Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Come on, now!

/ remember the first time / heard Metal On Metal.

You gotta hear it. It's so heavy. It's heavier than anything you've ever heard.

When Anvil first showed up on the scene, it was like, "Fuck!

"This is cool. This is a statement."

Like, literally, these guys are going to turn the music world upside down.

Seeing them was like a challenge to us to say,

"Well, if we can't be better than that, then we should just go home."

All the people back from stage!

They're a great band, yeah. I always liked Anvil. They got my vote.

If you actually had to choose one band and one album

that really started the whole ball rolling,

it would be Meta/ On Meta/ and it would be Anvil.

The minute you heard Anvil, the minute you heard the music,

the minute you saw the pictures, the minute you heard the story,

you could tell that this was the real deal.

Anvil was one of those bands that just put on this really amazing live performance.

Lips, the singer, used to come out with this bondage harness on

and he used to come out with this dildo and play his Flying V.

I mean, it was just complete insanity,

and that's why it was such a huge turn-on for us kids.

It was like something we'd never seen before.

They were thrash, man. They were a fast band.

And you're talking about a year before the big four,

Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth.

There's a certain sound that comes from that album

that has become one of the basic formulas for any heavy metal record made today.

We were talking about Robb Reiner, like,

he was by far the best metal drummer out there, in terms of his ability.

He was the guy. There was a "holy shit".

They were all good. There wasn't a bad guy in the band.

They were all great at what they did.

They should have made it a lot bigger. I don't really understand the reason why.

Sometimes life deals you a tough deck.

I don't know what happened. Why did they just fall off the radar?

I really have no idea.

You have to be at the right place at the right time. That's the whole thing.

If you're not at the right place at the right time, you will never do it.

I don't know if there was an isolation thing

because of the Canadian element, or whatever,

but something didn't translate all the way up to the next level.

They never really got the respect that they deserved after a while

because, as big as an influence as they had on everybody,

everybody just sort of ripped them off and then, sort of, just left them for dead.

This is where it begins. Basically, it's 7:00. I'm not sure what they're serving up today.

It's probably, I don't know.

From week to week, it slightly changes.

Every day it's a different menu but in different orders.

Let's say one week they have pizza, shepherd's pie,

and then the next week they'll have shepherd's pie, then pizza.

You know, put it out of order, out of the order from the week before.

If they happen to make shepherd's pie or something like that,

this week they'll make meatloaf next week on that day.

They'll rally between meatloaf and shepherd's pie

or meatballs with mashed potatoes. You know, just depends.

- I can't believe it. You're so cynical. - Where's the 20 bucks?

Today is a Monday schedule, which is,

they have to put bananas in all the deliveries.

You see, there's 10 racks, 10 routes, 10 vans, 10 drivers

and I'm one of those 10 drivers.

For all this horrible shit that I've got to go through,

I've got Anvil that gives me my happiness and it works out really good,

because even though Anvil doesn't give me pay,

it gives me the joy and the pleasure that you need to get through life.

The way I look at it, really, is that it could never be worse than what it already is.

If it never got better, that's the way it is. You see what I'm saying?

So, the only way that it could really... It could only get better.

It can't get worse from whatever's going to happen. There's no way.

But, on the other hand, if it did get worse, at least, this time, after all's said and done,

I can say that all has been said and done.

Instead of, "I've left a whole bunch of things undone

"and I wasn't able to do that and I couldn't do this

"and I didn't do that and I should have been this way

"and I could have been that way."

At least, this time, I'll do everything that it possibly takes to get there.

To make the success happen and feel it from internally this time.

- How's it going with the band, man? - Great, man. We're writing our new album.

Fuck, I'd rather be on a stage than doing this, you know.

At the moment, it gives me purpose.

It's part of my psychoactive therapy sessions.

And my doctor says I'm doing well, you know.

So, that's it. But, yeah, give me another stage and another party

and I'm really happy.

I love to entertain. It's part... It's in my soul.

Nothing is like being in the face of your fans.

There's a moment, and there are actual beautiful moments,

human moments, where you're actually,

you're in the same room as the people that love you.

Yeah!

Hello there, Toronto!

Yeah!

Robb, he's come over to my place so many times delivering CDs, T-shirts.

Yeah, Robb's been amazing, for sure.

They wrote a tune after him and me, Cut Loose and Mad Dog.

I've gone to probably two or three hundred shows of Anvil.

We've been to Oshawa, Sudbury, we used to travel with them.

It's an outlet, why not? People do other bad things in life.

It's a good outlet, metal.

Yeah, to my dying day, the metal for sure.

"I'd rather be a king below than a servant above.

