THIS IS SPINAL TAP Directed by Rob Reiner (Embassy Pictures)

by John Mendelssohn

The missus used to be married to a little asshole who produces comedy specials for cable television. The principals of This Is Spinal Tap— director Rob Reiner and stars Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Chris Guest—were frequent visitors to her and the little asshole’s home. She tells me that said principals constitute a fervent mutual admiration society that perceives itself as representing 99% of modern American satiric genius.

I don’t know if that’s true, and I don’t know if it ain’t. What I do know is that This Is Spinal Tap, sort of a heavy metal The Rutles, is exactly the film you’d have expected a little clique that regards itself as representing 99% of modern American satiric genius to have made. A couple of hysterically funny moments notwithstanding, it’s a self-indulgent bore, a maddening exercise in squandered opportunities.

The missus points out, for instance, that This Is Spinal Tap marks at least the umpteenth time that Reiner and friends have wrongly expected an audience to be amused by the Sinatra-Qbsessed chauffeur Bruno Kirby so loves to play.

Rather than a real script, one gathers from the production notes, the boys just wrote a plot synopsis, plugged in a bunch of characters they’ve been murdering one another with for years, and improvised virtually all of the dialogue. Thjs approach makes for a real documentary feel—and for long, long stretches without anything even remotely amusing being said or done. And if you started right now, it would be lunchtime tomorrow before you could list even half the heavy metal cliches the film should have poked fun at but doesn’t.

You might have hoped, for instance, that a documentary about an English metal band on tour in America would have been at least a little sexy. No such luck, not with guys as narcissistic as these—the closest thing to sex in the whole film is a dizzyingly ill-conceived and unfunny scene in an airport in which Harry Shearer’s Derek Smalls is discovered to have something crammed in his jeans to make him look more generously endowed.

One of the things that made Eric Idle’s Rutles so funny was its attention to detail, as evidenced most strikingly in a montage of the group’s album covers, each a painstaking recreation of one of the Beatles’. The Spinals, though, couldn’t be bothered even to get their East End accents right. Shearer, in fact, doesn’t even try.

The music—all composed and performed by the actors themselves (including the two actual English journeymen who round out the quintet)— is atrocious, and if you tell me that’s part of the fun, I’ll spit in your eye. The principal culprit is the illfittingly bewigged David McKean (late of Laverne & Shirley), who makes the guy in Motley Crue sound like Sal Valentino in comparison. The film’s art direction, set decoration, and photography are very much a match for the music. No expense has been left unspared here.

You’ve heard people say that when John Travolta, for instance, is on screen, it’s impossible to watch anyone else? Well, when Nigel Tufnel is on screen, it’s impossible not to watch someone else, for Guest plays him as the most brainlessly insipid lead guitarist in the history of British rock. You get tired of him, but there’s no denying that the character works marvelously in at least a few scenes, such' as that in which he comes to despair of ever making a proper sandwich out of the miniature bread the Spinals’ dressing room’s been stocked with, or that in which he proudly shows off an amplifier whose volume control’s been customized to go up to 11, rather than the traditional 10. “Eleven,” he explains proudly, “is like...one more.”

There are other fab moments too, like the one at which the group discovers under the most embarrassing possible circumstances that the Stonehenge facsimile they’ve had made for their live show is 17 inches, and not feet, high—and very much less awesome as a result. Elsewhere, you’re apt to shriek with mirth when they get hopelessly lost in an auditorium’s catacombs just before going onstage. And whoop “Rock ’n’ roll!” ever more feebly. Nor shquld it not be mentioned that Fred Willard, as an air force base’s obsequious social director, and Paul Schaffer, as a whiningly masochistic promotion man, ate both spectacular.

Be forewarned, though, that you’ll spend precious little of your time at This Is Spinal Tap shrieking with mirth, and lots more yawning or wishing you’d brought earplugs.

RAINBOW BRIDGE REVISITED

HIT & RUN:

THE JIMI HENDRIX STORY by Jerry Hopkins (Ferigree Books)

Is the sum of a man’s life more than bad habits, bad luck and bad business deals? Hopefully, yes. But there’s hardly more than these sad and tawdry details in Hit & Run: The Jimi Hendrix Story by Jerry Hopkins.

It’s not a particularly awful book, nor a very good one either. That’s the problem. Jimi Hendrix deserves nothing less than a great book, a biography that paints both the man and his era with the marvelous color and energy of his all-too brief life.

Of course, that’s not an easy task. It’s certainly beyond the reach of Jerry Hopkins, who, as the writer of two books on Elvis and co-author of the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, seems to be making a career of stirring up the ashes of dead rock stars.

Better they had been left alone.

