The New Cult Canon: 'Anvil! The Story of Anvil'

Life imitates art imitates life in a documentary about a real-life Canadian metal band with uncanny connections to a fictional rock and roll creation.

Anvil founders Robb Reiner and Steve “Lips” Kudlow

“In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived an ancient race of people: The Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing. But their legacy remains. Hewn into the living rock… of Stonehenge.” — Nigel Tufnel, This is Spinal Tap

“Satan was running across the countryside. He dropped a few stones, right?” — Steve “Kips” Kudlow on Stonehenge, Anvil! The Story of Anvil

There’s a sequence in the 1988 documentary U2: Rattle and Hum where the band, in the midst of an American tour that’s now winding through Memphis, makes a perhaps inevitable pilgrimage to Graceland. Having toggled artfully between color and black-and-white throughout the film, director Phil Joanou chooses black-and-white for this occasion and focuses on the musings of drummer Larry Mullen Jr., who immediately suggests why he’s not often the public voice of U2. Mullen talks about his love of Elvis Presley’s movies, at one point describing Elvis as “a film star who was a musician,” before reflecting soberly on The King being buried at Graceland. “I wish he hadn’t been buried in the back yard,” says Mullen. “I really wish he’d been buried somewhere where I couldn’t have gone. I would have felt better, you know? It’s just one of those things.” 

Only four years earlier, in the seminal mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, the three founding members of “one of England’s loudest bands” visit Graceland in the midst of their own catastrophic tour and hover over Elvis’ grave, where bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) snaps pictures and the frontmen, David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), harmonize a version of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Then the reality of their situation dampens the mood: Here’s a struggling, past-their-prime heavy metal outfit gazing at the tombstone of the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll.” “It really puts perspective on things, doesn’t it?” says Nigel. “Too much,” replies David. “There’s too much fucking perspective now.” 

There’s no shortage of rock-star pomposity on display in U2: Rattle and Hum, but the band’s (and Joanou’s) complete lack of self-awareness is a running theme in the film even when they aren’t directly echoing the clichés parodied in This is Spinal Tap. Then again, there’s plenty of evidence that the story of rock stars tends to repeat itself: The existence of the brilliant spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story hasn’t stopped biopics about Elvis, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, and other legends from acting as if that movie never happened. It would seem that all the famous musicians have to think about their entire lives before they play. Such clichés can (and should) be avoided, but there seem to be only a handful of well-trodden paths through the music industry and so overlapping footsteps are inevitable. 

That said, the drummer and co-founding member of the never-was Canadian metal band Anvil is named Robb Reiner. 

Robb Reiner. 

Robb freaking Reiner. 

That’s just one letter off from Rob Reiner, the director of This is Spinal Tap. It’s as if the extra “b” in his first name is added for that extra oomph, like the 11 on Nigel Tufnel’s amplifier. But Robb Reiner is a real person and Anvil is a real band, as all but the most devoted metal scholars learned by watching Sacha Gervasi’s 2008 documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil, in which Spinal Tap is never mentioned yet serves as an unmistakable invisible presence, like the Ghost of Rock and Roll Present. The relationship between the two movies is hilarious and poignant in nearly equal measure, but most of all it’s astonishingly uncanny, as if they’re working off separate drafts of the same script. Saying Anvil! The Story of Anvil “echoes” This is Spinal Tap isn’t sufficient. It’s more like a bullhorn. 

Anvil! The Story of Anvil picks up where This is Spinal Tap left off, with evidence that the band was big in Japan. The year is 1984, when the headlining acts at the Super Rock festival included the veteran German band Scorpions, soon-to-be hair-metal sensations like Whitesnake and Bon Jovi, and a pioneering outfit from Toronto called Anvil. Formed in 1978 by two high school buddies, singer/guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, Anvil peaked early with a handful of records in the early ‘80s that brought them in league with the hard rock movement, particularly the 1982 indie album Metal on Metal. (To date, all 20 of their albums have three-word titles, like Pound for Pound, Juggernaut of Justice, and, in a rare moment of self-consciousness, Anvil is Anvil.) Other members have cycled in and out of the band—and a couple have since died, though not the drummer—but Lips and Robb have been a constant to this day. Their 20th record (One and Only) came out last year, with the men in their late 60s. 

