Playing the impossibly vain lead singer, David St. Hubbins, in the 1984 mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap," Michael McKean helped rock & roll remember its sense of humor. Now preparing for a possible reunion tour, McKean looks back on his portrayal of rock excess

Interview by Chris Willman

EW Online: Do you have any memories of the movie's premiere?

Michael McKean: We didn't have a premiere party or anything, as far as I remember. We knew the movie was really good, but we didn't know if anyone was gonna think it was funny except us... We previewed it in Seattle and Dallas, and Seattle was kind of medium, and Dallas was just hopeless. People were walking out, and those ominous cards that people have to fill out were so awful. They were like ''Why didn't you make a movie about a good band?'' and ''Why is the camera moving around like that?'' and ''Who are these guys? Why is Meathead in it?'' It was a little bit distressing. And of course the people who run the preview-card businesses, the ones who are responsible for movies being sooo good now, basically told us ''This is a complete disaster. No one's ever gonna see this film. You shouldn't even distribute it.'' So we knew it was a special case. And indeed it didn't do fabulously well in theaters, except that a couple theaters showed the movie for a year, literally.

What were the origins of Spinal Tap?

Chris Guest and I had done just a little snatch of these two guys running into each other in a motel room -- they had both been given the same key and they hadn't seen each other for years -- as part of a demo for a cable series. That was the first time they really existed. When Rob Reiner was looking to get started as a filmmaker, it occurred to us that this might be a thing to do, a mock documentary. The band had by then appeared as Spinal Tap on Rob's special called ''The TV Show'' -- which recently showed on TV Land, by the way. Spinal Tap was part of a ''Midnight Special'' parody with Rob as Wolfman Jack. The band at that time was Chris and Harry (Shearer) and myself, Loudon Wainwright on keyboards, and Russ Kunkel on drums. We had a very bad little videotaped mock-video, and the song was called ''Rock & Roll Nightmare,'' which we occasionally do in concert but never recorded. Anyway, it snowballed from there. We watched a lot of rock & roll documentaries and took a little something from all of them. From ''The Last Waltz,'' we had the Scorsese presence, the bearded, serious filmmaker haunting the band. The maniac manager is basically Led Zeppelin's manager, who was very prominent in the ''Song Remains the Same'' film... Then we got a big map of the United States and theorized a tour. We said, ''What's the worst thing that could happen in Boston? Who might they run into a hotel in Cleveland? How do we make this tour the worst tour of all time? And how do we make these guys sympathetic and yet pathetic at the same time?'' The easiest stuff was writing the songs, because that kind of bombast is such great clay to work with. You could almost make no mistakes. There's no such thing as over-the-top -- and there's no such thing as under-the-bottom, either. We made, a very, very inexpensive demo in lieu of a screenplay because we knew we wanted to improvise. So we did this 20-minute film with these really cheap-ass wigs. I mean, I looked like Gena Rowlands' brother or something. It's actually viewable on the CD-ROM and laserdisc and probably DVD as well. Embassy Pictures saw that as an example of Rob's work, because Rob was using that as a demo for directing, and said ''Why don't we do this as a real movie?'' We said, ''That's what we've been waiting to hear!''

Do you take any credit for helping kill metal?

It didn't work, did it? Well, it took a few years, anyway. After the movie it was in kind of a doldrums, but God, with the rise of MTV, heavy metal became bigger than ever. I mean, Motley Crue didn't really hit until around that time. Is it true the ''band'' might be doing something again?

Yeah, the film rights are owned now by a French company (Canal Plus). They just said, ''Look, this is one of the best movies of the late 20th century, and we should either re-release it theatrically and support it with live appearances, or have a big rollout of the video.'' Whatever they're gonna do, we're in, because we love being these guys. There are still a couple of little itches we haven't scratched about live performance. So we'll see. I've gotta drop about 20 pounds to get into wardrobe again, but that'll be part of the fun.