"I'd rather be free and hate than a prisoner of love.

"Six, six, oh, six. Six."

This is going to be the best birthday I've ever had.

Something like that.

The tunes that we have for the upcoming album

are fucking, like, unbelievable.

The feels, the riffs, the grooves, the lyrics, pure, fucking magic.

Most people only know us for our first three albums,

Hard 'N' Heavy, Metal On Metal and Forged In Fire.

But there's a lot of other stuff,

like Backwaxed, Strength Of Steel, Pound For Pound,

Live Past Or Present, Worth The Weight, Plugged In Permanent,

Absolutely No Alternative, Speed Of Sound, Plenty Of Power,

Still Going Strong and Back To Basics.

Me, Lips, we put this band together about five years ago,

but we've been playing together in a band since we were 15, 16 years old.

- This is where we learnt how to play. - Yeah.

Yeah, this is a lot of the beginnings of our whole friendship,

our relationship with the band and life. It all happened here.

Every day on the way home from school I hear this blasting music

coming from that window right there.

Whoever's playing to this music is playing tight. It's a drummer.

It's fucking, like, six shits coming out of their eyes.

Anyway, I meet this guy in my biology class and he goes,

"Hey, man, I'm going to get this guy, Robb Reiner.

"He lives over at the corner of the Almans'."

All I could see was this speaker that was sitting in the window

and heavy music like either Sabbath or Grand Funk or Cactus,

a lot of Cactus. The guy really liked Cactus. And I go...

"Who could possibly like Cactus?"

We had one that we wrote called The Lola Song

and it had nothing to do with the song by The Kinks.

The Lolas were a little frozen kind of treat and it was called the Lola

and we liked them so much we wrote a song about them.

We were just innocent kids. We didn't really know what we were doing.

We just started rocking out and making this music.

Today on Shirley,

"Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, what's it doing to our kids?"

Now, let me read some lyrics from a song called Toe Jam by the group Anvil.

"Dig a little deeper, hip your partner, make her shout,

"back to front, side to side, tip your cap and come inside,

"down with her fishnets, up with her skirt, dig a little deeper, till you hit pay dirt."

As soon as he met Robb, Robb is a drummer,

and Steven wouldn't continue school.

He wasn't gonna... He gave up school.

Old Pancer's, home of the corned beef sandwich.

I think the first song we ever wrote

- was called Thumb Hang. - Thumb Hang. Yeah.

We were trying to write a song about the Spanish Inquisition.

We learnt about it in history class. They would hang people up by their thumbs

if they didn't take on Catholicism.

So, you know, I figured, "Hey, there's a cool subject. Thumb hang."

Fuck, we should be doing that again.

- They're like brothers. - They're like brothers.

I mean, it would be...

I think it would be like splitting Siamese twins, really.

They've just always been very tight.

What, they've been around for almost 30 years now.

And it's just amazing how they're going to keep on going and going and going.

They're never going to stop.

You have to structure your life around it, I guess.

You know, we changed our wedding date for it.

Averey was born the Friday before he went away on the tour,

we kind of got him started.

You know, "Gotta have this baby now, he's leaving."

- What does your dad do for a living? - He's in a band.

- What's the name of the band? - Anvil.

- What do you think of them? - Pretty good.

The band has been around so long, it's not like a band that just got reunited.

We're in shape, we're in playing shape, we're in writing shape.

It's not like we let it fall apart and then we're trying to rebuild it.

We've been building it all along and working at it.

I think it's probably got more potential now than it ever has.

It's been an honour and a thrill to be in this band for 10 years.

And there was moments when I wondered, "Is this the right place for me, or is this...

"Am I... Are there other opportunities for me out there?"

But those thoughts don't last long when I start thinking of,

"Yeah, I'm in Anvil."

I was a big Anvil fan for many years growing up as a teenager.

So sometimes I still can't believe, it's like, "Wow, I'm in Anvil! I can't believe it."

You know?

Ivan met this girl over in Europe by the name of Tiziana.

She's actually an agent and she's been e-mailing me.

It looks like she's been a big fan of the band

and she's basically telling me that she has a passion and love for metal music

and I guess we're part of that. It looks like she's booked us a tour.

Wow, look at this. Italy, Switzerland,

Austria, France, England, Belgium, Germany. 1,500 euro a fucking show, man.

Holy shit, this is going to be the biggest tour I've done in 20 years.

When I sit at home or work at Choice Children's Catering,

they don't know that my band even exists.

But if I happen to play, you know, a show someplace in Europe

and one of the labels goes, "Hey, man, that band Anvil

"that we heard about, you know, 20 years ago, they're playing.