On March 2, 1984, the world learned that real guitar amps go to 11. That was the day that “This Is Spinal Tap,” starring Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as the hapless members of a fictional heavy metal band whose career prospects are trending sharply downward, revolutionized the worlds of comedy and heavy metal.
Besides setting the stage for Guest’s later mockumentaries (including “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show”), the movie hit a strong chord in the metal community for its accurately ridiculous depictions. From the band being forced to open for a puppet show to stage props gone awry (see: the Stonehenge re-creation mistakenly rendered in miniature), “This Is Spinal Tap” exposed ludicrous situations that touring metallers find themselves in every day.
In honor of the film’s 30th anniversary, we spoke to some of heavy metal’s top stars about their own most degrading and bizarre Spinal Tap moments.
ALICE COOPER
“Forty years I’ve been handling snakes onstage. We were playing the House of Blues in LA. Johnny Rotten shows up, KISS shows up, everybody’s there. Johnny hadn’t seen my show in a long time. It was the ‘Circus of Horrors’ tour, so the road crew was dressed like demented clowns. At one point in the show, I’m holding a snake, and all of a sudden people are laughing at all the wrong times. I didn’t realize the snake was defecating all over me.
“I looked down, and there were five piles of the most vile-smelling stuff on the planet. Snakes eat rats, so you can imagine.
“So the roadies — who are dressed as clowns — come out to clean it up, and it’s so vile that two of them start gagging, and one throws up. So now I’ve got a snake defecating, I have clowns throwing up onstage, and Johnny Rotten is watching this going, ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.’ ”
(Cooper hosts the syndicated radio show, “Nights With Alice Cooper,” and will open Mötley Crüe’s farewell tour this summer.)
SCOTT IAN (guitarist, Anthrax)
“It was 1986, our first time in Europe. We pulled up to what we thought was our hotel in the middle of nowhere in Belgium, and it’s this 200-year-old farmhouse. It’s late at night, we knock on the door, and, like, someone’s grandma, who doesn’t speak English, opens the door. Turned out it was some weird bed and breakfast. I don’t know how we arranged staying there, but we had nowhere else to go.
“So we pile into this house, and the lady is walking around pointing at the bedrooms, tiny little rooms with weird, creepy paintings of children on the wall. We’re all like, ‘Someone’s not gonna make it through the night.’
“The next morning, I go into the kitchen, and the lady comes in — she points to a menu card with pictures of [eggs]. So I point at the fried eggs, and then she takes my arm and points at the chicken coop. I had a bunch of chickens looking at me crossly, but I pulled out three eggs.”
(Ian brings his spoken-word show, “Speaking Words,” to B.B. King’s on March 5.)
ALEX SKOLNICK (guitarist, Testament)
“We were performing in Europe in 2008, and we had this video presentation created to play behind the band. It was supposed to be timed [to the songs], but the guy who designed it didn’t know what he was doing.
“We had this one part planned out — George W. Bush was still president, he was supposed to pop up on-screen and we were all supposed to turn around and flip him off with a big ‘F–k you!’ But we didn’t realize the video was out of sync. So we turned at the spot we were supposed to, and we flip off the screen, scream ‘F–k you’ — and it’s a picture of our album cover. We flipped off our own album cover.”
(Skolnick’s memoir, “Geek to Guitar Hero,” is available on amazon.com.)
LITA FORD
“I take my two dogs, both four-pound Chihuahuas, on the road a lot, and I had Pup-Peroni — pepperoni sticks for dogs — put in my tour rider. Our roadie, Doogie, didn’t know they were for dogs. I said, ‘Doogie, what are you eating?’ I don’t think he’s eaten pepperoni after that.”
(Ford’s latest album was 2012’s “Living Like a Runaway.”)
ZAKK WYLDE (guitarist, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Label Society)
“In the mid-’80s, my cousin Karen was working as a cocktail waitress at a Playboy ski resort in the Poconos, and she brought a guy [home] with her. He’s got no shirt on, and he’s sweating. He’s talking to my mother, saying he’s a producer, and my mother doesn’t know about someone on blow. He’s like, ‘We’re working with this woman, trying to do a Madonna-type thing, and we’re looking for musicians,’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, my son plays guitar!’
“What they were doing was with porn star Ginger Lynn. We get there, I open the door, and it’s like ‘Caligula’ or that scene in ‘Eyes Wide Shut.’ People are f–king all over the place.
“They lead me into the studio and this [producer] is sweating profusely once again, and there is a mound of cocaine on the console. I recorded the songs, but all I kept picturing was . . . my mother sitting at the house going, ‘I’m so proud of my Zakky boy.’ ”
(See Wylde’s Black Label Society at Best Buy Theater, May 10.)