Anvil! The Story of Anvil

An old-school metal band’s dramatic epic is about to hit movie
theaters. This is a group that started in the early ’80s and influenced
rock legends like Slash, Lemmy from Motörhead and Scott
Ian of Anthrax. It’s an act that still tours around the
globe. These musicians allowed filmmakers complete backstage access
— which means cameras rolled during embarrassingly juvenile
tizzies, including ones where giant man-tears were shed.

No, I’m not talking about Metallica. This is the story of
Anvil, perhaps the most stubborn heavy metal band in history. After 30
years of recording and touring, its name is still unknown to most rock
fans. The briefly famous group has to grab club owners by their shirt
collars in order to get paid, misses its trains on European tours and
gets shot down by major-label A&R guys because the “landscape has
changed.”

Anvil is obscure, Canadian and led by two family men in their
fifties who borrow obscene amounts of money to hire famous producers
for albums that will never get distribution. They also refuse to quit
playing music. All of this makes them perfect subjects for
another Behind the Music episode.

It also, surprisingly, makes the movie created in their honor one of
the sweetest rock and roll stories produced.

It would’ve been so easy to turn the documentary Anvil! The
Story of Anvil into a real-life Spinal Tap. There’s so
much comedy in the band’s tragedies. Director Sacha
Gervasi has the camera rolling for every Anvil blunder — and
there are many, from the group performing for 174 people at a venue
that holds 10,000 to listening as the drummer, Robb Reiner,
casually relays the fact that singer Steve “Lips” Kudlow regularly rips
his gold drumstick necklace from around his neck in fits of anger.

Gervasi has a wealth of punch lines to choose from, but he’s
judicious in using them, editing them in subtly for maximum
impact. He doesn’t go the predictable route and skewer this cult
band for continuing three decades after its 15 minutes of fame
ended.

Instead he offers a more universal narrative.Anvil! touches
on the difficulty of giving up on a dream you’ve invested with your
life. It’s an identifiable sentiment, regardless of whether your props
come, as Anvil’s have, from an overly made-up member of Twisted
Sister at a music festival.

Anvil! begins by giving viewers the band’s context. It
shows the group playing a huge concert in the ’80s alongside household
names like the Scorpions and Bon Jovi. There are interviews with
heavy-metal gods discussing Anvil’s importance. The Toronto act’s
early recordings, including 1982’s Metal on Metal,
apparently hold high places in metal history.

But after its third record, the band fell off the radar, for reasons
no one in the film can really explain. Lips now makes a living working
for an elementary school catering company, while Reiner works in
construction.

It takes a pretty strong self-image to be the everyman in your day
job and the invisible rock star at night. But Lips and Reiner are such
teddy bears, so naive in their drive, that you wonder how they’ve
managed to keep the tiny Anvil bubble afloat without the cold, cruel
world coming in for a pop.

One answer: These men are total metal lifers. This is made obvious
when Lips is backstage at a festival Anvil plays, giddily sprinting
after childhood idols to gush about his affection for their work
— never mind that half these musicians don’t seem to know who the
hell he is.

The group’s strength also stems from the deep bond between Lips and
Reiner. They met as adolescents — and, inspired by a history
class on the Spanish Inquisition, wrote their first song together,
“Thumb Hang.” Now on the other side of 50, the two men talk about one
another like brothers — and fight as though they’re still 14.

They repeatedly get into the same arguments. Lips is a powder keg of
reactive frustration, and cries often. Reiner gets sick of the drama
and of being broke. He calmly threatens to walk away, Lips sniffles out
a sincere apology and they go on, like war veterans whose love for one
another surpasses anything romantic or familial.

Unlike the whine sessions in Some Kind of Monster, where
Metallica’s group therapy made the musicians seem really obnoxious,
Anvil’s figureheads project nothing but the deepest sincerity in their
breakdowns. Despite the fights, there’s a real kindness in the way they
treat one another. Add in the band’s underdog status, and these tiffs
become strangely moving — when, of course, they aren’t totally
hilarious, which is often the case.

When Anvil! opened in San Francisco in April, fans gathered
for an “Anvil Experience” party at local nightclub Slim’s, with a
screening of the film and live performance by the band. (The group had
suffered another blow in recent years. As the documentary’s epilogue
explained, the rhythm guitarist quit: Anvil is now a power trio.)

But the fans in the crowd throwing devil horns didn’t seem to care.
Lips, a black anvil inked on his right arm, moved his rubbery mouth
around with excitement when he wasn’t calling for the crowd’s
applause.

The band played a total of four songs — one of which was
little more than a drum solo, and another the Anvil-anointed “national
anthem of heavy metal,” titled “Metal on Metal” — before walking
offstage for an encore.

How did they sound? Let’s face it, Anvil’s songs are dated. There
are better metal bands out there. And they need to replace that rhythm
guitarist.

But watching Anvil! makes you root for these guys
nonetheless — if not for the music, then for their indomitable
fighting spirit, and the humility with which they’ve taken their lot.
(Lips in particular finds the good in everything, including a booking
agent who botches their European tour.)

In an era where young bands act jaded after one round of blog buzz,
it’s refreshing to hear from musicians who spend their entire lives
taking nothing for granted. Thirty years of playing metal ain’t nothing
to laugh at — even if, as Anvil! proves, it
provides plenty of moments to laugh with.