Christopher Guest has a plan to cover himself when he forgets the lyrics to his own songs at this evening's Berklee College of Music concert - and Guest is quite certain that he will be forgetting lyrics.
"It's rather pathetic," he confesses. "I have to go on the Internet to get the words that I wrote - that we all wrote. Of course, some of the lyrics on the Internet are wrong because the person heard them incorrectly. Hopefully I can just turn to some kid onstage at Berklee and say 'Why don't you sing?' Problem solved."
Best known as the writer, director, and shape-shifting comedic actor from such mockumentaries as "Waiting for Guffman" and "Best in Show," Guest is at Berklee tonight to collect an honorary doctorate. Because the 59-year-old finds the idea of donning a long black robe to be strange, he will instead perform music that he wrote for "This is Spinal Tap," "Guffman," and "A Mighty Wind." Berklee faculty and students, who have rearranged his movie songs into styles ranging from big band to bossa nova, will play alongside him.
Don't expect a mullet wig or leather trousers, though. Guest will leave his "Spinal Tap" accessories at home and perform as himself.
"There's something fun and creative about making music that comes from the head of a character that you're playing," he says on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. "The songs that Nigel Tufnel plays [in "Spinal Tap"] are not the choices that I would make. The stage musical that Corky St. Clair writes [in "Guffman"] is not the musical that I would write. But it's the best that these characters can do given their abilities."
Analytical, self-deprecating, and sly even on the phone, Guest may appear to be an unlikely candidate for an honorary doctorate from a music college. But Berklee president Roger Brown is quick to point out that with the heavy metal spoof "Spinal Tap," Guest has become an icon to musicians everywhere.
"I was with two trustees of the college, and we were watching a documentary that used clips from 'Spinal Tap' to illustrate key points about the history of rock and roll," Brown says. "I was intimately acquainted with 'Spinal Tap' because I'm in a band, and we get together once a year and watch it. I knew that Christopher Guest had composed a lot of that music. It is such a seminal work, especially for rock musicians, that I thought he would be an interesting candidate."
Growing up, Guest's first love was music. Although he wanted to play drums, his parents chose the not-as-loud (or as cool) clarinet for him and he was accepted into the High School of Music & Art in New York to study classical music. While there he discovered bluegrass, and began to idolize Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. He was so enamored of the genre that he transferred to the Stockbridge School in the Berkshires simply because Arlo Guthrie was also a student there. The two performed together several times at a psychiatric hospital for a room of patients who simply stared.
It was with the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a spinoff from National Lampoon magazine in the early 1970s, that Guest had an opportunity to combine his comedy and songwriting skills.
"If you fancy yourself funny, and I guess I did, and you have the opportunity to include music in that scenario, and that's what I did, then it's an ideal situation," he says.
He contributed to five records and a Lampoon live show before his turn as Nigel Tufnel, the talented but doltish guitarist in "Spinal Tap." According to Guest, Spinal Tap was inspired by a 1979 tour with Michael McKean and his band Lenny and the Squigtones, a "Laverne & Shirley" offshoot. That's where Guest first appeared as Tufnel, with McKean playing his "Laverne & Shirley" character, the dim-witted Lenny Kosnowski.
Because music is dominant in his life - he plays multiple instruments, records music at home, and has performed with his friend Loudon Wainwright III - movies and music were a natural fit. "Spinal Tap" famously skewered hard rock culture, "Guffman" took on the world of community theater and show tunes, and "A Mighty Wind" parodied the folk world that Guest was once a part of.
"In all the films I've done, I've written some of the music," he says. "I don't know if people realize that if you strip away the lyrics on a lot of these songs, it's basically just music that suits the scene in the film."
Guest and his cohorts have practically created a genre for telling the stories of inept and attention-starved over-achievers who do things such as attempt to take an amateur musical to Broadway. Creating the music to accompany these misadventures is not as simple as it appears.
"Without being sarcastic, it's not easy to write a bad song," he says. "Because if it's just bad, who wants to hear it for more than 10 seconds? When we perform as Spinal Tap, there's no comedy sketches, it's just us playing music for two hours. So there has to be some level where it's working musically."
Guest's music has successfully made the leap from screen to stage. Spinal Tap continues to perform live. The actors from "A Mighty Wind" toured after the film was released, performing songs such as the Oscar-nominated "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow." Currently, Guest and Levy are in the early stages of talks with a producer to turn "Guffman" into a Broadway musical.
His next project is not another improvised movie, but an album with collaborator and longtime friend David Nichtern. The two started working on a record earlier this year. It began as a collection of meditation music, but then evolved into something that Guest can't quite describe when he added a clarinet and accordion.
"This is serious music we're doing," he says. "If you heard it now, you'd think it's not remotely funny. Well, at least it's not meant to be funny. That would be really sad if you found it funny."
Christopher Muther can be reached at muther@globe.com.
