The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
Joey deVilla’s Personal Blog
From the category archives:
If you’re a fan of the Violent Femmes (and if you remember rotary-dial phones), you’re going to recognize the reference in this piece of retro-themed art by so0meone going by the name “9 0 0 0”:
There’s more stuff like this in 9 0 0 0’s Flickr photoset titled Plan 9.001.
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Anvil! The Story of Anvil was the one documentary I really wanted to catch at last year’s Hot Docs film festival. If you watched Canada’s MuchMusic station in the 1980s and its heavy metal segment, The Pepsi Power Hour (hosted by the mullet-sporting JD Roberts, who later became CNN’s silver-haired John Roberts), you might have some dim memories of Anvil and their hits Metal on Metal and 666. It was pretty cheese-a-riffic Canadian metal; when I was a DJ at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Clark Hall Pub, I used tracks from promo CDs of Anvil’s Strength of Steel and Annihilator’s Alice in Hell to get people to leave the pub after the lights had gone on so we could mop the floor.
(Okay, I’ll admit that I sort of liked their hit Metal on Metal.)
Anvil might have remained a footnote in metal history had it not been for a teenage roadie named Sacha Gervasi, who helped lug around gear for the band in the 1980s. Gervasi would later go on to become a screenwriter for movies such as Spielberg’s The Terminal. When Gervasi heard that Anvil were doing a big tour in 2005 and had landed the headline spot at the Monsters of Transylvania Festival, he asked their frontman, “Lips” Kudlow if he could film a documentary of them. “Lips” said yes, and a real-life This is Spinal Tap “rockumentary” ensued.
Every review of Anvil! The Story of Anvil points out that a lot of the mishaps experienced by the fictitious band Spinal Tap actually happen to Anvil, a real-life band. There’s the lifelong “David St.Hubbins/Nigel Tufnel-esque” friendship between the two founders of the band. The guitar player’s fiancee can’t speak English and mismanages the band into disaster. There’s a concert scene where the camera starts with a tight shot of a crowd near the stage and then zooms out to reveals that the band is playing to an audience of 200 in an arena that holds 10,000. The band memebers make ends meet through their day jobs: telemarketing and serving school lunches. There’s even a stranger-than-fiction scene where the owner of a club in the Czech Republic tries to pay the band in goulash rather than cash.
It’s funny, yet heartbreaking at the same time, because while Spinal Tap’s over-the-top problems were make-believe, the guys in Anvil were experiencing them in real life.
Here’s the UK trailer for the movie:
It looks as though Anvil will finally get their break. The movie is getting a lot of praise, people are actually coming to see their shows, and a number of their songs will soon be available as downloads for the Rock Band videogame.
I’m definitely catching the movie once it hits the theatres here.
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For no reasons other than I love the band and my stumbling across this list, here are the names of the bands who’ve opened for Queen:
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If you’re looking for a name for your heavy metal band, you might find the chart below helpful:
Click the chart to see it at full size.
Found via The Triumph of Bullshit.
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In an earlier article, Branford Marsalis’ Take on Students Today, I posted a video in which jazz.funk sax man Branford Marsalis talked about his music students. His first lines in the interview are:
What I’ve learned from my students is that students today are completely full of shit.
That is what I’ve learned from my students. Much like the generation before them, the only thing they are really interested in is you telling them how right they are and how good they are.
I mentioned that the interview comes from a documentary titled Before the Music Dies, a documentary film in which filmmakers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen “traveled the country, hoping to understand why mainstream music seems so packaged and repetitive, and whether corporations really had the power to silence musical innovation.”
A reader named “Tomas” said in a comment to the article that Before the Music Dies was posted in its entirety on Google Video. You can watch it in the little video window above, or at a larger size on its Google Video page. If you really care about music, whether as someone who plays it or simply enjoys it, watch it; you’ll find it’s two hours well-spent.
You can also buy the video on DVD for US$14.99 or download it for as little as US$2.99 from the Before the Music Dies site.
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