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Spinal Tap to Reunite for Live Earth
Maximum Prophet noted that one of the most influential and loud rock bands in the history of music is coming back together to perform at Live Earth this summer. Yes, that's right
Tap is Back. The article has some good news (a new single is coming) and some bad news... apparently Derek is in rehab for addiction to the Internet. Best wishes to him on his recovery- I'm sure it won't impact the performance... if Spinal Tap is anything, they are a band.
Spinal Tap did not exist before the movie. Due to the popularity of the movie, the actors who portrayed Spinal Tap actually went on tours and released albums. Because the members are actors, they do not remain together touring and recording albums, but they get together from time to time for things like this.
This is Spinal Tap is an utterly hilarious "mockumentary" about a hard rock band in the eighties, brought to you by the same folks as Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind. It's news for nerds because, like everybody else in this world, nerds like Spinal Tap. Why don't you?
Additionally, Tap fans often join in on the joke by reporting on and discussing the band's doings as though it were all real, as the submitter did here.
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The actors learned their instruments and performed their own music. In order to do that they performed as a actual band quite a bit before the making of the movie and continue to do that from time to time.
Spinal Tap did not exist before the movie.
I beg to differ. When I was a wee lad (and allowed to stay up late), I remember watching a special (read: pilot) that Rob Reiner put together called "The TV Show" in the late 1970s (on ABC-TV I think). It was basically skits that parodied TV (much like "Robot Chicken", though horribly dated of course).
The skits included a telethon ("Stop Death During Our Lifetime!"), a commercial for the chemical company Proto-Chem (with CEO Tom Proto-Chem no less), a send-up of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom (the prey of the intrepid crew that week was "the white collar worker"), and.. Spinal Tap.
I was too young to do any drugs, so I know I wasn't hallucinating. Anyone else see this too?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
According to wikipedia, they first appeared as a band on the ABC Comedy Special "The TV Show" back in 1978, long before the movie was released.
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"Environmental concerns of unnecessary cardboard waste from artists and consumers alike created controversy over continued use of longboxes. Musicians like David Byrne would incude a sticker over the packaging of his albums reading ""THIS IS GARBAGE", referring to the excessive material use of the longbox form. The satirical band Spinal Tap's 1992 studio album Break Like the Wind was sold in an "extra-long box" (an 18-inch longbox) -- a deliberate parody of the prevailing longbox packaging controversy, as well as a deliberate phallic metaphor."
(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longbox)
So is it hypocritical for them to be performing at Live Earth? Or is it just hilarious? I'm tending toward the latter.
And the fact of the matter is that they aren't bad musicians at all. Like many in comedy they all had backgrounds in music before Tap. It used to be that some sort of musical ability was a prerequisite for being a comedian. Vaudeville sort of made that a part of being a theatrical comedian. It's not really as wedded to comedy anymore -- I think that Andy Kaufman was the last person to call himself a "song and dance man" -- but it's in the DNA.
Same with animators. Max and Dave Fleischer created a very unique system at their studio where the animators had to know how to read music to time out cartoons. At the very least, they had to know how to read rhythms. The Fleischers had a radically different system than any other studio, and only Tezuka Osamu really copied their methods. However, because Tezuka Osamu copied the Fleischer system, a lot of animation made for domestic consumption in Japan has the seiyuu laying on their voice performances after everything else is done, and x-sheets containing rhythmic notation of some sort or another. The American/Canadian/European system that started at Disney had the soundtrack recording go first and everything else being animated to that "track." When the Japanese did overseas services for studios like Hanna-Barbera in the '60s and '70s they used the "track goes first" system. From what I understand, in modern Japan, whether they animate to the track or not is a personal decision of the production company. Some studios do, some don't.
Anyway what I was getting at is that there are a lot of animators who are also musicians. Some are just people who play music for fun, some are really, really good at it, for example Jim Smith who helped create Ren & Stimpy and whose guitar playing can be heard at the beginning and end of every episode. Being funny and being musical seems to be connected somehow.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Unlike the bands in the subject Spinal Tap wrote their and played their own songs. They are also used in a VW Ad (Nigel does a solo from the top of a Jetta, the ad was most likely directed by the 5th Baron Haden-Guest, who is somehow related to Tufnel. I think they were school mates in Squatney) and GSM by the Themesmen (Tap with Joe 'Stumpy' Pepys on drums) can be heard in a Schwab ad.
I've always preferred: The difference between a geek and a nerd is a nerd knows the difference between a geek and a nerd.