongside Casablanca, Taxi Driver andothers.

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