This weekend at movie theaters, music fans had two choices:
Hannah Montana: The Movie and its fictional story of a wealthy teenage popstar struggling to balance super-stardom and her private life, or
Anvil! The Story of Anvil, the true story of a group of 50-year-old men struggling in obscurity to succeed as a heavy metal band while working day-jobs in order to survive.
It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that Miley Cyrus’s Disney flick dominated the box office. However, the fact that underdog rock band Anvil is finally getting attention after all of these years is a victory nonetheless.
A bittersweet documentary, early reviews have painted Anvil! The Story of Anvil as something of a real-life version of This is Spinal Tap, the popular 1984 “mockumentary” of an amusingly dysfunctional rock band. Whether the documentary is celebrating Anvil or exploiting it is debatable, but the result is entertaining either way.
Formed in 1978, while the members were still in high school, Canadian heavy metal band Anvil released its debut album, Metal on Metal, in 1982. The album quickly became a favorite among musicians while remaining relatively unknown to mainstream listeners, perhaps making Anvil the hard rock equivalent of the Velvet Underground.
Anvil toured with big-name acts and watched its peers rise to stardom, but group’s music never quite caught on, leaving the band members to work day-jobs (such as delivering food to schools) while struggling to keep the band together-for three decades. The documentary follows the band on a European tour, and reportedly features a scene of a club owner attempting to pay the band in goulash (something we’re sure never happened to Miley Cyrus).
Anvil! The Story of Anvil features interviews with well-known metalheads such as Lars Ulrich (Metallica), Slash (Velvet Revolver/ex-Guns’n'Roses) and Lemmy (Motorhead), all praising Anvil and touting it as an important, influential group that rarely gets the credit it deserves.
The band is celebrating the release of the movie with the Anvil Experience, a series of movie screenings followed by live performances, likely including songs from the band’s latest CD, This is Thirteen. The current schedule includes:
April 14 - El Corazon - Seattle, WA
April 16 - The Paladium - Worcester, MA
April 17 - The Trocadero - Philadelphia, PA
April 21 - Crowfoot Ballroom - Pontiac, MI
April 22 - Metro - Chicago - IL
JaredfromSubway says...
04.13.09 1:25 pm
I was listening to an interview with the director of this movie and he mentioned how they were getting overwhelmed with the amount of support other metal bands were showing. Even a prick like Lars Ulrich was going out of his way to garner support for the band.