Gervasi opens The Story of Anvil with testimonials from metal legends like Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, who remembers thinking Anvil was “going to turn the music world upside down,” and Scott Ian from Anthrax, who recalls Lips and Robb setting such a high standard that “if we can’t be better than that, than we should go home.” The consensus among their peers is summed up by Lemmy from Motorhead, who believes that life simply dealt them “a bad deck,” which frames Anvil like the hero of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, the story of a potential trailblazer who simply missed his moment in history. But Llewyn Davis is also missing that certain essential charisma that separates a singular figure like Bob Dylan from the countless folkies relegated to obscurity. Anvil may have missed their moment, but it’s more likely it was never there for them. 

A sampling of Anvil album covers through the years. .

Yet it hasn’t stopped them from trying. After the opening in Japan, Gervasi flashes forward to the present, where Lips is logging time as a driver for Choice Children’s Catering in Scarborough, Ontario, the sort of shit job that a man gets decades after he’s dropped out of high school to front a middling rock band. Robb does construction work and keeps his mind right through “psychoactive therapy sessions.” Anvil still performs when asked, however, in humble venues like a sports bar Etobicoke, where Lips blissfully celebrates his 50th birthday among dozens of diehard fans. There’s happiness to be found at this scale, but Lips and Robb have clung to dreams of rock fame as the world—and even their respective spouses—have long since moved on. 

The Spinal Tap moments start to flare up on a European tour arranged by Tiziana Arrigoni, a manager of dubious qualifications who sets up dates around the continent without nailing down all the details or even arranging for a steady paycheck. The band misses trains and flight connections. In one “Hello, Cleveland” fiasco, they get lost in Prague and arrive so late to a pitiful bar gig that the owner refuses to pay them. (A postscript informs us that they eventually settled for 100 euros.) In the face of adversity, Lips and Robb have a tendency to attack each other, sometimes physically, and the tour is a constant misery, ending in a “Monsters of Transylvania” rock event in Romania that’s 4,826 people short of the arena’s 5,000 capacity. 

Anvil! The Story of Anvil presents a dilemma similar to American Movie (another New Cult Canon favorite), in that we wonder if we’re being invited to laugh at the flailing of outsiders who pursue their dreams in the face of constant rejection—or, worse, deflating indifference. Much like Mark Borchardt in the earlier film, picking up odd jobs at the cemetery while trying to raise money from his demented grandpa for a long-gestating personal project, Lips jumps at any opportunity that comes to him, but lives humbly in the meantime. (He even gets thousands from his older sister to record This is Thirteen, a record Anvil ultimately self-distributes.) At the lowest point among many, he takes a sales job at a call center working for an Anvil superfan named “Cut Loose,” but quits after eight fruitless hours. Like Borchardt, Lips accepts his failures in good humor much of the time and shows promising signs of the perspective that comes with age. 

It’s probably fair for the film to suggest, as gently as possible, that the art isn’t all that great. At the band’s peak, Lips’ live schtick involved appearing on stage in bondage gear and taking whacks at his guitar with a buzzing vibrator, and it can be hard to separate one song sample from the next. (Say what you will about Spinal Tap, but songs like “Big Bottom,” “Rock and Roll Creation,” and “Sex Farm” are earworms.) When Robb reveals his paintings to the camera, most of them street scenes devoid of people, it’s like a flashback to Nigel Hufnel showing the other Reiner his room full of guitars. American Movie and Anvil! The Story of Anvil both celebrate the impulse and determination to make art, but the beauty of the results is most definitely in the eyes of the beholder. 

Perhaps the most enduring line in the film comes after the tour, when a dejected Lips returns to his domestic routine after the band’s European adventures yielded minuscule returns and no interest from record labels. “Things went drastically wrong,” he says, “but at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on.” Anvil got a massive (if short-lived) bump in recognition after this film was released, including some gigs as an opening act for touring giants like AC/DC and a network appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. But to keep going after such a brutal and humiliating tour—an indignity that surely adds to many others Gervasi’s camera wasn’t there to witness—makes it clear that the joys of performance are worth the hardships. Bands don’t labor in obscurity for nearly half a century if they don’t love doing it. In Anvil! The Story of Anvil, Lips and Robb aren’t quite content to take what they can get, but they’re getting there. 

Next: Crimson Peak

* Note: I had promised an entry on Computer Chess before realizing I’d already done Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls. Not that he doesn’t deserve the attention, of course.