New book about 'This Is Spinal Tap' really rocks

A baffled rock band meanders the labyrinthian corridors of a Cleveland concert venue, searching in vain for the stage. A miniature model of Stonehenge is stomped into near oblivion by mincing dwarfs, as the lead singer looks on with astonishment. A drummer spontaneously combusts in a flash of light, leaving only a green globule on the seat behind his kit.

These are the images sewn into the living rock of our collective consciousness by “This Is Spinal Tap,” the story of a fake and vigorously ludicrous group that has proved far more beloved and influential than anyone would have expected following the film’s fraught initial release in 1984. All of this and more — a lot more — is covered in “A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever,” a new history of the band written by Rob Reiner and the actors who play Spinal Tap, with the help of culture journalist David Kamp. Turn the book over and you see the cover of a second volume, “Smell the Book,” about 60 additional pages of (fictional) oral history about one of England’s loudest bands.

These days, “This Is Spinal Tap” is generally regarded as one of the funniest and most enduring comedies ever made: a laugh-a-minute quote machine whose faux-verité style popularized the mockumentary form. Tap’s primary members were three of the great improv players in history: Michael McKean as the moony, New Age-adjacent singer-guitarist David St. Hubbins; Christopher Guest as the sweet-natured but remarkably thick lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel; and Harry Shearer as the walrus-mustachioed, pipe-smoking, self-styled philosopher-bassist Derek Smalls.

Writing in a deft and wry tone, Reiner explains the prehistory of the movie, with initial Tap appearances occurring as far back as 1979, when the band performed a song called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare” on English TV. “This Is Spinal Tap” bore the fruits of that long gestation period, the principal players having marinated in the characters long enough that their outward cartoonishness ultimately yielded surprising dimension. It didn’t hurt that the music — written and performed by the deliriously talented McKean, Guest and Shearer, with some assistance from Reiner — is objectively perfect.

All of it taken together served as a kind of potted history of the rock era, as well as a withering critique of many peccadilloes of the baby boom generation: limitless vanity, an addiction to cultural relevance and an almost complete absence of self-awareness. Now, when “This Is Spinal Tap” has been enshrined in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant,” and the phrase “these go to eleven” has its own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, all of this may have seemed inevitable. Reiner’s book makes abundantly clear that the far more likely outcome would have been for “This Is Spinal Tap” to sink without a trace — and for a time, it seemed like it might.

An early rough cut of the movie ran to four hours, requiring a ruthless approach to editing that got it all the way down to a lean 83 minutes. (One subplot that was lost in the process, Reiner writes, involved a punk band called the Dose that played as openers on the tour, its singer played by Cherie Currie of the very real, groundbreaking all-woman group the Runaways.) The executives at Embassy did not understand the picture at all and functionally refused to market it with any enthusiasm. Test screenings in Dallas and Seattle were catastrophic. Audiences struggled to follow the premise — many thought they were watching an actual documentary about a mediocre heavy metal band in clear decline and wondered why in the world anyone would have made it.

Slowly, the film found its footing. Critics loved it and, following raves in The New York Times and Newsweek, its audience began to grow. In a classic instance of lucky timing, the movie coincided almost perfectly with the new and burgeoning home video market, where it became a perennial favorite. By the early ’90s, life imitating art, the group had become famous. They played sold-out concert tours and released a brisk-selling new album, “Break Like the Wind.” At a Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in 1992, the Tap played a “homecoming” show in front of 72,000 adoring fans.

All these decades later, Reiner still seems startled by the success of the movie and deeply attuned to its inherent ironies. This month saw the release of a sequel, “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues,” making it especially timely to reflect on the original film’s immutable power.