Why are all the best bands fake?
, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, even Neil Hamburger — all comedy-music acts that are about as legitimate and earnest as a Halloween costume. Sure, these guys know how to play their instruments. They record and release CDs and DVDs. They tour the country and draw thousands to their live shows. But they’re not out there to make us marvel at their sweet riffs and melodies, they’re just trying to make us laugh.
Of course, the minds behind mockumentaries like and also know actual musical talent goes a long way toward selling the joke. They’re hitting the road — including a Denver date at the on Wednesday — to display their own. Comedy veterans Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer will ditch the costumes and fake accents when revisiting songs from the aforementioned movies in their tour.
We spoke via phone with McKean recently about the tour, the 25th anniversary of “This Is Spinal Tap,” the risks of a tour like this and the benefits of picking up the guitar early on in life.
The Folksmen in the music mockumentary “A Mighty Wind.”
Hi Michael, thanks for speaking with me today. Where did the idea for the tour come from?
It was because of the 25th anniversary of “Spinal Tap,” and we knew we wanted to do something special. We didn’t want to bring out the whole bells and whistles tour because in this economy it ain’t gonna happen. If we had some enormous sponsor behind us it would be a different story. Also, we had lately made some appearances as ourselves and we were able to hopscotch around all of what we do in our different films, so we wanted to be able to do that and have that freedom to bounce around and not be compartmentalized visually. Also, our crowd is pretty smart. They like us and don’t need all that other stuff to laugh.
So you guys will be playing songs from the spectrum of your films?
The entire palate.
Any specifics?
I think if everybody’s patient they’ll hear their favorites. It’s not like Elvis Costello or Ray Davies, who has hundreds of songs.
You’ve worked with a lot of talented performers over the years, but clearly you’ve got a special chemistry with Christopher and Harry. Was that pretty immediate when you guys started working together or did it develop over time? I know you first started working with Harry in the Credibility Gap early on…
I don’t know, it was kind of a trial by fire thing with Harry. My friend David Lander (“Squiggy” to McKean’s Lenny in “Laverne and Shirley”), who I’d gone to college with called me and said you’ve gotta come to L.A. I’m doing this radio show here called “The Credibility Gap,” so I made the trip. There were three ten-minute shows with sketches on the news every day, so I had to produce. I’d really never written sketches fast like that before, so I just sat down and started writing. Harry and I have been friends ever since.
When did you meet Christopher?
In 1967. Chris and I were students at NYU — both guitar players — so we started writing songs together.
A lot of people try to mix music and comedy but it doesn’t always work. What are they missing?
I think the real starting point is to parodize something that has it coming it some way. Pomposity and pretension and self-love are always good places to start. It would be very hard to parodize a musician like Richard Thompson or Elvis Costello Nick Lowe or millions of other examples who are genuinely there. How do you do a Bela Fleck parody? You can’t make comedy out of that because it already has its own sense of humor. I think a great starting point for any humor is humorlessness, otherwise your target doesn’t have it coming.
When did you start playing guitar? You’ve talked before about Jimmie Driftwood being a sort of touchstone for you.
Everybody that I knew got a hold of a guitar in some way or another at age 14. There was this folk thing happening and you started realizing rock ‘n’ roll consisted mainly of four chords. I think it was about two months after I got my first guitar that I played publicly. There was a hootenanny thing going on. I wrote some songs with some friends and that just kind of continued. I was with a band for a short time — they actually had a couple of hit records — but I joined up with them because they had lost some members to some questionable acitivity and needed a guitar player… although I never played live them.
Clearly you’re comfortable performing on the stage, judging by your stage credits over your career. Most people probably know you from TV and movies, but what’s different doing comedy on stage than on those media?
Well, the obvious one is that you have an audience there. You don’t have to wait six months months to a year to find out if it was funny. You do what you can, you work on the act knowing what you know and just kind of inch along that way. With TV there’s a certain amount of immediacy. Working as an actor it’s just kind of what you do. I did “Saturday Night Live” for a season and a half it was very alive.
Were you worried about how this tour was going to translate?
We knew that there was a certain amount of risk in doing exactly what we wanted to do this time, but that’s kind of the way it is. I think our fans are smart and they’re also very curious about us and the stories that we can tell as the creators of these songs and characters, which we couldn’t tell as the characters. So we’re going to be showing some really, really strange videos from behind the scenes and some museum pieces, like our appearance on “The Joe Franklin Show” before anyone knew we were a gag. There’s Rob Reiner’s TV show pilot from 1979 and some fan videos. Actually, we came across these amazing videos that fans made of our songs. They’re so funny and sweet and it’s the kind of tribute you can really take to the dinner table.
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com
