Unwigged and Unplugged

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 ’60s 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 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.”

And here is where three things made the difference.

First, these veteran comedians are first-class nitpickers. They spent six weeks rehearsing the songs, the banter and other elements of the two-hour-15-minute concert.

“Part of it was not just learning the songs but learning how we would play the songs, as opposed to the characters,” Shearer said. Take, for instance, “Big Bottom”, and its gluteus maximus of rhythm.

When Tap reunited to perform the song last year at a benefit concert in London’s Wembley Stadium, Shearer was backed by no fewer than 18 fellow bass guitar players. Obviously, nothing like that sound was possible on a three-man stage show. (They are backed for much of the concert by collaborator CJ Vanston on keyboards. Also, McKean’s wife, Annette O’Toole, and Shearer’s wife, Judith Owen, contribute vocals.)

Shearer solved this problem by going to a genre he loves rather than spoofs.

“One day we were rehearsing and I said, ‘Guys, what about this?’ — and I played, haltingly at the time, this sort of jazzy approach to the ‘Big Bottom’ riff, and Michael and Chris started snapping their fingers and doing a kind of scatty approach to singing it,” Shearer said. “We looked at each other at the end and said, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s us.'”

Once the video was a go, Guest, McKean and Shearer worked on polishing their act just as it would be filmed and were ready to record by the tour’s final stop in Milwaukee. Also working in the DVD’s favor was Shearer’s and Roche’s history with director Jim Gabour, who had produced concert videos for Norah Jones and others. Plus, Roche worked for Crawford. Getting a high-definition truck and first-rate personnel to Milwaukee was doable on short notice, and everyone was motivated to turn the video around quickly.

Finally, there’s an anti-corporate, microbrew quality to the tour that is reflected in the DVD. No teaser trailer you’re forced to watch. No slick packaging. No pointless behind-the-scenes extras. And no interference from suits. The result is a solid, straightforward replica of what thousands of ticketholders enjoyed. Roche, who edited the final product, swears that just two cuts, totaling less than 10 seconds, were made to the video.

Really, the only problem came from the Lego lawyers. During the concerts, the trio entertained the audience by showing two fan-made music videos of Tap songs that they’d found on YouTube. But the good people who make the world’s most popular premolded toy construction blocks put the kibosh on including a fan video to “Tonight I’m Going to Rock You Tonight”, using all Lego characters, on the DVD.

“We are a trademarked brand, and we really have to control the use of our brand,” a spokesman for the company told the New York Times. (Another YouTube video was substituted, one not nearly as good.)

“You look at some of those other Lego videos on YouTube,” Shearer said, “like ‘Lego Weapon Store’, ‘Lego Beer Bust’, ‘Lego Thriller’ — starring that noted friend of children, Michael Jackson — and you think, ‘Well, that’s all good for the brand.’ As a copyright holder, Lego could have all of those taken off YouTube with one letter.”

Shearer was especially appalled by the letters from Lego’s lawyer — “a woman who clearly has had a bad time sometime in her life” — citing chapter and verse the offending lyrics. (Ironically, the Unwigged video features a hilarious live reading of the 1986 NBC memo that listed what portions of This Is Spinal Tap had to be excised before it could air on the network — at 11:30PM on a Saturday.)

“I mean, it was just astonishing, this woman, and all I can say is I hope that therapy is available on the Lego campus for their employees,” Shearer said. “But this was really shocking. The idea that a Spinal Tap song endorses anything is so insane as to defy understanding.”