Anvil! The Story of Anvil traces the roots of Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner’s musical partnership through a tour of the area where they grew up: Bathurst Street in North York, where Kudlow first heard Reiner blasting heavy-metal tunes, drumming along in his family’s basement lair. This heritage is commemorated with a visit to Moe Pancer’s Deli, where the duo are filmed reflecting upon the first song they ever wrote, about the Spanish Inquisition, after learning in their Northview Secondary School history class about how the victims were ultimately persecuted: “Thumb Hang.”
The movie features Kudlow interacting with his fellow musicians on the aging metalhead festival circuit, where he excitedly recalls to journeyman drummer Carmine Appice how thrilled he was to meet him back in the day at the Video Invasion arcade at Bathurst near Wilson.
“I lived right across the street, on top of the Murray Shore Pharmacy,” says Kudlow. “He’s moved locations since, but poor Murray Shore, we must have driven him nuts — especially when there was a drum set in the apartment.”
Reiner, when not drumming, is revealed in the film to be a painter of bleak street scenes. Framed on his wall are images of Steve’s Restaurant, an area diner just off the 401, and Sunrise Foods, a fruit market in a strip mall at Bathurst and Sheppard over which Reiner resided for years.
Kudlow spent his formative years in the Keele and Wilson area, and started high school at William Lyon Mackenzie Collegiate Institute. “I quite literally did not fit in,” he insists — even though that’s where, at age 15, he met his eventual first wife.
She wasn’t Jewish, but they settled down near Bathurst and Lawrence — a 20 minute drive from the Gasworks downtown, but a world away. The landlord owned Hermes Bakery, where Kudlow charmed the initially indifferent women behind the counter into giving him fresh baked goods every time he dropped off his rent cheque… along with leftover bouquets from his flower-delivery day job.
Lips had his bar mitzvah in 1969 at Beth Torah Congregation near Dufferin and Lawrence, as he was encouraged to have it a different synagogue from the one his family belonged to, the now-defunct Beth Am: “There was another kid who was supposed to have it the same week, but he stuttered, and they didn’t want to make him look bad.” Divine providence for Anvil, no doubt.
Anvil will be celebrating the first night of Passover, and their exile from local obscurity, onstage at the Bovine Sex Club on Saturday (April 19).
Scott Ian of Anthrax and Jay Jay French of Twisted Sister are two other guitar-shredding Jews who testify to Anvil’s influence in the documentary. Kudlow was channel-surfing in the US when he stumbled upon a VH1 Classic channel Passover special Ian and French starred in three years ago — Matzo and Metal.
“My first thought was I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he says. “And then I thought I should’ve been sitting at the table with them.”