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- [00:00]
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- [02:33]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories on the podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York and Los Angeles and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org the moth receives support from Amazon.com the story you're about to hear by Tony Hendra was recorded live at the Moth main stage in 2009. The theme of the night was stories from behind the scenes, and it was presented as part of documentary Fortnite 2009 at MoMA.
- [03:14]
Tony Hendra
It's 1982. I am sitting in a sumptuous beach house in Malibu, watching a magnificent Pacific sunset, and this is shaping up as the worst day of my life. I was in Los Angeles for two reasons. First, to promote my latest satirical publication, and secondly, to appear in a low budget movie which was the directorial debut of an old friend of mine. I wasn't terribly keen about this, never having been in a movie, and he had some deranged notion about shooting it like a documentary. The satirical publication was much more my speed. It was a time, as you probably remember, when there was a man in the White House who was talking quite blithely and frequently about a winnable nuclear war against the godless Soviets. And some of us in New York had decided this was a satirical opportunity. And we put together this parody pamphlet of the kind that would inform people of what they could do in the event of nuclear Armageddon. And it was put out by an agency called the Futile Preparedness Agency. And it gave you little tips about what you could do in the event of a direct hit by a 100 megaton bomb on your home. It was called Meat Mr. Bomb, and Mr. Bomb was a very cheery, helpful 1950s hydrogen bomb with a wide smile and good teeth and a firm handshake. Now, meet Mr. Bomb was quite funny, and Newsweek had said they were going to put it on their cover. So I had, at my own expense, 200,000 copies of this printed up. And I had just heard minutes earlier from my publisher that the largest distributor in the Southwest had read Mr. Bomb and he had not enjoyed it. He was a Razorback Reaganite, and he had shredded every one of the hundred thousand copies I'd shipped to him, refused to pay for them. And since I had no money left to sue him, I was effectively bankrupt. Now, the house I was staying in was to some degree a house of gloom. It belonged to a member of the band, you remember, that legendary 60s group. And I had once believed that the band was the greatest rock and roll group in history, if not the universe. And of course, they had broken up a few years earlier for the usual egotistical, unnecessary reasons, leaving me bitterly disappointed, and the mood that I was in at that point, this breaking up seemed to me to be symptomatic of the age. Things were breaking up, falling apart. They were coming to an end. Peggy Noonan famously called those years Morning in America. To me, they were more like late evening in America. And worse things than that were happening. I mean, a year before that, a deranged fan had shot John Lennon in the street. Not many months before this, a death much closer to home had happened, which was that of John Belushi. And I had given John Belushi his first job, actually his first starring role in a show I produced for the National Lampoon called Lemmings. And Lemmings was a full scale parody of Woodstock at which all the great rock idols got theirs. And John was the sort of satanic MC of all this and was absolutely brilliant. And Lemmings became a big Off Broadway hit. And John was launched on his stellar career and his equally magnificent drug habit, which had just killed him. My first marriage was in ruins and I knew that basically it was my fault. And it seemed to me somehow appropriate that I was in California, because California is the end. I mean, it's the end of America. You can't go any further right after that, it's 5,000 more miles of oceanic night. And then you get to China and it all starts over again. And it was also appropriate that somehow this magnificent sunset was sliding gradually underneath the horizon into Stygian darkness. And for the first time in my life, I just wondered, what the hell was the pointing going on now, whoever owned this house, Robbie Robertson or Richard Manuel, whoever it was, was kind enough to have left a quart of vodka in it. And I also had with me my very first prescription for Valium. I'd always hated downers and I'd never taken them. But I'd been sleeping badly and my doctor said this was the answer. So these two things taken together seemed to me to present a perfect opportunity. So I laid out 10 Valium. I figured that's how many it would take. I took a big, big slug of vodka and took my first Valium ever and then took another slug of vodka. Nothing much seemed to happen. So I took two more Valium and a really big hit of vodka this time. Still nothing. Clearly this wasn't going to work. I would have to take the remaining seven Valium and get it over with. And so I took a really big hit of vodka to prepare myself for this step. And I picked up the Valium and I looked at them in my hand for a long time. And I Fell asleep. And about 14 hours later, I woke, and I was still just as suicidal, but now had a massive hangover, too. And I remember through the fog that I was supposed to be on a movie set. To be precise, about four hours earlier. And it was the last thing in the world I wanted to do was be on a movie set. And especially a movie about rock and roll, which at this point I hated. And it didn't have a script. This movie, it had to be totally improvised. And I'd never improvised in my life either. But I was a professional. So I jumped in my car and sped across the Malibu hills to the location. And they rushed me into hair and wardrobe and so forth and so on and rushed me to the set. And there were the three stars of the movie, looking absolutely hilarious in their fright wigs. And the set was actually a limo. And I was placed in the limo with them, and somebody yelled, action. And we