I'm Brian Hyatt. This is Rolling Stone Music Now. A new sequel to This is Spinal Tap hits theater September 12th.

It's called Spinal Tap 2. The End Continues. Last week we had on director Rob Reiner, and this week I'm continuing our coverage by talking to Christopher Guest, who of course plays Nigel Tufnell and Spinaltap, and is also the director of many

great movies that followed in Spinaltap's footsteps, from Best in Show to a Mighty Wind.

We talk a lot about the origins of Spinaltap and Nigel Tufnal and a lot more.

Here's my conversation with Christopher Guest.

In ancient times,

hundreds of years before the dawn of history.

It's so interesting how deep the roots of this go,

thinking about the National Lampoon Stage Show

and listening to your James Taylor parody.

Well, New York City, with your streets that flash like strokes?

Farewell to Carolina where I left my frontal lows.

Is that where the idea of combining music and comedy and a species of acting began for you?

I wrote a piece for the Lampoon in 1970. I was 22. I was the first year of the National

Lampoon. I had the naivete or something to say to them, but what I really like to do is music and voices and whatever. And they said,

oh, well, then why don't we make records? And I said, that sounds like a good idea. I enlisted a friend of

mine, Bob Tischler, who became the engineer and producer.

They built a studio for us at that time, just an amazing thing to have a 16-track studio in

1971, I guess.

And we had this radio show called The Radio Hour, and I would do a lot of things on that,

wrote some songs with Sean Kelly mostly, and that

evolved into Lemmings eventually.

...