Hard at work making bad music

Since the dawn of time, music has been written to stir, to celebrate, to make its performer seem potent or wise. One way or the other, it’s meant to be good. But for a handful of musicians and songwriters during the last three decades, many of them working in film, the task has been to create something awful, even ridiculous.

From the forced psychedelic poetry of the Rutles, an affectionate Beatles parody that animated a 1978 mock documentary, to the flamboyant bombast of Spinal Tap, a fake heavy-metal band that powered a 1984 film, to the soulless tunes of the white-blues band Blues Hammer in 2001’s “Ghost World,” this is music designed to be banal instead of imaginative, hackneyed instead of fresh. It’s born to be bad: music designed to exaggerate the worst qualities of its model, or to reveal its practitioners and fans as shallow or deluded.

Sometimes, oddly, the joke catches on: “The Rutles: All You Need is Cash” and “This is Spinal Tap” were so successfully bad that these previously imaginary groups played actual shows in the guise of reunion tours. There have been fewer calls, in contrast, for reunions of the imaginary bands featured in the movies “Rock Star” and “Almost Famous,” whose shrill and forgettable music, respectively, was written by actual hard-rock musicians.

When parodic music is done right, it’s still tuneful. But how do you make it funny?

“You have to find what’s funny about the form, go a little bit past that, and not end up with incompetence,” says Michael McKean, who wrote some of the music for Christopher Guest’s folk-music parody “A Mighty Wind,” which opens this week. “It was the same thing with Spinal Tap,” McKean says of the big-haired, over-the-hill group he helped portray with Guest and Harry Shearer. “They’re not really incompetent, they’re just kind of tasteless.”

In the new film, Guest, Shearer and McKean make up an earnest, plaid-shirted trio called the Folksmen, who are hoping to stage a comeback 30 years after releasing LPs like “Hitchin’,” “Ramblin’ ” and “Singin’.”

“You have to soak up what the music was and then lay the comedy down on top of that,” says Eugene Levy, who wrote some of “Mighty Wind’s” songs and portrays half of the lovebird duo Mitch and Mickey. “It’s like a transparent sheet you can still see through.”

You need to know -- and you need to like -- the form you’re mocking, Folksman and “Mighty Wind” director Guest says. “The early parodies that talk-show people did of rock ‘n’ roll in the ‘50s were terrible,” he says. “They didn’t know it, they didn’t like it -- and that’s a lethal combination.” Guest, like McKean and Levy, played in folk bands as a teenager.

Guest may have the longest track record of anyone penning parodic music: Years before writing music for “Spinal Tap” and “Waiting for Guffman,” the story of a Broadway reject bringing song and dance to a talentless Midwestern town, he wrote for National Lampoon’s “Radio Dinner” LPs.

Parody works in part through exaggeration. “In ‘Spinal Tap,’ there’s the fake historical quality of ‘Stonehenge,’ ” Guest says, naming a song whose staging memorably re-created the Druid monument. “It’s something the musicians look at with a mystical reverence. In folk music, it’s the seriousness with which these people approach their ‘art.’ People who take themselves too seriously, who can’t see anything else, are usually funny.”

The music for “A Mighty Wind” offers spot-on exaggerations of folk’s excesses, from its purple romanticism to its strained political commitment and college-boy slumming. “There’s a song on the [soundtrack] album about a train wreck in a coal mine,” Guest says of the track “Blood on the Coals,” which combines two of folk’s dearest cliches.

According to John Michael Higgins, who also helped pen some of the film’s music, writing bad songs is hard, honest work. For research, he went back to groups like the Serendipity Squires and the Back Porch Majority -- groups he calls “a sick marriage of egghead harmonies and the Carter Family.”

Despite the ironic thrill he got from their goofy names and horrid wardrobes, Higgins couldn’t cheat when trying to duplicate their style. “I asked, how long are the melodic phrases? How many times do the choruses repeat? When does the chord change? Do the verses get more complicated or less complicated as the song goes on?”

Some songs are so bad the audience was spared them in their entirety. “Chris has a Spanish Civil War song called ‘Skeletons of Quinto,’ ” McKean says of a piece the Folksmen briefly rehearse in the film. “It just fills one with dread when it starts up, because you know you’re gonna be lectured, and half of it is going to be in Spanish. It’s hard to do boring in comedy, which is why you don’t hear all of the song.”

McKean and his wife, Annette O’Toole, wrote three of the film’s songs, including a sea chantey made up of quaint and impenetrable nautical terms they found in a high-seas novel by Patrick O’Brian.

The couple is especially proud of a number called “Potato’s in the Paddy Wagon.” Says McKean: “The annoyance factor is immense. But when you pare it down, it’s a pretty good folk song.”

Effective combination

The humor in bad music doesn’t just come from songwriting, but from playing and arranging. In “Ghost World,” the blues band -- which occupies an important moment in the movie since the film concerns die-hard record collectors and music-savvy teenagers -- is terrible not just because it’s a bunch of white guys singing about picking cotton and toiling behind mules. It’s also terrible because of a self-satisfied enthusiasm common to bad blues bands everywhere.

Similarly, when the title song of the Todd Solondz movie “Happiness” is sung solo by a pathetic, would-be singer-songwriter strumming to herself, it emphasizes her helplessness. But when R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe performs the same as a rock anthem over the movie’s closing credits, it’s bracing.

“The real parody is in the production of the songs,” says Higgins, who arranged much of the music in “A Mighty Wind.” He also plays the pastel-clad leader of the New Main Street Singers, who perform on cruise ships, and at amusement parks and state fairs. Shearer’s character, a more serious folkie, calls them “a toothpaste commercial.”

Higgins’ task was to create cheerily synthetic arrangements driven by over-bright harmonies and too many people playing guitar. One of his goals was to listen to as many overwrought arrangements as possible.

“To my deep shame, I was listening to this music even before Chris asked me to,” says the arranger, who claims to own every Christmas record ever recorded. “I wouldn’t call it a guilty pleasure, because I have no guilt about it at all. To listen to authentic folk music -- early Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie -- would keep me from being impure. I wanted to be inauthentic, really.”

Appreciation after all

Most of those who discussed their work on music parodies said they emerged with a greater respect for their source, even while tweaking it. Guest still has a fond memory of watching an AC/DC concert -- attended as research for “Spinal Tap” -- where guitarist Angus Young mooned the audience.

Neil Innes, who wrote the music for the Rutles and played the John Lennon-like Ron Nasty, feels a similar warmth toward his models. “The Beatles had a great sense of humor,” says Innes, who also wrote some of Monty Python’s music. “It’s like they were in on the joke.”

Folk musicians weren’t always as whimsical. But they offer other grounds for empathy. “These groups, at their most charming, really believe what they’re saying,” Higgins says. “And I think that’s the joke Chris is getting at.”

To the ears of at least one observer, Guest and company were more successful than they’d hoped. “T Bone Burnett was really impressed by some of the music,” Eugene Levy says of the roots-music figure who was executive producer of the “Mighty Wind” soundtrack and produced the music for “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” “I had to tell him, ‘These aren’t real songs, T Bone.’ ”