Unable to capture the elusive essence of his subject, Hopkins tries to cover this failing with an endless scandal of too many drugs, too much sex, rotten contracts, and other sordid details. Jimi’s trail is here, but the man himself is not. Hit & Run is like a biography of Pancho Villa in which the vast epic of the Mexican Revolution is reduced to a simple tale of stolen cattle and plundered banks. It’s as if Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was little. more than Marc Antony pulling aside the shroud to expose Caesar’s bloody wounds, again and again.

Hendrix was magic, a guitarist without peer. His music combined the wailing black ghosts of the Mississippi Delta with the voices of psychedelic aliens from beyond Mars. His life and music are important and should hot be trivialized by a plodding study iri sensationalism.

The writing in Hit & Run is simply flat. The words stumble when they should soar, limp when they should fly. Hopkins just can’t capture the dash and flavor of Hendrix’s life and times. Often he tries much too hard and the results read like the literary equivalent of fingernails dragging across a blackboard.

“Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll: the tripod that held up the ’60s, the fuels that made the pop scene go,” the author oozes at one awkward point.

Ironically, the only truly lovely glimpses of Hendrix come when Hopkins is repeating the words of others. The late Michael Bloomfield provides a particularly poignant moment-with his awed description of the profound mysteries of Hendrix’s guitar technique.

But these passages are far too few. When they do occur, it’s as if Jimi suddenly popped up before Hopkins’s eyes, winked and vanished into a purple haze, out of reach again.

Fortunately we still have his music. There’s more of the man in one of his records than in a library of books like this one.

Frank Fox

THROUGH THE MOSS DARKLY

THE ROLLING STONES by Robert Palmer & Mary Shanahan (Rolling Stone Press/ Doubleday)

There was a time I’d have agreed that the Rolling Stones were the greatest tock ’n’ roll band in the world, but that was long ago. The Stones’ buffoonish ’81 tour was orie of the most disillusioning rock spectacles I’ve ever seen, clearly revealing dagger as the hypocrite he’s probably always been (cockney accent and all), and making me wonder how he has the audacity to criticize latter-day Elvis Presley when what today’s Stones represent (flaunting the “legend”) is as bad (if not worse) as Elvis during his white jumpsuit phase. (At least Presley could still sing!)

Excepting two cuts, Tattoo You was a major embarrassment, and even Keith Richards made himself look ridiculous with “Little T&A.” And that song is symptomatic of what’s wrong with the band these days: “outrage” for the sake of outrage—because that’s what’s expected of them (it’s all over Undercover)— With no sense of purpose. Although Some Girls was an excellent LP, everything since has shown the truth of the cliche—the Stones should have disbanded after Exile On Main Street because it’s become increasingly difficult to recall the golden days when the Stones meant something and seemed to encompass everything that rock ’n’ roll once represented.

That’s why I’m grateful for this third Rolling Stone Press “coffee table” book (the first two dealt with the Beatles and Elvis)—because it actually reminded me of that time, and helped put things back in perspective. Designer Mary Shanahan has followed the lead of the late Bea Feitler (who designed the previous books), and the photos here are sensational. The early ones brought back vivid memories of seeing the Stones for the first time on their Hollywood Palace American TV debut and feeling genuinely frightened. The photos from the mid-period “Satanic,” drugbust days brought memories of a time when parents wouldn’t allow Stones records in their house, as opposed to today’s parents who wait in line with the kids to see Mick & the “boys” (the latest item on Mick & Jerry in Shirley Eder’s column perking their interest). Just looking at this book made me go back and listen to some of my old Stones discs, something I haven’t done in a long time.

Although Robert Palmer doesn’t fare as well here as he did in his recent Jerry Lee Lewis biography, some of the text is superb, most notably when he’s delving into classic blues culture and relating it to the Stones. His “quasi-Marxist” critique of “Satisfaction,” discussion of the band’s social/moral anarchy, and defensive explanation of the band’s early “misogyny” are all noteworthy, as are several anecdotes (an angry Keith throwing an ashtray through a window at Mick’s wedding). And he’s one of the first critics to give Their Satanic Majesties Request its just due. Palmer manages, however, to underrate both the Beatles and Some Girls while overrating Tattoo You, and he sidesteps the Stones’ racism issue, failing to criticize them for basically stealing “Prodigal Son” from Robert Wilkins. There are also several factual errors: he misquotes the Clash’s “1977,” fails to mention Meredith Hunter’s gun at Altamont, and I don’t think the Rock ’N’ Roll Circus was ever shown on TV.

Still, it’s the photos alone that will make the book a delight for both old and new Stones fans alike, bringing to mind a time when the Stones were genuinely good bad—perhaps a tad evil—but always thrilling, a time when it at least seemed more than “only” rock ’n’ roll. After all, a great rhythm section just ain’t enough.

Bill Holdship