Sacha Gervasi, the director of Anvil! The Story of Anvil, could’ve easily made a documentary that put himself in the picture — reuniting with Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner, the core members of the Toronto heavy-rock band he first met as a 15-year-old metal fanatic at the Marquee Club in London, England in 1982. He misspent the following summer as their roadie, touring Canadian hockey arenas.

Returning for tonight’s Hot Docs premiere of the film that debuted in January at the Sundance Film Festival — without a bad review to show for it — Gervasi had lost contact with his raunchy thrash heroes for the better part of 20 years. During that time he held jobs like working with poet laureate Ted Hughes, drumming in a band with Bush’s Gavin Rossdale and writing the Tom Hanks airport flick The Terminal.

This year, what he wants more than anything else is to turn Anvil into stars. Proof of his sincerity is that Gervasi is not seen, and barely even heard, in the final cut of his film. And he believes that the story has broader appeal than the typical rockumentary.

“You just want to help these guys,” he insists. “The message is not only about them, it’s wider than them. Whether you’re into sculpture, or pottery or starting a small business — whatever dream you have, the movie is about not giving up. They never got the million-dollar contract, sure. But, if the world doesn’t listen, fuck it — you still have to live with yourself. Giving up is something that these guys just haven’t done.”

For those unfamiliar with the Anvil oeuvre, the flick opens with testimonials from metal icons like Slash, Lars Ulrich of Metallica, and Lemmy from Motörhead — but the endorsements become superfluous as the tragicomedy takes over.

Walking the red carpet into the Winter Garden Theatre tonight will be Kudlow and Reiner, unthinkable when their resident Yonge Street venue the Gasworks switched off the amplifiers 15 years ago. Despite earning attention around the globe, Anvil never managed to headline a local bar bigger than that.

And, no matter how widely his efforts manage to travel, Gervasi — whose mother is originally from here — isn’t entirely confident that Toronto will ever warm to Anvil’s style of speedy sleaze, pointing out that Sting was hated in his hometown of Newcastle.

Back in the late 1970s, no one would’ve mistaken Anvil for the Police — even if both groups had a frontman with a one-word nickname — although they had similar illusions of grandeur from the start. “Lips” was also the original name of Kudlow and Reiner’s band; in 1981, they pressed up their own LP copies of Hard ’n’ Heavy — not the cheapest proposition in those days — earning the attention of Tom Williams, co-founder of independent label Attic Records.

“I was out every night looking for bands and knew that talent wasn’t the only thing that mattered,” he recalls from his current home in Laguna Beach, California. “Drive was more important than talent in a lot of cases. And, in the case of these guys, they acted like they had no choice but to get ahead.”

What had to change with the record deal was the band name — Lips was too closely identified with Lipps, Inc., who had the genre-burning disco hit “Funkytown.” Picked from a list, partly because it fit the Hard ’n’ Heavy album title, was Anvil.

Williams previously worked for the Canadian branch of Warner/Elektra/Atlantic, witnessing first-hand the benefits of gambling on acts like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. The commercial flowering of another Toronto-based act motivated him, too.

“Rush were definitely playing to the intellectual side of the metal crowd,” says Williams. “Anvil just wanted to be the best fuckin’ band ever, playing places where the washrooms were filthy, the waiters were surly and everyone was drunk. I don’t remember them ever thinking they were going to get rich from it.”

There was, however, a club circuit where groups like Anvil could get booked for an entire weekend, and FM radio stations were blasting the tunes into teenage bedrooms; even if most metal was relegated to the late-night hours, it was reaching the core. Shows with Iron Maiden and Motörhead also motivated teenage boys to etch the Anvil logo on their jean jacket.

“I assumed our audience was adolescent males,” says Kudlow, whose 50th birthday bash at the now-defunct Heads or Tails sports bar in Etobicoke a couple years ago gives viewers of Anvil! a context for the band’s current fortunes on their home turf. “From the start, I gave in to that simplicity. I’d write something that, structurally speaking, could’ve been a hit — and then I’d sabotage its commercial potential, just by giving the song a title like ‘Show Me Your Tits.’”

