Spinal Tap: Stellar musicians beneath the wigs

It's been 25 years since Spinal Tap launched its hilariously disastrous, albeit fictional, North American tour in support of its equally ill-fated and fictional album, Smell the Glove. Mercifully, the band's Unwigged & Unplugged tour - which touched down Thursday night at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside - seems to be going much better: rave reviews and sold-out theaters without a single drummer losing his life, all of which is a big step up from second billing to a puppet show at an amusement park or the Air Force base-dance circuit.

Part mock-career retrospective, part teaser for the forthcoming album Back from the Dead (June 16), Unwigged & Unplugged finds the men behind Tap - Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer - sans wigs, codpieces, and electric guitars. The three perform sterling semi-acoustic versions of the Tap songbook (didgeridoo included), along with choice selections from various alter-ego bands such as the Folksmen's gaseous "A Mighty Wind" and the Thamesmen's snarly British Invasion pastiche, "Gimme Some Money."

There was a stellar bluegrass reading of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up," a finger-snapping jazzbo take on "Big Bottom," a gnarly "Heavy Duty," and a '70s porn-funk romp through "Sex Farm" - the last, McKean said, deemed too salacious for broadcast by NPR and The Tonight Show. But Glenside, he assured us, was hip enough to handle it.

Between the arch songs and the glib patter, they screened video gems such as a pre-This Is Spinal Tap TV performance in full metal regalia from 1979, and a short mockumentary of a Scandinavian cheese festival featuring, as Shearer noted, an elementary-school-age Jake Gyllenhaal.

Often lost in the laughter is the fact that the men of Tap are very accomplished players, composers, and performers who happen to have an uncanny knack for lampooning the inanity and preciousness of popular musical forms. When an audience member mistakenly asserted during the Q&A segment that Tap "isn't a real band," Shearer shot back: "You're the one who paid money to see us play."

After a standing ovation closed out the two-hour concert, the men of Tap returned to the stage proudly donning Phillies game shirts, their names emblazoned on the back, that presumably had been awarded to them by the Phillies organization. "What?" they asked when a cheer went up. "We've been wearing these for every show. This is the first time anyone made a big deal out of it."