Anvil’s heavy metal alchemy

ADAM KAMIEN

THE tagline for rock documentary Anvil! The story of Anvil reads: “At 14, they made a pact to rock together forever. They meant it.”

But Jewish hair rockers Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner (not to be confused with This is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner) might have re-thought the promise they made to each other in 1973 if they knew what lay ahead.

Best buds from Toronto, Kudlow and Reiner formed the seminal metal band Anvil in 1978 and four years later released their second album Metal on Metal, which changed the heavy metal landscape and paved the way for iconic bands such as Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, Megadeath and even Guns N’ Roses.

On the back of the influential album, Anvil was asked to join the bill for a star-studded festival in Tokyo called Super Rock ’84. They played to massive crowds alongside the likes of Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Scorpion and Motorhead. Anvil had arrived. The band turned in one of its signature high energy, fast-paced and technically brilliant live performances. Kudlow took the stage in his trademark bondage leathers, his long, blonde locks hanging in his face as he hacked at his guitar with his infamous white dildo.

The film opens with footage of the gig, which is followed by a cavalcade of hard rock legends including Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Motorhead front man Lemmy, who all gush about Anvil’s genius, crediting the band with blazing a trail.

But while the above rockers went on to sell hundreds of millions of albums between them, Anvil slipped quietly into obscurity.

“I’m not bitter,” Kudlow said at a screening of the film in Melbourne last week, sounding genuinely surprised that someone would ask him that.

“I was never bitter because you absolutely need miracles to make it in this business. All those guys, Metallica, Slayer … they all had miracles. Now, after all this time, we’ve got ours,” Kudlow said, like it was never in doubt.

The miracle Kudlow is talking about flowed on from the colossal success of the film. Thanks to Anvil! The Story Of Anvil, the band have representation, a major-label deal and are playing to packed-out crowds all over the world. They are currently touring with AC/DC and their albums are flying off the shelves.

But if anyone deserves this sort of success, it is Kudlow and Reiner. Despite 30 years of non-existent album sales for their 13 studio albums, and gigs playing for single-digit crowds, plus more than their share of ego-fuelled rows with each other, the pair has never split. In fact they believed all the while, as they did in 1978, that success was just around the corner.

For Kudlow and Reiner it is and always has been about the music.

“It’s like making love to my wife,” Kudlow said on his wilful persistence with Anvil.

“I’ve got a couple of kids, but I keep doing it, I keep trying. It’s just what I do, I love it,” he analogises.
Kudlow is the huge heart of Anvil! The Story of Anvil, which is already being hailed as one of the greatest rock documentaries of all time. He is indomitable, an eternal optimist who forges ahead blindly despite more than 30 years of mostly abject failure. At the time the film was made, Kudlow was working as a delivery driver for a caterer; Reiner had a job as a jeweller.

“I started out with Rob when I was 14 years old and we said ‘we’re going to do it ’til we’re old men’ … we really meant that. I really believe that no matter how hard it gets there’s always a way,” Kudlow says in the film.

Both Kudlow and Reiner came from middle class, immigrant Jewish families – there is footage of Kudlow’s bar mitzvah in the film – but while you might assume their parents were on their backs to “get a real job”, it wasn’t the case. In fact, Reiner’s father, a Hungarian Auschwitz survivor was especially supportive of his son’s career path.

“Don’t forget when I started doing this, it wasn’t that long after the Holocaust. My dad didn’t give a shit what I did, he had justot out of Auschwitz and was pretty much rapt with whatever I did. It didn’t really matter to him,” Reiner said.

Kudlow openly embraces his Judaism in the film, at one point jokingly offering lyrics for a new song, singing: “Oi, oi, oi, Moishe laid a goy, what’s ever happened to my little Jewish boy. I sent him to school to learn and read and write, now he comes back shtooping shiksas every night,” in a thick Yiddish accent.

Kudlow is the perfect documentary subject. He is an unaffected, immediately likeable everyman, who is proud and passionate, but not self-conscious. He speaks with poetry in his voice and it’s hard to watch him fail. After a calamitous European tour that ends up costing the band money to play empty hovels, Kudlow was philosophical. “At least there was a tour for things to go wrong on.”

Watching the film, it just doesn’t seem fair that someone with Kudlow’s ceaseless dedication can’t catch a break. But the film’s tragedy is also its humorous wellspring. Anvil is a caricature of 80s hair-rock bands and unwittingly lampoons the era and the genre, so it’s no surprise comparisons to the virtuosic mockumentary This is Spinal Tap are being drawn. On Anvil’s set list are songs like Thumb Hang, Hard Times-Fast Ladies, Flight of the Bumble Beast and 666 and with album titles like Backwaxed, it’s hard to escape the similarities to Rob Reiner’s 1984 film.

Anvil director and former roadie for the band Sacha Gervasi, includes a couple of knowing nods to Spinal Tap, including a scene where an amp is turned up to 11 and the band visits Stonehenge while in the UK.

Gervasi befriended Kudlow and Reiner by showing them around London in 1983. He soon joined the band as their roadie and went on several tours with Anvil in the 1980s. In 2004 Gervasi wrote The Terminal, which starred Tom Hanks and was directed by Steven Spielberg.

“I was at Anvil’s very first show [in the UK],” Gervasi said. “Everyone was there including Lemmy from Motorhead. Anvil blew the roof off the place. They played faster, heavier and more intensely than any band I’d ever seen. And they were hilarious. Lips cavorted around with his dildo like an adrenalised harpee on meth-amphetamines.”

“Bands far worse than them ended up making it big but Anvil didn’t. They just seemed to fade into obscurity. I remember thinking they must have broken up or something. In the back of my mind I wondered how Lips and Robb were and what had become of their lives. But by then I was distracted with my own life.”

Gervasi frames his friends Kudlow and Reiner with great affection in the film, but even if he hadn’t, it would be hard not to like these guys. The film is extremely well put together, but more than this, it is genuinely uplifting. So much so that the audience at the Melbourne screening broke into spontaneous applause during certain parts of the film.
Kudlow’s description of his love for performing is a good analogy for how it feels to watch the film.

“There are moments, actual beautiful moments, human moments when you’re in the same room with people who love you.”
And there will likely be plenty of love from audiences all over the world.

Anvil! The Story Of Anvil is screening nationally in selected cinemas.

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