It’s time to crank the volume to eleven with the funniest band that ever freaked out the entire rock industry with This Is Spinal Tap, an early mockumentary about One of England’s Loudest Bands on a promotional tour through America in an attempt to rebuild its waning popularity and promote the release of its newest album “Smell the Glove”.

Surprisingly Deep

As it turns out, there is a lot of history behind Spinal Tap–they began as a “flower power” band, got in on a lot of trends just as they were on their way out, went through a series of drummers who died under mysterious and frankly outlandish circumstances and plenty else. Trying to distill the history of Spinal Tap into this space is an exercise in futility.

Then The Industry Got Hold Of It

It’s easy to mistake This Is Spinal Tap for a fluff piece or an overwrought comedy, but you’ve been warned–that’s not a mistake to make. The Library of Congress, for example, selected This Is Spinal Tap for preservation, describing it as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Several bands believed that This Is Spinal Tap was actually about them, including Dokken and even Aerosmith. Steven Tyler was downright enraged by it–it hit so close to home that he couldn’t see humor in it. Singer Tom Waits went so far as to say “everything in that movie had happened to me.”. Meanwhile, hosts of other bands from Metallica to R.E.M began describing their own experiences and incidents in terms of Spinal Tap.

It even became an insult to pretentious bands to call them “funnier than Spinal Tap”.

Which, Frankly, Makes Me See Why The Library of Congress Got Hold Of It.

When that many groups and that many musicians can draw such ready and easy parallels between a work of outright fiction and their own lives, you know you’ve hit on something special here. What’s even more amazing is that the cult popularity of This Is Spinal Tap continues to this day, despite being twenty-three years old. Makes me wonder what will happen on the Tap’s silver anniversary….

Time to turn the volume clear past twelve, folks, and play some This Is Spinal Tap movie trivia on Kwanzoo!

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