‘Go to eleven’: How the ‘Spinal Tap’ phrase lived on after the movie

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Rob Reiner had a secret weapon on the set of “This Is Spinal Tap.”

The dialogue in the mockumentary centred around a fictional British heavy metal band was almost entirely improvised. But before they started rolling, director Reiner (who also played documentarian Marty Di Bergi in the film) talked to the art department about funny props that they could work into the outlines they had for each scene.

Over the next 40 years, one of those props became a symbol of rock hedonism and pure volume: the guitar amp that goes to eleven. “It’s just this crazy idea that we had of a band that’s so loud that they even want it to go past 10,” Reiner said in an interview with The Washington Post.

At the time, Reiner didn’t know the phrase “go to eleven” would eventually appear in amplifier ads, in casual conversation and any time something was cranked up to the max. Upon release in 1984, “This is Spinal Tap” received rave reviews for the meatheaded performances and realistically silly hard rock, but it grossed less than $5 million. Still, the movie would become a cult classic, as rock bands from Led Zeppelin to Metallica said that the film’s ridiculousness wasn’t so far from the real thing – and has now finally prompted a sequel, “Spinal II: The End Continues,” which comes out this weekend. Meanwhile, the “eleven” phrase accrued enough legitimacy that in 2018 it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

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“I won’t be surprised if there are people using it nowadays who have never seen ‘Spinal Tap’ (and) don’t really know what it’s from,” said Craig Leyland, the dictionary’s head of new words. “They’re not quoting the film necessarily. They are using this phrase because it’s become part of the language.”

Much of what makes the “go to eleven” scene unforgettable is how Christopher Guest, as Spinal Tap’s lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel, improvised the conversation with Reiner’s Di Bergi about the amp. When asked why the amp can’t just be louder and the highest volume is 10, Tufnel pauses and responds with the confidence of a naive child: “These go to eleven.” Reiner immediately thought the line was a keeper.

“I knew it was funny the minute he did it,” Reiner said. “My father (Carl Reiner) used to do a routine with Mel Brooks called ‘The 2000 Year Old Man’ and … whenever my father could paint Mel into a corner where his mind would start racing all over the place, he would come up with some of the funniest things. I knew that if I stuck (Guest) in a place that he was uncomfortable, something funny would come out.”

When Leyland’s team was compiling examples for the dictionary entry, the earliest usage they found outside the film was in 1987 from the British music newspaper Sounds, which said that several amplifiers all “appear to be turned up to eleven.” The phrase remained a big part of amplifier talk for a while. In the early 1990s, Marshall Amplifiers had Guest in a series of ads for the JCM-900 amp – which had a gain knob that went up to 20, directly inspired by the film.

The posters included a photo of Guest-as-Nigel, with the quote, “Now it goes to 20, that’s 9 louder, innit?” But even before the Spinal Tap ad campaign, Marshall was noticing the influence of “Spinal Tap” and trying to figure out how to contribute. “The ‘go to eleven’ scene has gone on to cement Marshall as a cultural icon,” said Steph Carter, the director of culture marketing for the 63-year-old company. “It’s kind of become a symbol of the ultimate loudness and that rock and roll attitude.”

About 50 miles from London in Milton Keynes, England, Marshall’s offices contain a small museum section. Its most prized artifact is an amp where all of the knobs go to eleven (though Carter can’t confirm if it’s the real one from the movie).

Other companies such as Soldano and Friedman have also released amps that go up to eleven on the volume or gain knobs as a nod to the film. Dave Friedman, the owner of the latter brand, had one suggestion for the “Spinal Tap” sequel: “They should have made it go to 12.”

But returning director Reiner and the band weren’t looking to repeat the glories of the first time, so there’s no mention of it in the sequel.

“There’s a bit of a push to not over-rehash the original jokes,” said Beau Harrison, the prop master for “Spinal Tap II.” “At times, we’d even pull out stuff or reference stuff (from the original) and Rob or the guys would be like, ‘No, we want to move on from that. We want different stuff.'”

The “go to eleven” bit did appear in a teaser trailer, though, in which knobs on a Marshall amp are turned up to eleven, before the volume control is pushed all the way up to infinity. Carter said the amp in the teaser was custom-made by Marshall.

Christopher Guest’s guitar tech, Thom Lowry, who also worked with members of Foreigner and Black Sabbath, thinks that the “go to eleven” scene has remained relevant because it can be emblematic of anyone’s delusion to be larger than life, particularly musicians. (Guest himself did not comment.)

“If the amp goes to 11, it’s really not going to go louder than the max that the amp is (already) going to go to,” Lowry said. “The numbers are really irrelevant. It would be like looking at your kitchen faucet and having hot or very hot on it.”

These days, a kitchen faucet that goes to eleven wouldn’t be out of the question. The Oxford English Dictionary cited a 2008 tweet where a Nevada dad wrote about how he needs “to take it to 11” at the gym and a 2015 financial guide which explained that an “economic collapse is an economic depression cranked up to eleven,” plus there were other uses in magazines, newspapers and books that didn’t make it into the entry, according to Leyland. And on 11/11/11, “the Nigel Tufnel Day Appreciation Society and Quilting Bee” declared a holiday after the quote, reportedly celebrated by doing regular stuff cranked up – you guessed it – to eleven.

The instinctual, goofy clarity of the quote almost feels like it predates the movie. That feeling is familiar to Reiner, having directed many films with quotes that have had extended lives, such as “When Harry Met Sally” (“I’ll have what she’s having”) and “A Few Good Men” (“You can’t handle the truth”) and “The Princess Bride” (too many to name).

“There’s barely a day that goes by that I don’t hear somebody say ‘Well, let’s turn this up to 11. Oh, this goes up to eleven.’ I’m watching sports and they’ll say something like that,” Reiner said. “It’s a weird thing to know that something you created as just a little gag all of a sudden becomes part of the lexicon.”