With one notable exception, the original cast of This Is Spinal Tap were wildly successful thespians playing complete fuckups. Arguably the most iconic character of the lot, the exploding drummer “played” by everyman Ric Parnell, was another story altogether. The tall, angular skin pounder shown pondering the fate of his predecessors—while lounging in a bubble bath with a shower cap on his head—was the role. He honed it through a series of tragicomic misadventures with The Milkmen, a quirky yet capable band from Boulder, Colorado, with an imaginative stage set featuring a life-size robotic bovine who introduced the band and gave milk on cue.
In 2022, at the age of 70, Ric ascended to the great drum platform in the sky. Old guard media, in its haste to run VIP obits sanctifying the unhirable goofball, reported that he’d been offered roles in juggernaut bands like Journey and Whitesnake. Pardon me while I chortle at those claims! Ric was far too fragile physically, mentally, and emotionally to have lasted a week with either outfit. Pro’s pros like Neil Schon and David Coverdale would have sussed him out in a New York minute. Nay, he was much more at home with The Milkmen, a story unto itself that unfolded when Ric was at the height of his game. I oughta know—I’m the guy who kicked Ric Parnell out of the band and into immortality with Tap.
The original cult classic lucked upon Ric, an odd duck who took on legendary status naturally; conversely, the eagerly anticipated sequel premiering September 12 opts for proven star power. While I’m sure that essentially the same highly acclaimed brain trust knows what it’s doing, I’m also sure that announced participants Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney are already immortal. At this point in their spotlit careers, there isn’t a single aspect of their lives that hasn’t been X-rayed already. Not so for the exploding stickman, whose checkered career remains woefully underreported.
The first time I saw Ric beating on things was in 1971; I was one of maybe 25 souls who’d shown up at the 2,500-seat Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, witnessing his band Atomic Rooster bomb out spectacularly on their American tour. At the end of the decade, our paths crossed again in a Boulder warehouse. I’d been waiting around for his prog rock band, Nova, to finish rehearsing at a shared space before my friend’s band set up. In the late ‘70s, up-and-coming groups of every ilk were flocking to Colorado to bottle a mystical force John Denver had coined “Rocky Mountain High.” I was wracking my brain, but I couldn’t quite place the guy. As he was packing up, I asked if perhaps I’d seen him somewhere before. He responded, “That’s unlikely, unless you saw me with Atomic Rooster—and nobody did.” Uncovering the rare Rooster sighting broke the ice, and then we were off and running.
My milk-mate Steven and I had musical aspirations of our own that were coming to fruition in the favorable creative climate. While our writing and arrangements had progressed by leaps and bounds, one crucial element remained elusive: identifying a difference-making rock drummer in a state where country music was still king. At that time, any number of artists who shared that rehearsal space, or any who caught Nova playing around town, could have asked a guy who just flat-out loved to play if he’d record with them, and in all likelihood, he would have said yes. To this day, I can’t figure out why we were the only ones who did.
What I do know is that we got the exact boost we sought from a prodigious talent who, if your song was already good, would throw in enough verve and panache to make it great, and if by some chance it already was great, could elevate it to a timeless classic. Invariably, the transmutation was over before it began; it didn’t take the guy twenty minutes from first listen through blueprinting every last change in his mind to polished recorded perfection. We’d never seen anything like it.
I’d like to think that we had a lot going for us. But if you wanted to pinpoint the X–factor why The Milkmen had taken first and third place in the 1981 KBCO Songwriting Contest over 6,000 other entrants and why our live show had won over a dubious public, well, we had rock royalty in the person of Ric manning our drum throne and everybody else didn’t. That is, we had the fully functional version of him, before he became an absolute booze and coke fiend.
Even after Nova abruptly moved to LA, momentarily throwing us for a loop, we willed a way to keep the momentum going. Flying a flashy drum savant from Los Angeles to Colorado to serve as an insurance policy against mediocrity at all our gigs had its obvious benefits. That said, the sheer number of bookings coming our way had turned that strategy into an extremely expensive proposition. Booking passage and providing subsistence for Ric’s wife, Cindy (she pronounced it “Seendy”), aka Lady Parnell, a flaming redhead from the Canary Islands, was an even more extravagant luxury. But we’d already learned the hard way that if Her Ladyship wasn’t around to chaperone, you were asking for trouble. “His Lordshit,” as his fetchingly foul-mouthed old lady often name-called him (she’d mix in the odd “Ric the Dic” for a change of pace), would stray in every conceivable way. At first, the womanizing wasn’t a distraction: It was expected. But if Cindy wasn’t around, any time of day turned into the proverbial “beer o’clock.” Sure, we had our comedy side, but at the same time, we were dead serious about being the tightest band around. If one of us was soused and not quite up to snuff, it messed with our finely laid plans for world domination.
I suppose it could be said that, at least in one respect, Ric’s drunkenness could be seen as an asset; it aligned with most clubgoers’ state of mind—though we could have done without his tendency to issue impromptu soliloquies about off-the-wall topics that never quite connected from behind the drum kit. But there was absolutely nothing I could cite that was remotely redeeming about his newfound predilection for cocaine. Coke made him a lot edgier. His drumming took on a manic quality. He began finding opportunities for fills that weren’t there. On a personal level, he wasn’t quite the Monty Python-type character who’d been such a treat to hang around. So far, only we, his milk mates, had noticed a more zombie-like mien. Our fans still regarded Parnell as a major attraction, a powerhouse presence propelling us onwards and upwards.
Change was also afoot at the Blue Note club, which had rolled out the red carpet for us after we won that highly publicized contest: the premier showcase venue was changing hands. Naturally, we wanted to make a good first impression on the new owners who weren’t so sure about us despite an impressive sellout streak. As the pivotal gig approached—and having already spent a small fortune on costumes, set design, and robotic bovine maintenance—Steven and I chose to economize that gig instead of flying Cindy out, too.
On that fateful night, tension was already palpable backstage when Steven sidled up to me, concern written all over his face.
“What’s up with Ric?” he asked.
I sighed. The night before, after our show at Max’s in Denver, Ric and I had pulled these two milkmaids and went back to their place on Capitol Hill. One of them was a real looker and quite the dancer, so I gave her a good spin to a few rockabilly records. Being led by a suave lead such as myself would have won the day, only Ric was scoring just as many points chatting her up with his limey charm. Battle lines were drawn: my dancing vs. his accent. Neither one of us was settling for the roommate. But the longer we locked horns, the more time conspired against me: I cared that not getting any sleep meant I’d probably suck at tonight’s gig, and Ric the Dic didn’t. Around 5 AM, I threw in the towel and drove home to catch what zees I could.
Around noon the next day, I saw a BMW parked in my driveway with Ric and the dancing queen playing kissy face. The smug bastard exited the Teutonic status symbol, gave me a thin-lipped smile, and demanded feed. He hadn’t slept a wink, and neither would I have if I were him. I considered his demand. The kind of feed that sprang to mind was feeding his limbs into a wood chipper. Instead, we wound up at his favorite spot, Rocky Mountain Joe’s, where the guy ordered three supersized slices of chocolate poison cake, each one seven layers thick, oozing with gooey gobs of syrupy frosting, then wolfed ‘em down like he had a clock to beat.
“Has he had anything else to eat since he’s been here?” I asked Steven.
“Not that I know of,” he replied, “That’s all I’ve seen him scarf down since he stepped off the plane.”
Just then, a bartender moseyed into the dressing room, plopped himself down on a couch, pulled out a ziplock bag full of white powder, and let it rest on a coffee table. In the custom of the day, he began spelling his name out in cocaine. Ric chose that moment to stagger in with yet another freshly plucked milkmaid in tow. He surveyed the scene and perked up. With an exaggerated flourish, he pointed an index finger at the mound of powder.
“I say, is that blow?” quoth he.
It’s unlikely that whoever invented Formica ever anticipated that the space age substance would be used as a blank canvas to spell out drummers’ names in Colombian imports, let alone duplicate the process repeatedly. Ric, the babe, and the barkeep loaded up. And loaded up some more. And kept loading up until showtime. Steven and I glanced at each other apprehensively.
Then they introduced us, the lights came on, we launched into “Late Night Delivery,” and the previous night’s rutting competition was ancient history. It seemed as if the whole band was finally on autopilot, all four of us hamming things up without worrying about the mechanics of singing, how we looked and moved on stage, or whether or not our robotic mascot’s auditory and lactosary features would function properly. Things were sounding markedly tighter than they had in recent shows—Ric had mercifully toned down his tendency to live up to his mythology through overplaying. Man, we could do no wrong! The room was pulsating. Applause rained down on us after every carefully choreographed ending. The new Blue Note owners were beside themselves with joy.
However, midway through the set, things started feeling a trifle off. Was it me, or had Ric’s playing veered from basic but grooving to…kind of…minimalistic? I caught occasional glimpses of Steven’s raised eyebrows and our bassist, Chocolate Milk’s perplexed expression out of the corner of my eye. But I was singing away, there was a packed crowd to keep engaged, and I wasn’t absolutely sure that something was amiss. Mere moments later, a lack of activity around the drum kit was no longer just some vague perception—it was impossible to ignore. Hi-hat activity had ceased. Ric’s kick, normally a low-frequency thud that landed right in your solar plexus, was a faint approximation of itself. Bizarre timbres emanated from the snare. When at last Steven took a solo and I could finally turn around to assess the damage, well, Christ almighty, a nodding-out Ric had dropped his sticks and was playing the snare drum with his head! For a few measures, Le Dic nodded out to the beat. Then he was just nodding…then he was completely out.
A tremendously embarrassing stoppage of the performance ensued, then we beat a hasty retreat back to the dressing room. We’d pulled so many wacky stunts on stage that the crowd couldn’t tell whether this spectacle was part of the show or not. They figured it out soon enough. Back in our dressing room, amateur ER attempts failed to revive the blacked-out Brit. We poured ice water on his head. We forced coffee down his throat. We slapped his cheeks, urging him to snap out of it. The new owners crowding around the stricken stickman were growing very, very grumpy.
Finally, Ric came to. He mumbled something or other in an apologetic vein. He knew where he was, could count fingers, and seemed semi-coherent. Perhaps overoptimistically, we took these as signs of life as indications that the show could resume. Sheepishly, we retook the stage to lukewarm cheers, boos, and catcalls from irate concertgoers who 20 minutes ago were convinced they were watching the next big thing.
The revival lasted all of thirty seconds, if that. Then we were trudging back to the dressing room, dragging Ric’s limp body along like a fallen soldier. “Beko” (Rebecca), Ric’s milkmaid du jour, destined to become the love of his life (at which point a fed-up Lady Parnell settled in for a long run as a publicist at Rhino Records), attended to her wounded knight—to no avail. The show was over. Grudgingly, the new owners refunded everyone’s money. We wouldn’t get paid a dime after spending a small fortune commissioning our dairy diorama. We’d never be welcome at the Blue Note again—as performers or patrons. Ric Parnell would likewise have to turn elsewhere for future gigs and auxiliary income; there was no way on God’s green earth we’d ever risk a repeat performance.
On the bright side, Ric had just received all the on-the-job training he’d ever need to breeze right into his role with Tap, and, miraculously enough, we somehow finagled ways to replace him with another dynamo and live out our dairy dreams at bigger and better venues. But the exploding drummer and me saga didn’t end there.
While I may have vowed that Ric would never play another gig with us, I never ruled out recording again with him, and that’s exactly what we did, 33 tunes worth, during a memorable reunion in 2016. And I never lost touch with Ric, or Cindy for that matter—in fact, I was her plus one at the This is Spinal Tap opening night in LA. I remember sitting there, taking in a flick every cinephile and music aficionado would have bet the sex farm would suck, dumbfounded just like everyone else that Rob “Meathead” Reiner’s directorial debut was one of the funniest movies of all time, recalling Ric telling me that they cut out all of his best lines. Like what, you ask? Well, during the scene when Nigel deadpans the name of the “delicate” love ballad he’s pecking out on the piano as “Lick My Love Pump,” I already knew how proud Ric was of the title that he came up with that got rejected at the same group song-naming session: the ever-charming, “Buttfucking Baby Jesus with a Knife.” You don’t forget song titles like that. And even with the Spinal Tap sequel trotting out megastars in lieu of casting the occasional odd duck, you don’t forget exploding drummers like Ric Parnell.