My Encounter with Anvil! The Story of Anvil

It didn't feel like a choice. I bought the CD after the movie was over, and listened to it on the way home. It was impossible not to. The guy had almost begged us to buy it—said he needed the money to help pay his sister back, because she financed the album. It was their thirteenth record. The guys from Anvil had been making music and recording songs without success since almost before I was born.

He still wore his hair with the bangs cut above his forehead, and it fell around his shoulders on the sides, just as it had when he was a teenager, 30 years ago. His voice was hoarse; he was dressed in black. He was the lead singer—and still went by the nickname “Lips,” which was his stage name. I waited in line for half an hour to shake Steve Kudlow’s hand. (That’s me standing next to him above, and Mastodon's Brann Dailor walking past behind us.) I bought a T-shirt, too, with the band’s logo in big white letters on the front. I wanted to respect the band, honestly; I wanted to acknowledge these guys, after the documentary I’d just seen; I wanted to provide them some type of return in light of their fruitless pursuit of rock stardom, and show in some small way that I could appreciate their historic persistence, no matter what kind of music they played, or how dated it seemed when they played it. That’s really why I shelled out the $20 bucks to buy the CD, and then borrowed the other $20 to pick up the shirt.

Two weeks ago, Anvil! The Story of Anvil made its Atlanta debut at the Landmark Midtown Arts Cinema. Anvil performed after the show. I was there with six other people. I really wanted to see it, because the previews looked terrific—and I wanted to hear them live. I’ve always been a sucker for stories about ordinary people who refuse to give up (see American Movie). Of course, if you’ve seen Anvil!, maybe you’ll agree that it wasn’t quite as uplifting as I thought it was going to be. It was—well, you know, it was sad more than it was affirming. But it was sort of charming, too.

The three band members stood there in the lobby of the theatre, near the brownies and the soda fountain and the glass display windows stocked with candy, below the movie posters—shaking hands, posing for pictures, rifling through cardboard boxes to find the right size of T-shirt.

Lips and Robb Reiner (the drummer, who was always wearing a bandanna) had been arguing outside the doors to the theatre for a good half hour before the show, nearly shouting, perhaps unsettling to some of the folks who were eating at the tables outside at a restaurant called Apres Diem, because they were apparently trying to figure out how and when they were going to get paid (for what, who knows). My back against the brick post near the ticket counter, I was eavesdropping on them, and looking around, I don’t think anyone else knew who they were. Even after the release of the movie, after all the sort-of success, there they were still arguing. It was weird, to hear them yelling at each other. Of course, during the film, those two guys—Kudlow and Reiner, best friends, so close as to be brothers—yelled at each other nearly the whole time, while the music played in the background.

For their live show, they set up right in front of the white projection screen in an adjacent theatre room, and played for about 60 people who were standing in the aisles. Some thrashed their heads back and forth, yelling after each number. Most of us just stood there and listened to them without moving while they played, as though we were still watching a movie.