TAPPED OUT?: Can Spinal Tap make it...

TAPPED OUT?: Can Spinal Tap make it as a “real” rock band? Not so far, at least on the pop charts. Spinal Tap’s “Break Like the Wind” album on MCA Records fell out of the Top 200 album chart after only six weeks, despite a promotional blitz that saw the metal-spoofers featured in just about every magazine, newspaper and radio or television show in the free world.

Yet both MCA and the band are forging ahead with a real rock campaign.

“We’re marketing it like a rock band,” says Randy Miller, MCA senior vice president of marketing. He reports that 200,000 copies of the album have been shipped so far, and that sales boosts are expected as a result of appearances on the recent Freddie Mercury tribute concert and on “The Simpsons” and from a new single and video (“The Majesty of Rock”).

The album is an unqualified hit on heavy-metal radio stations, and ticket sales have also been good around the country for the band’s upcoming tour, which includes a June 5 stop at the Universal Amphitheatre.

But several people inside MCA report that marketing Spinal Tap as a real band has been tough with mainstream rock stations, where programmers seem confused over whether the album is supposed to be serious or a spoof.

“Did they make a comedy record or a rock record?” says Carey Curlop, program director of rock-oriented radio station KQLZ-FM (Pirate Radio). “I’m confused as to how to take it. . . . It’s pretty easy to play ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ by Weird Al Yankovic, because I know what it is. This one I don’t know.”

Tap manager Wendy Goldfinkel doesn’t understand the confusion, and noted that “real” people seem to be accepting both the humor and the rock on face value. When returning to Los Angeles from the Mercury tribute in London, she reported, a young customs official turned to Tap bassist Derek Smalls (we know him as Harry Shearer), and--apparently remembering the Spinal Tap movie’s foil-wrapped cucumber scene--said, “I wish I had a reason to go through your bags.”