INTERVIEW: Anvil open up about their game-changing rock doc
Image courtesy of Abramorama / Provided by official site.
By all accounts, when Anvil!: The Story of Anvil hit movie theaters 13 years ago, the Earth shifted a bit on its axis for this Canadian heavy metal band. The story is old hat at this point, but it bears repeating: Anvil was founded by best friends Steve “Lips” Kudlow, guitarist and vocalist, and Robb Reiner, drummer, in the late 1970s. They eventually found success in the 1980s, especially with the album Metal on Metal. By the time director Sacha Gervasi hit the record button several decades later, the audiences had thinned a bit for Anvil, but there was still the friendship between Kudlow and Reiner, plus their undying dedication to rock music.
Now, Anvil! has been re-released into theaters. This version is completely remastered and features an exclusive 18-minute interview that accompanies the main feature. Looking back on this cinematic experience, Kudlow and Reiner are still pleased by how the documentary impacted their professional lives. “It was a total game-changer for the band,” Reiner said in a recent Zoom interview.
Kudlow agreed: “The whole thing came from a place of 100 percent trust, plain and simple. Sacha loved the band. He’s like a little brother to us, so it’s like how do you not trust the guy. He wants to only do good, so what the hell. Let him film everything and make the movie he really wants to make.”
Anvil have been quite busy this past year, making up for lost time during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have toured extensively, bringing adoring fans new songs off their latest record, Impact Is Imminent, and they already have a tour shaping up for spring 2023. For these two musicians, touring and making music are what they do for a living, and there’s no stopping them anytime soon.
When Kudlow started playing music himself, he gravitated immediately to the guitar. He cites Chuck Berry and Little Richard as early influences, and he also talked up the British Invasion and blues musicians of his youth. “For me, that was 1966,” the guitarist said about his early musical days. “I went after guitar. It was the guitar music era. … By the time I was 3 or 4, I was aware of Elvis Presley and remember seeing him on The Ed Sullivan Show only with his face showing, and I remember asking, why don’t they show the rest of his body? I remember asking that. Wow.”
He added: “You get the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and then before long, by the time ‘67 rolls around, you’ve got Jimi Hendrix. So you’re following guitar, especially lead guitar, which was a huge and massive propellent of rock music. That’s what it was all about. It was about electric guitar and what you can do with it, and once guys like Hendrix came, it was like a revolution of music that happened at that time, an explosion that we’ve never seen before. It was a phenomenon, and you follow that through. All that branches out, and it eventually … inspired what people call heavy metal. It’s really just an extension of rock ‘n’ roll, which is what it was to begin with. It’s about electric guitar and what it’s developed into, and that’s where we are really even today. There is guitar in almost every type of music you could possibly think of. The electric guitar has permeated all music and all generations at this point in time. It was a revolutionary thing, the electric guitar.”
Reiner’s introduction to music was a little different. He remembers seeing Little Ricky drumming on the I Love Lucy show. He turned to his mother and said, “I want to play drums.”
“That’s when it started,” Reiner said. “That was it. I was a kid. I was 11. I took drum lessons for about two years and just kept going with it. Quit school when I was 16, joined a band, went on the road, and that’s all I’ve done my whole life.”
Both Reiner and Kudlow were adamant that they never considered leaving Anvil or stopping the band. Even during the time period documented in Anvil!, which was difficult, they kept moving forward. Reiner said rockers are finished with music when they call it quits.
Kudlow said that after the band’s first three albums catapulted them to the heights of the metal world (Hard ‘n’ Heavy, Metal on Metal, Forged in Fire), they sustained their success and never had a problem with record companies not giving them a deal.
“The only decision about stopping is our own, not because we can’t get a record deal or not,” Kudlow said. “There’s always a show you can do, and now that that movie came out, it’s been endless shows and endless opportunities to insane proportions where you’ve got no room in the calendar. You’re booking into the next year, never mind the next week, you know what I’m saying. It’s insane what has actually happened. We are making a full-on living in rock music, which is miraculous because there’s only a handful of us that could say that honestly. That’s actually a truth. It takes a lot to get there, a helluva lot to get there, and it’s no easy task. And it’s not going to come overnight. I never expected it to, but I’ve been working long and hard. And it’s not a question of deserving; it’s a question of earning, and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve earned our way, and we’re here. And we’re here until the end, until we die. That’s what I mean. And certainly having this movie have a second run is a huge, huge boost to our career to add yet another generation of kids that didn’t know about us, so there’s a whole bunch of new 20-year-olds who are going to now learn about Anvil. So that’s awesome, and you can’t really ask for more than that.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Anvil!: The Story of Anvil has been re-released into theaters on its 13th anniversary. Click here for more information.