were underway. And they were brilliant. None of them was British, but they all had perfect British accents. And they were being incredibly funny in character, intimidatingly funny. And I knew that very soon one of them would turn to me and say something, and I would have to answer. Now, I'd done a little homework. I'd read up on improvisation, and I'd talked to all my friends who'd been in improv groups. And the consensus seemed to be there was one basic rule you had to follow. Listen. Can't bring anything preconceived to improvisation. You must just listen not just to what people are saying, the other people are saying, but. But to what their faces are saying, what their bodies and their movements are saying. And if you do that, just simply answer what you hear. It will work. And now the moment came. The character called David was turning to me and he was saying something to me. And I could see in his face that his character thought my character was pretty sleazy, that this character, whose name was Ian, lied a lot. And out of my mouth came this voice that wasn't really mine. It was sort of evasive and sort of slimily ingratiating. And it had that kind of nasal whine, you know, that was beginning to creep into everyday English. And it worked. It was amazing. I mean, the scene was enabled to continue being funny. I mean, I wasn't funny, but I helped them be funny. And my friend, the director, was very happy with the scene. So we did another take of it, and he was even happier with that. And then we did another scene and another scene, and pretty soon the day was over, and I had Completely forgotten all thoughts of offing myself. But more importantly, something quite wonderful was happening, which was these stars and the extended cast and myself too. We were all in some way on the same emotional page. We had all sort of arrived at this deep disillusion and disappointment with this wonderful music that when we were younger we had had such high hopes for, that we actually thought some of us would change things, would bring peace and rationality into life, would end racism and war, you remember. And it had betrayed us and it had been betrayed for us. And it had been a source of failures and disappointments and vulgarity and stupidity and absurdity and pretension and so on. And this whole cast was just coming into that and devising and finding all these wonderful ways in which venality and cynicism and so forth had poisoned this whole area of the art world. And it wasn't the big sort of comedic set pieces that I loved. It was the little tiny ones where we would find out new dimensions of this. And I'll just give you a quick example. This is actually my. The favorite scene, at least one of the favorite scenes that I'm in. And it's sort of in the middle somewhere. And it's about Nigel, who's the lead guitarist, being backstage before a concert. And a large amount of food has been delivered to Nigel and he's not at all happy with it. And specifically, there's some very small slices of bread which have been delivered with this. And Nigel just doesn't understate. I don't see how the bits of meat, how. They're too small. The bread's too small for the meat. Look, you see, it won't work. I want big bread, okay? And. And it is Ian's job, my character's job, to talk this moron down so that he can go out on stage and play the loudest music in the world to brain dead teenagers. And they keep buying tickets. That's his job. And Ian does it in this kind of mothering. He's like a kind aunt, you know? And yet at the same time, it's incredibly cynical, incredibly manipulative and so on. So anyway, that sort of body of work came together after. Throughout this. It was just a wonderful, wonderful shoot. And I would actually venture to say that Spinal Tap actually isn't a mockumentary because of this wonderful cinematographer we had, Peter Smokeler. It was actually a documentary record of a really fascinating collective comedic experiment that took place at a certain point in time and couldn't have been at any other point in time. And that was a success and I think that's why it sort of works. That's where it gets its edge in authenticity. And I have one little epitaph to this. I haven't the foggiest idea what it means, but I'm going to throw it in anyway. This was about five years later, and Spinal Tap had been out for about three years and was sort of on its way to becoming the minor classic that it became. And I got into a cab in New York and my, my driver was a quintessential acid casualty. I mean, he had, you know, he had one of those beribboned kind of ponytails down to his ass crack, you know. And he peered in the rearview mirror and he said, hey man, weren't you in Spyl Tap? And I said, yeah, yeah, I played the manager. Yeah, he said. And he said, oh man, I really dig their music so far out. He said, you know, man, I was into tap before they made that movie.
- [15:21]
Dan Kennedy
Tony Hendra's latest book, George Carlin's Last Words, is currently on the New York Times top 15 bestsellers and it's on sale now at Amazon.com he's also the author of Father the Man who Saved My Soul as well as the Messiah of Morris Avenue, a novel. The Moth is a non profit organization, so consider supporting our free podcast by going to our podcast contribution page or by becoming a moth member@themoth.org the moth is now on itunes. Search for the best of the Moth to find some of your favorite stories from the Moth Radio Hour and from our podcasts. To learn more about this and all of the Moth's upcoming shows and our corporate events and training program, Visit our website themoth.org Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy.
- [16:09]
Tony Hendra
Is the author of the book Rock An Office Power Ballad.
- [16:12]
Dan Kennedy
Learn more@rockonthebook.com Amazon.com is proud to support the creation of great stories on the Moth mainstage and at the Moth Story Slams. Thanks to Maz Swift for our podcast music. Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Ruest at the Argo Studios in New York. Podcast hosting by PRX Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.