And now for the story of Lips and the dildo. Back in the late ’70s,
before Guitar Hero III or Rock of Love 2 or even VH1, a
jolly Canadian guitarist named Steve “Lips” Kudlow formed a thrash band
with his high school best friend, drummer Robb Reiner (no relation to
Meathead). They became Anvil, a four-piece speed-metal circus that
toured with soon-to-be cash-cow longhairs like Whitesnake, Bon Jovi and
the Scorpions and reveled in tongue-in-cheek cock-rock clichés.
(Exemplary song titles include “Metal on Metal,” “Hair Pie” and
“Butter-Bust Jerky.”) Onstage, Lips wore leather pants, a bondage
harness and a studded dog collar; he also used a dildo as a bottleneck
slide to play his Flying V. But more than a decade into this shtick, a
show promoter went ape-shit on Lips when unsuspecting concertgoers
complained they’d been offended by this porno prop and demanded their
money back. That was when Lips, out of genuine respect for would-be
fans, decided to retire the dildo.
That might be the only thing that the 53-year-old front man has
retired in his entire life, and this awe-inspiring persistence is now
the focal point of director Sacha Gervasi’s phenomenal rockumentary
Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Even though Anvil never
amounted to anything more than “the demigods of Canadian metal” (which
is sort of like being the Slam Dunk Champ of Chippewa Falls), Lips and
Robb decided early on that their sole objective was “to rock forever,”
and at all costs. Gervasi, a British screenwriter (The Terminal)
who’d roadied for Anvil as a teenager, reunites with Kudlow and Reiner
as fiftysomethings in Toronto, both married with sons, toiling away at
dead-end jobs by day, headlining strip-mall sports bars by night, and
all the while still saying things in earnest like, “Until we become a
real commodity, this is what you deal with.”
The same blind faith that has held Anvil together for three decades
guides them, in the first half of Gervasi’s film, through their biggest
tour in 20 years to Europe. Orchestrated by then-guitarist Ivan Hurd’s
lady friend, the five-week trek turns out to be a logistical nightmare,
seemingly planned by “a demented monkey throwing darts,” as Gervasi
recently described it. They miss trains in Sweden, get lost in Prague
and perform in Transylvania to 174 people in a 10,000-capacity arena.
The tour is such a perfectly executed comedy of errors that, during the
filming, one of Gervasi’s cameramen locked the director in a room and
demanded to know if Lips and Robb were secretly actors.
Rockers in their fifties going for it one last time — if the
basic premise sounds familiar, it should. “Spinal Tap was our
Trojan horse,” Gervasi, accompanied by the band, explains during a
recent press jag at the swank Bowery Hotel. “The drummer’s called
Robb Reiner. They wrote a song called ‘Thumb Hang.’ Lips
plays his guitar with a dildo. We’re dead, like, 11 times. So we
may as well use it to our advantage.” So Anvil! became part
intentional homage: The band visit Stonehenge on their European tour,
there’s an amp that goes to 11 and Lips and Robb sing the first tune
they ever wrote in a diner. “We love that movie,” Lips adds,
looking characteristically frizzy and leathered. “It’s us — in
fake.”
But Lips and Robb are so very, very real. Robb’s sister, Droid,
likens their relationship to Siamese twins, but they’re more like
classical cartoon-buddy foils: Laurel and Hardy without the slapstick,
Jake and Elwood without the blues, Jay and Silent Bob with actual
ambition. Hetero life partners, they bicker like an old married couple,
and while in the studio recording their 13th album with money Lips
borrowed from his sister — their last-ditch attempt at mainstream
recognition — Anvil morphs from Spinal Tap to Metallica in
Some Kind of Monster: Robb threatens to quit, Lips ends up
crying into the camera and everyone engages in emotionally weighted
therapeutic discourse. Yet somehow, these Headbangers Ball footnotes, with their intentionally goofy groupie anthem called “Show
Me Your Tits,” end up being far more human and likable than the Mighty
Ducks.
A Hoop Dreams for heshers, Anvil! has had a happy
ending off-screen. Thanks to the doc’s festival-circuit acclaim, Anvil
is enjoying a comeback of Mickey Rourke-like proportions. Michael Moore
is a fan, as is Keanu Reeves. Slayer’s manager signed the band,
Coldplay’s booker handles them in the UK and Oasis’s liaison represents
them in the States. VH1 has acquired the exclusive rights to air
Anvil! The Story of Anvil this summer. Random House will release
the Anvil book. Rock Band will soon have Anvil tracks. There’s also an
Anvil! soundtrack deal in the works with major-label
involvement. All this before the documentary has even entered wide
release. “This is the most famous we’ve ever been — ever —
in our whole 30-year history,” Robb admits, awestruck. “With what’s
coming, with all this, I think the dildo will return.”
This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.