This Is Spinal Tap Turns 30, Spinal Tap celebrates 30th Anniversary: This goes up to 30 (er, 11). Celebrating three decades of the metal-skewering mockumentary.

Rob Reiner’s directorial début, ‘This Is Spinal Tap’, turns 30 years old this week. Saying that certainly makes me feel old (I was in high school when I watched it three years after its 1984 theatrical run).

But it also solidifies the movie as not just a great comic masterpiece, but as a musical time capsule.

When you look at the metal scene, you can almost see it as what happened pre-Spinal Tap and post-Spinal Tap, because it changed the way we thought about metal, and rock culture in general.

Click here for my list of Most Awful Hair Metal Videos

For the genre’s critics, it acted as smug condemnation of excesses of rock star behavior. But for metalheads, it was an in-joke that both hurt and healed. Sure it poked fun at the ridiculousness of the metal scene, but it also showed why it was so popular; the self-mythologizing and hedonistic nature of metal performers made them appealing to both sexes, offering escapism amidst the dark years of the Reagan era.

Metal musicians embraced it, because of the truths that it told; getting lost backstage at a gig, sugar-coating poor ticket sales by playing more ‘intimate venues’. Suffering the snideness of rock criticism.

It also didn’t hurt that This Is Spinal Tap was staggeringly funny. And that the actors playing band members David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean), Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), and Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) wrote and played all the songs in the film. It gives it a gritty authenticity that would have suffered if farmed out to session musicians.

And the cast and crew did their homework; Shearer toured with Saxon to get into character; band scuffles were modeled after discovering a tape of garage rockers The Troggs infighting in a recording studio. The air-force gig was a reference to a real life show from Uriah Heap. It’s that attention to detail that keeps it from being an over-the-top affair. It’s not a cartoonish film. It feels lived in, which only highlights the cartoonish nature of the industry they’re ribbing.

Their comedic genius went beyond their one-liners (which remain classic) but to the song lyrics and titles themselves. They managed to keep the cheesy sexual innuendo but barbed with great comedic bite.

Take the lyrics of Big Bottom: Big bottom drive me out of my mind/How could I leave this behind?

Or this bon mot from Sex Farm Woman: Working on a sex farm/Trying to raise some hard love/Getting out my pitch fork/Poking your hay.

So..so stupid, but crafted with perfect comedic timing.

And the soundbites remain legendary;  These goes to 11, This piece is called Lick My Love Pump, None more black, You can’t really dust for vomit. To name but a scant few.

‘This Is Spinal Tap’ was met to middling reviews and poor box office when it first came out, but it found its target audience on home video. Kids who were unafraid to see their favorite genre skewered, or for those who were graduating to college rock and could get a chuckle at the pomposity they’d left behind.

And for musicians, it helped them take themselves a little less seriously.

And let’s not forget how prescient the film was; it predicted the fall of hair metal, heavy metal symphonies, and bands like Anvil, who made it big in Japan when American audiences dried up (and who had their own doc, and a drummer named Robb Reiner!) And of course, Spinal Tap’s  trendsetting black album cover for Smell The Glove.

Rolling Stone did a really great list of several trends ‘Spinal Tap’ predicted. Click here to check it out.

It also helped popularize the mockumentary format, which remains a strong mini-genre to this day.

If you’d like to own ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ on Blu-ray or DVD, you can do via the Amazon links below. I highly recommend the purchase (there’s also a 30th anniversary version for U.K. buyers only). In addition to some really great outtakes, it has the band doing commentary in character, and it proves just as chuckle-worthy as the film. The soundtrack is pretty sweet too so I included a link for that as well.

Click here for my list of 11 Best Movie Commentaries

[amazon_image id=”6305922756″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]This is Spinal Tap (Special Edition)[/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”B000Y5JFN4″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]This Is Spinal Tap [Blu-ray][/amazon_image][amazon_image id=”B001O01HU2″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]This Is Spinal Tap (Soundtrack)[/amazon_image]

It’s also available in iTunes:

Do you have fond memories of watching This Is Spinal Tap? Tell me in the comments: