IDS Classic Albums:

Not long after its 1976 premier, the television show "Laverne & Shirley" became an instant hit. A merchandising franchise quickly followed suit. After a few musical performances on the show, Michael McKean and David Lander were given the chance to cut an album as their show personas, Lenny and Squiggy, in 1979.\nPopular television has spawned some awful musical crossovers through the years. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams had already released Laverne & Shirley Sing in 1976, sharing shelf space beside mind-numbingly bad franchise tie-ins like Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space. However, Lenny & the Squigtones Present Lenny & the Squigtones is one of those notable exceptions.\nLike its namesake characters, Lenny & the Squigtones parodies the bad-ass greaser image of the 50's. Lander, who is responsible for most of the vocals, swaggers with the confidence of James Dean and croons with the voice of a castrated Jerry Lewis. He is pictured on the album cover with his squigophone -- three Folger's coffee cans topped with a bongo head. Therein lies the joke. The rest of the band members are competent musicians, all catering to Lander's lyrical ineptitude and feigned sense of grandeur.\nThe music is good and the comedy is funny. "This song is called Night After Night, and it's about two nights in a row." The lampoon rock ballads are immersed in a backdrop of comic shtick. "Men don't cry, they vomit," Squiggy later explains to the band's live audience. The album is also a milestone marker for McKean and guitarist, Christopher Guest, who went on to write and perform in "This Is Spinal Tap." Lenny & the Squigtones marks Guest's first appearance as his Spinal Tap persona, Nigel Tufnel.\nLenny & the Squigtones is hard to find but well worth the effort. There is an innocence and lovability to the act that carries over from "Laverne & Shirley," but familiarity with the show is not a prerequisite for enjoying the album. McKean and Landers use it as a vehicle for fleshing out their television personas into an independent comic routine. The end result is very much a rough draft for the musical mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap"