{"id":360696,"date":"2025-12-20T21:52:29","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T21:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/360696\/"},"modified":"2025-12-20T21:52:29","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T21:52:29","slug":"for-rob-reiner-music-was-a-main-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/360696\/","title":{"rendered":"For Rob Reiner, music was a main character"},"content":{"rendered":"

For more than 48 hours, the 1959 Chordettes hit \u201cLollipop\u201d<\/a> has been stuck in my head. The song was part of a transitional scene in 1986\u2019s \u201cStand By Me<\/a>,\u201d where the pop at the end is pantomimed by Corey Feldman and Jerry O\u2019Connell, two of the film\u2019s three surviving leads. It\u2019s not the worst Rob Reiner earworm to have; no doubt someone else out there is plagued by \u201cBig Bottom\u201d or \u201cHell Hole,\u201d or is simply hearing Bruno Kirby shout \u201cBaby fish mouth! Baby fish mouth!\u201d<\/a> over and over. We all process grief in our own ways, and in the days following the murder<\/a> of actor-director Rob Reiner<\/a> and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, I keep coming back to the music.<\/p>\n

Reiner\u2019s first film was 1982\u2019s heavy-metal mockumentary \u201cThis Is Spinal Tap<\/a>\u201d; his last, released in September, was the long-awaited sequel, \u201cSpinal Tap 2: The End Continues.\u201d (A follow-up, \u201cSpinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale,\u201d was set to be released in 2026, but is now on hold.<\/a>) In the most cosmically terrible way, this actually makes sense: \u201cSpinal Tap\u201d doesn\u2019t define Reiner\u2019s work, but it is the most undiluted example of his knack for blending music into antic-yet-poignant scenes like a supporting character.<\/p>\n

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(Michael Buckner\/Variety via Getty Images) Rob Reiner at the \u201cSpinal Tap II: The End Continues\u201d premiere on September 09, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpinal Tap\u201d debuted in 1984, which was a great year for movies about music only if your name was either Prince<\/a> or Mozart. By contrast to \u201cPurple Rain\u201d and \u201cAmadaeus,\u201d Reiner\u2019s first feature didn\u2019t rank \u2014 \u201cSpinal Tap,\u201d a $2 million film with a box office of less than $4 million, was outperformed by both the Rick Springfield vehicle \u201cHard to Hold\u201d and the Dolly Parton<\/a>\/Sylvester Stallone clunker \u201cRhinestone,\u201d just edging past the Talking Heads concert film \u201cStop Making Sense.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSpinal Tap\u201d doesn\u2019t define Reiner\u2019s work, but it is the most undiluted example of his knack for blending music into antic-yet-poignant scenes like a supporting character.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that people didn\u2019t know that the movie was in theaters. Three years after the debut of MTV<\/a>, rock and pop music\u2019s influence was omnipresent, and a farce about over-the-hill rockers trying and failing to keep up with the times seemed likely to hit with a young, music-savvy audience. Instead, as Reiner would recall throughout the years, audiences gave it a resounding thumbs down: \u201cPeople didn\u2019t get it . . . [they] came up to me and they said \u2018I don\u2019t understand \u2014 why would you make a movie about a band nobody\u2019s ever heard of?\u2019\u201d (Among these people: Ozzy Osbourne<\/a> and, apocryphally, Oasis\u2019s Liam Gallagher<\/a>, whose brother Noel revealed that the singer didn\u2019t know Tap was fictitious until he went to see them at Carnegie Hall in 2001.)<\/p>\n

If it weren\u2019t for the VCR, \u201cSpinal Tap\u201d might never have reached cult status and gone on to become a classic whose verisimilitude apparently brought a few actual rock stars to tears that were not of laughter. But eventually, the movie twigged with kids who were already bingeing Penelope Spheeris\u2019s two-part documentary \u201cThe Decline of Western Civilization\u201d<\/a> and getting a solid primer on grubby British tomfoolery from \u201cThe Young Ones,\u201d<\/a> which MTV began airing in 1985. \u201cSpinal Tap\u201d was the logical next step, a film whose only misfire was that it was just too good at what it did right out of the gate.<\/p>\n

Mockumentaries weren\u2019t yet the staple of film and TV they would eventually become; Robert Altman\u2019s \u201cNashville\u201d<\/a> and Albert Brooks\u2019 \u201cReal Life\u201d were viewed more as metatext than as outright satire. Almost 25 years later, the New York\u2019s Times\u2019 John Leland recalled the lasting bruise of \u201cSpinal Tap\u201d\u2019s initial reception<\/a>: \u201c[T]he film\u2019s title has become a punch line waiting to reveal any subject as a joke, the more deadly serious the better.\u201d (The New York Times itself, for the record, gave the movie two separate raves upon its release, with critic Vincent Canby<\/a> calling\u00a0 it \u201cone of the brightest, funniest American film parodies to come along since \u2018Airplane!\u2019\u201d)<\/p>\n

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(Columbia Pictures\/Getty Images) Jerry O\u2019Connell, River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton and Corey Feldman in a scene from the film \u201cStand By Me,\u201d 1986.<\/p>\n

The movie bombed in theaters, but its soundtrack made the Billboard Hot 200<\/a>, debuting at No. 131. This would become a pattern: The string of movies that followed \u201cSpinal Tap\u201d \u2014 1986\u2019s \u201cStand By Me,\u201d 1987\u2019s \u201cThe Princess Bride<\/a>,\u201d and 1989\u2019s \u201cWhen Harry Met Sally<\/a>\u201d \u2014 have little in common narratively, but bear the imprint of a director for whom story and music were equally important. \u201cPeople wanted to know, \u2018How do you know all this [about music]?\u2019 [But] it was just the world I lived in,\u201d Reiner recalled in a September 2025 appearance on Elvis Mitchell<\/a>\u2019s KCRW podcast, \u201cThe Treatment.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Reiner was always determined to follow his father, comedy titan Carl Reiner<\/a>, into show business. But he was already immersed in doo-wop and rock music and, in perhaps the quintessential Boomer origin story, took a short detour through San Francisco\u2019s music-soaked Summer of Love first. His first official gig as a comedy writer was the envelope-pushing CBS variety show \u201cThe Smothers Brothers<\/a> Comedy Hour,\u201d which had a politically liberal slant and featured musical guests like The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, and Harry Belafonte<\/a>; there, Reiner joined peers like Steve Martin<\/a> in blending Borscht-Belt schtick with Haight-Ashbury headiness.<\/p>\n

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Debuting at the start of the Vietnam War, the Smothers Brothers\u2019 mix of social justice, political satire and psychedelia drew outrage from the network execs, sponsors, and \u2014 in a too-timely-to-ignore twist \u2014 even President Lyndon B. Johnson. (Johnson eventually came around<\/a>, asserting that \u201cIt is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists.\u201d) Reiner\u2019s stint on the show was brief (it was canceled in 1969), but it solidified an artistic voice that embraced the sincere absurdity of being human and the joy of being moved by music, by idealism, by love \u2014 and invited audiences to do the same.<\/p>\n

\u201cStand By Me,\u201d Reiner\u2019s second feature, was adapted from the Stephen King<\/a> short story \u201cThe Body.\u201d Reiner changed the title so the movie sounded less like a horror feature, and decided on Ben E. King\u2019s 1961 hit as the matching track for the film. He loved it, but more than that, he thought it spoke to the bittersweet bonds of preadolescence at the movie\u2019s center, the constant teasing and squabbling and provoking that disappeared when they faced down a foe (hoodlum older brothers, leeches) as a united front. The four boys lived a life almost wholly devoid of parents and authority figures, where their connection to the world came largely via transistor radio. The film\u2019s needle drops \u2014 Buddy Holly\u2019s<\/a> \u201cEveryday,\u201d The Silhouettes\u2019 \u201cGet a Job,\u201d and my current earworm, \u201cLollipop\u201d \u2014 seemed like dreamy sonic buffers easing the abrupt transition from child to teen.<\/p>\n

Similarly, \u201cWhen Harry Met Sally\u201d\u2019s spiffed-up standards, delivered in an anodyne croon by Harry Connick Jr.<\/a>, operate like a dapper Greek chorus that descends on the neurotic will-they-won\u2019t-they chums, periodically affirming that the persistence of romantic hope isn\u2019t as embarrassing as they think.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s tricky, to satirize the very thing you love,\u201d Reiner told Mitchell on \u201cThe Treatment.\u201d He was talking about what makes \u201cSpinal Tap\u201d work, but could have been describing the core of his astonishing run of 1980s films, in which opposing forces \u2014 reality and fantasy, childhood and adulthood, friendship and enmity, timidity and bombast \u2014 all have their chance to shine. The \u201cSpinal Tap\u201d movies are famously scriptless; the dialogue is all improvised, with Reiner, as documentarian Marty DiBergi, the straight man silently \u201cyes, and\u201d-ing his costars to preposterous pinnacles. But that comedic generosity is visible in his other early films as well. Reiner frequently likened comic dialogue to jazz, where everyone knows what they\u2019re doing; they spin into solos and then come back together in the pocket. \u201cSomeone lays down a rhythm track,\u201d he told Mitchell, \u201cand people fall right in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Harry Met Sally\u201d\u2018s spiffed-up standards, delivered in an anodyne croon by Harry Connick Jr., operate like a dapper Greek chorus that descends on the neurotic will-they-won\u2019t-they chums, periodically affirming that the persistence of romantic hope isn\u2019t as embarrassing as they think.<\/p>\n

People still are. In the days since his death, clips of Reiner keep surfacing as reminders of music\u2019s meaning to his work. There he is in 1993, playing a director<\/a> in the video for Reba McEntire<\/a>\u2019s 1993 hit \u201cDoes He Love You.\u201d That\u2019s him singing the Everly Brothers\u2019 \u201cDream\u201d on the set of \u201cSpinal Tap 2\u201d with Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. Here he is harmonizing gorgeously with \u201cNew Girl\u2019s\u201d Zooey Deschanel<\/a> \u2014 Reiner memorably guest-starred on the show as Jess Day\u2019s father \u2014 on the Christmas carol \u201cAngels We Have Heard on High\u201d and, as the same character, singing Tal Bachman\u2019s romantic-comedy staple \u201cShe\u2019s So High.\u201d Meanwhile, Blue \u00d6yster Cult dedicated a recent performance of \u201cDon\u2019t Fear the Reaper to the director, and, at their annual Hanukkah show at New York\u2019s Bowery Ballroom, and Yo La Tengo<\/a> broke into a shambling rendition of \u201cGimme Some Money,\u201d the skiffle hit originally recorded by the fictional pre\u2013\u201dSpinal Tap\u201d band The Thamesmen<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rob Reiner was, I can only assume, constantly approached by fans blurting out \u201cThese go to 11!\u201d and \u201cI\u2019ll have what she\u2019s having,\u201d yet never seemed to get tired of talking about his era-defining films as new generations found them. His life was taken horribly \u2014 but what a life. In that last interview with Mitchell, Reiner admitted that he thought of \u201cSpinal Tap 2\u201d as a romantic comedy rather than a mockumentary: Despite a fractious history, David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel always came back together. \u201cNo matter what happens, whether there\u2019s fights, there\u2019s arguments, there\u2019s disruptions in the relationship. They come back together because they\u2019re bound together by the music.\u201d<\/p>\n

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