“The review you had on Shark Sandwich, which was merely a two word review, just said ‘Shit Sandwich.’”
“Where’d they print that? That’s not real. They can’t print that!”
No, it’s not as bad as Shark Sandwich. Let’s accentuate the positive here. When you’re a die-hard fan of a band, you tend to look at the lesser albums with a sort of bigger-picture viewpoint, and come to love the valleys as well as the peaks. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer had all been kicking around for a while, writing sketch comedy and performing in National Lampoon stage shows and bursting through Laverne and Shirley’s apartment door, before they created a fictional metal group still living the sex, drugs, and rock & roll dream. They were known by many names: the Originals, the New Originals, the Thamesmen. You know them as Spinal Tap. Along with director Rob Reiner, who joined in by playing documentarian — or, if you will, “rockumentarian” — Marty DiBergi, the quartet created This Is Spinal Tap, a fake vérité portrait of a fake band that became a real band, and gave birth to both a genre and a genuine classic.
Reiner would direct dozens of other movies, from The Princess Bride to Misery to A Few Good Men. Guest became a filmmaker in his own right, popularizing the mockumentary format they had pioneered. McKean has graced any number of projects over the years; his turn on Better Call Saul is canon-worthy. Harry Shearer is still doing his radio show, Le Show, and continues to do voice work for an animated series whose name escapes us. The three musicians toured as Tap occasionally over the years, and collaborated on a number of similarly deadpan projects. None of their other work, arguably, has had the seismic impact or inspires the same insane quotability as This Is Spinal Tap. (OK, well, maybe The Simpsons.) It’s their Live at Budokan, their Pet Sounds, their Dark Side of the Moon.
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is the sequel that many of us have waited for, if not exactly the sequel we wanted. It’s amusing rather than hilarious, gently ribbing rather than gutbusting. A colleague compared this late-act follow-up to a modest dessert rather than a meal; we’d say it’s closer to an after-dinner mint served with the check. What made the original work so beautifully, besides the sheer genius of all four major participants and a supporting cast that completely got the joke, was the way they understood the excess and ridiculousness of what rock had become by the mid-1980s. They had enough knowledge and, more important, affection for it to mock it. Here, there’s nothing really left except the affection. The laughs do not go to 11. They stop somewhere around the Roman numeral II.
And yet! Much like the legacy acts that reunite, sometimes for the paycheck and sometimes simply for old times’ sake, the gents are happy to trot out the hits one more time. Occasionally, a fleet-fingered solo emerges that reminds you why you fell in love with them originally. Hearing that the boys are reuniting for one final show due to a longstanding contractual issue, Marty DiBergi decides to pick up where he left off 41 years ago. A lot has happened since then. The Tap members have not spoken to one another, much less played together, in 15 years. Everyone’s moved on. Nigel now runs a cheese shop. Derek has opened up the New Museum of Glue, a museum devoted to, um, glue. David has kept himself busy by playing in a mariachi band in Morro Bay, California, composing “please hold” music for companies, and writing a memoir. The latter, he tells DiBergi, was motivated by his reading of “Bruce’s book, I Am Springsteen, Going on Sprevensteen.” (That’s one of the funnier lines.)
So, though the bad blood remains, they decide to honor the wishes of Hope Faith (Kerry Godliman), daughter of their late manager Ian Faith, and avoid a lawsuit. They convene in a house in New Orleans — not called the Rising Sun, for the record — and begin rehearsing. A number of famous drummers turn down the chance to play with Tap, what with the high mortality rate and all. Thankfully, a young woman named Didi (Valerie Franco), who’s a monster on the skins, takes the gig. DiBergi catches up with “the hostess with the mostess” Bobbi Fleckman (Fran Drescher) and their A&R guy Artie Fufkin (Paul Schaffer). Paul McCartney drops by to play “Cups and Cakes” with them. So does Elton John, who takes over the vocal duties on “Stonehenge.” Everyone loves it, except for the show’s producer Simon Howler (The Thick of It‘s Chris Addison). He thinks Sir Elton is adding a bit too much piano.
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Rock is supposedly no country for old men, but no one seems to have told these guys. There are a lot of jokes about Tap not exactly being in their prime, and you wonder if the fictional bitching about creaky joints and aching bones doesn’t reflect the cast’s own feelings about being up there in years. When the concert finally does happen, fences are mended, old wounds are healed, and … let’s just say that the band’s unlucky streak regarding live performances has not gone away. Before things go awry, however, you see the sold-out crowd basking in the glow of these living legends. Older fans get their nostalgia fix. Younger fans who missed them the first time around finally get a chance to hear “Big Bottom” in all of its low-end glory. The same applies to the audiences offscreen as well.
From Rolling Stone US
