Anvil! The Story of Anvil begins with frenzied head banger concert footage from 1984 focusing on several name bands and then one obscure one - “Anvil”. I thought instantly that this was a rock mockumentary in the vein of cult favorite This is Spinal Tap, also from 1984? The first few minutes did nothing to dissuade me from this notion, with raucous onstage antics and photos that felt like self parody: men with impossibly big permed hair, rock stars with bondage gear that would make them feel right at home in a gay leather bar. The lead singer, known as “Lips” is even shown biting down on a dildo and later, playing the guitar with one (!). Certainly this is a comedy we're watching. Lips’ partner in crime, a drummer, even shares a name with the director of Spinal Tap Rob Reiner, though the drummer adds a second “b” to make it Robb. Surely, this is all an elaborate put on?
Jump forward to today (or thereabouts -- documentaries have long gestation periods) and we see Lips and Robb hitting 50 and still rocking out albeit at much much smaller venues. This is no mockumentary at all, it turns out. The Story of Anvil is instead a sobering straight-faced look at dreams that never came to fruition and people who can’t let those same dreams go without one last fight. And then another one after that. And maybe one after that. Anvil has been together for 30 years and will obviously never break up. Their lives aren’t rock star comfortable as those undoubtedly lived by the Rolling Stones and the Who, two other bands to whom you hear their longevity compared. Living close to poverty in Canada, the partners work at dead end jobs their lives only perking up with occasional bar gigs and, when the documentary really gets going, a tiny European tour.
The tour doesn’t go so well.
This is An -- excuse me, Anvil! The Story of Anvil starts to work cruel magic from there on out. After one depressing nearly empty and live gig in Prague a lawyer, who is offering up his services to sue the venue, asks why they aren’t playing in big venues to sellout crowds. The drummer Robb Reiner responds with a Spinal Tap ready quote
I can answer that in two words -- no three words: We haven’t got good management.
So it goes for Lips and Reiner, friends since fourteen when they met in Biology class. They suffer one defeat after another but their heads keep banging though the hair is now falling out rather than bouncing back with each neck toss. Rock star fame and fortune is a gilded carrot that never stops dangling for these men. Their big dreams are reinforced by two things in particular: first, supporting and loving family members who also share the dream and/or much patience in hoping their loved ones get what they all expected they would in the early 80s; second, the long tail of respect that one of their first records Metal on Metal (from the early 80s) brought them within the head bangers subculture. Big selling bands play talking heads here and heap praise on the early record as an influential album that paved the way for the “big four": Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth.
For the first half of this documentary one admires the tenacity of the rock and roll dream but in the latter half, an increasingly humiliating sense that the dream has been over for decades and they just haven’t woken up begins to take over. After a particularly difficult therapy session of sorts with their record producer on their 13th record “This is Thirteen” they visit Stonehenge. Yes, Stonehenge! This is Spinal Tap roars back into mind. The famous comedy starts to look even more hilarious and wise in how little it stretched its metal rocking truth. Either that or Anvil! The Story of Anvil is starting to look unneccesarily cruel.
The finale, another concert, attempts to reverse course a bit. It's going for the full circle happy ending but by then quite a lot of damage is done. Anvil! is at times funny, sweet and often interesting (aside from the recording session which tests the resolve of not only the band but the audience in that way it stretches on) but the desperation is so tangible it proves exhausting. This will be a tough sit for anyone who has chosen to follow an artistic dream and still feels that it's well out of reach. Anvil! is in some small way a tribute to tenacity but it’s also a cautionary true story: dreams can become nightmares and sometimes the past is best left there. 1984 is long behind most of us but its still haunting Lips and Reiner as if it were yesterday.
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For the first half of this documentary one admires the tenacity of the rock and roll dream but in the latter half, an increasingly humiliating sense that the dream has been over for decades and they just haven’t woken up begins to take over. After a particularly difficult therapy session of sorts with their record producer on their 13th record “This is Thirteen” they visit Stonehenge. Yes, Stonehenge! This is Spinal Tap roars back into mind. The famous comedy starts to look even more hilarious and wise in how little it stretched its metal rocking truth. Either that or Anvil! The Story of Anvil is starting to look unneccesarily cruel.