But contrary to how a showman like Vincent Furnier gave in to public perception and started calling himself “Alice Cooper,” the Anvil axeman fond of bondage gear and playing his Gibson Flying V guitar with a dildo also has to work a day job. (The movie shows Kudlow doing deliveries for Choice Children’s Catering in Scarborough; he now does office duties for his sister’s refrigerator company.)

Starving artistry produces many neurotic monologues from Kudlow, played against his more phlegmatic partner of over 35 years, Reiner, who developed plenty of ruminations of his own from behind the drum kit. Their friendship is constantly put to the test — particularly when a 2005 tour of eastern Europe, booked by their now-departed second guitarist’s girlfriend, collapses in a heap of frustration.

For these guys, though, it’s a long way to the bottom if you want to rock ’n’ roll. The documentary chronicles their determination not to end their career there.

Getting attention outside of Canada came naturally to Anvil a quarter-century ago, however, as Attic publicist Ralph Alfonso was eager to feed the British music weeklies with tales to fill their robust pages. Working with Judas Priest/Thin Lizzy producer Chris Tsangarides for their subsequent albums, Metal on Metal (1982) and Forged in Fire (1983), gave them the boldface cachet. The press releases usually focused on Anvil’s staunch resistance to write ballads or use keyboards.

“They did it all with such sincerity,” says Alfonso, later reborn as a beat poet in Vancouver. “But once they let the beast out of the Pandora’s box, there was a loss of control — Lips got upset when one magazine published his real name. The question became, how do you harness a vision like theirs, and get the monster out into the world? They didn’t just want to drive to the edge of the cliff, they wanted to jump over it — but the music business in Canada told them not to.”

Regardless, tens of thousands of Anvil albums were being sold, even in Canada — Metal on Metal came this close to Gold certification for 50,000 units moved, recalls Attic Records president Alexander Mair. And while they couldn’t find enough industry people on this side of the border that understood the aesthetic, Aerosmith’s manager David Krebs swept in to take Anvil on as a client with one catch — he imagined a multinational record deal, which meant getting off Attic.

“We did our best,” says Mair. “Lips, in particular, was always positive and open to suggestions — but they didn’t make it easy to get something happening, either.

“The label paid for Tsangarides to come up here to record them, and they were in the studio in Oshawa, where we pretty much left them alone. The place must have been filled with smoke, because a few weeks later I get a call explaining how they listened back to it straight — and now they’ll have to start all over again.”

(Another expense was incurred when a van the label procured for a tour wasn’t returned to the rental company within the agreed-upon time frame — 30 days later, Mair learned original member Dave Allison just assumed it was his to keep.)

Anvil eventually got that American record deal — but when Strength of Steel and Pound for Pound were released through Metal Blade Records in the late-’80s, every major label had a glut of bands with long hair and loud volume, and they got lost in the shuffle with no funds to support a tour. Kudlow and Reiner stuck it out, even as other members moved on, regrouping in the mid-’90s with current bassist Glenn Five for albums with trend-defying titles like Plugged in Permanent and Absolutely No Alternative. Anvil! The Story of Anvil finds them striving to make amends for indie albums produced on the cheap, by reuniting with Tsangarides to record last year’s This Is Thirteen.

Kudlow makes no apologies for basking in Anvil’s recognition — that’s the theme of Gervasi’s documentary, after all — but what makes him a compelling onscreen character is that he can’t shake the self-doubt.

“I’ve realized that the music I was most inspired by came from people who never got rich and famous from it,” says Kudlow. “That’s what was so special about those acts — that they never reached the point where they were above ground. Subconsciously, I wonder if that’s what I was trying to achieve all along as well.

“Being people’s favourite obscure band is a really difficult place to be, though. So, if that never changes, at least it’s made us a good place to steal ideas from.” 

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