When pooling their ideas for This Is Spinal Tap, arguably the greatest film ever made about the music industry, director Rob Reiner and actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer took inspiration from a host of hard rock and heavy metal legends: Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Saxon, Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult among them. But when it came to choosing a stage outfit for bassist Derek Smalls - the "lukewarm water" between the "fire and ice" of the band's poetic visionaries David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel - Harry Shearer decided to model the look on Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford's BDSM-style 'leather man' image, as a subversion of the idea that bass players are traditionally the least flamboyant member of rock bands.
The outfit that Shearer settled upon was a leather harness worn over his bare skin, purchased in a West Hollywood sex shop named the Pleasure Chest, recommended to the actor by the film's costume designer Renee Johnston, who refused to personally go to the shop.
"I had the experience of walking into the Pleasure Chest and asking, Where are the harnesses?" Shearer recalls in A Fine Line between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap. "The answer was, 'Between the butt plugs and the ball stretchers'."
Christopher Guest accompanied his co-star on his shopping trip to the sex shop.
"I had never been, and haven't been since," he recalls. "It was an unfamiliar world, eye-opening and... other-orifice-opening. We were wandering through these aisles and seeing things we'd never seen. There were molded arms a yard long with fists at the end of them."
"I found the harnesses where they were supposerd to be," Harry Shearer continues, "between the butt plugs and the ball stretchers. I also saw, displayed on a shelf in jars, these things labeled 'Doc Johnson's Butt Plugs'. Years later, my wife and I were at an auto show looking at a rare original Corvette in mint condition. As in most museums, there was a credit for whose collection this came from. And the credit read: 'From the Doc Johnson Collection'."
In the book, Shearer is also keen to clarify that the vegetable wrapped in tin foil and stuffed down Smalls' 'smalls' in just one of the many iconic scenes in the 1984 film was not a cucumber, but a courgette.
"A cucumber is too large and warty to achieve the desired effect," he insists.
