The New Yorker Radio Hour - Derek Smalls—Harry Shearer’s Character in “Spinal Tap”—Returns with His Solo Début

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

Harry Shearer is known for doing many characters, including Mr. Burns and others from “The Simpsons,” but the most famous is Derek Smalls, the saturnine, epically muttonchopped bassist in the movie “This Is Spinal Tap.” Almost thirty-five years after the release of Rob Reiner’s mockumentary about a struggling metal band, Shearer has given Smalls a new lease on life. Although the character is fictional, the new solo album, “Smalls Change: Meditations Upon Ageing,” is real. Smalls tells The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz that he produced the record with support from the British Fund for Ageing Rockers, and it contains songs about a toupee (which belongs to Satan) and erectile dysfunction. (You have to give the dysfunctional part, Smalls says, “a good, stern talking-to.”) And they discuss what is clearly a sore subject: the fact that Spinal Tap was never inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Plus, a New Yorker editor picks three favorites for a new parent.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For this episode, I'm just going to turn things over to my friend and colleague, Andy Borowitz, who's got something very special in store for us. On the periodic chart of metal, one band is heavier than the rest. Its atomic weight is 11. Its name is Spinal Tap.

Led by singer David St. Hubbins and guitarist Nigel Tufnell, Spinaltap, made music history with their seminal 1984 documentary, This Is Spinal Tap. But it was their bassist, Derek Smalls, who left an unremovable mark with his tasty licks on Tapp's majestic hit, Big Bottom. Flash forward 34 years, whatever happened to Derek Smalls? Is he still alive? And more importantly, can he still rock?

Well, Derek Smalls answers those questions and some others that no one has asked. On his first ever solo album, Smalls Change, Meditations Upon Aging. Derek Smalls, welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Oh, thank you so much. And you look fantastic. You look alive to me. I'm not a doctor, but you do look good. Well, I feel good. I had a little incident, which is why my chops, my facial hair is not what it used to be.

What was the incident, tell me? I was a friend mine, it's an old friend Eddie, Eddie Draggs. He's moved to Scunthorpe, England. Late summer, early autumn, these strange gusts of wind will sometimes whip up in the countryside. I mean, Scunthorpe's not, you know, it's not London, let's put it that way. Anyway, I was walking down the street and see this little, little cat, sweet little, you know, tiny little cat. and all of a sudden one of these gusts whips up and whips the cat right into my face.

Oh my gosh. And poor thing, you know, claws come out. And so I went to the NHS and they said, we'll be shaving you now, mate. And of course, the cat didn't know what hit him, especially when I hit him. Right. Oh, that's terrible.

And you're, but you're rallying now. You're feeling. It's growing back. It's growing back. Good. Derek, this is quite... Not the cat. Not the cat.

Of course not. It's not growing back. I did a little bit of research before I... I know where you're going with this question. Well, it's an uncomfortable question. It is.

But I have to bring it up and I don't mean to... Do you know what makes it doubly uncomfortable? Well, you want to tell people what the question is first? I mean, I know where you're going, but they might not. Well, the question is,

I, in preparation, as a journalist, when I sit down to interview somebody, the first thing I do is I Google them and I go to their Wikipedia page to learn as much as possible about them. It's called,

just shoe leather journalism. It's what I do. And I, I googled Spinal Tap and found that Spinal Tap somehow is not in the rock and roll hall of fame. Keyword, somehow. Somehow. How could that be? I mean, are you dumbfounded, flabbergasted? Is it politics? Is the fix out? What is the deal? I was dumbfounded for a long time. And then I did some thinking in research and I became smart. founded. Do you know what they sell in the gift shop at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? A T-shirt that says, Hello, Cleveland. Oh, my God.

First door, you sign, authorized personnel only. Yeah. Open that door. That's the stage. You think so. You authorized. You're being musicians, aren't you? All right.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Rock and roll. Rock and row! No. You see this way. This way. Straight-up.

Androroro. Some things up. There's a cover-up going on. And I don't know what it is. Who do you think could be behind that? I don't want to name names. These people have been named already by their parents. But somewhere in the management of that so-called Hall of Fame,

so-called Hall of So-called Fame. That's all I can say. Have you, at this point, are you sort of... I could say it again, but I don't like to repeat myself. You don't like to repeat yourself. Are you sort of... Are you and the other guys in the band sort of sought off? We don't care.

You know, this is, are you, or does it still hurt on some level? Every time I see that they're selling a T-shirt that says, I'm Cleveland in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, that hurts, mate. It hurts you. Yeah, yeah. You don't get a piece of that. Don't get a piece of the shirt. No.

A piece of the shirt wouldn't be much. It would be worthless, probably. I mean, you need an entire shirt. You need an entire shirt. Yeah, yeah. Now you're editorializing again. A little bit, because I'm expressing my opinion about what's important in a shirt. and the whole thing.

Not everybody feels that way. Both sleeves and the neck, please. Right. At the very least. At the very least. This is a question, I think, a lot of spinal tap bands, and I count myself as a huge one. Thank you. You're what, 6.3?

About 6.3, 6.4. Yeah, you are huge. I'm on the big side. Yeah. You know, you're one-third of what's been called the loudest band in rock and roll. I think we were the ones who called us that. You called yourselves that. Yeah.

Given that you have that kind of a massive success and that sort of a lot of, legacy. What inspired you to step out and record a solo album? Well, 2009 we played Glastonbury Festival in England. That's a big gig. 130,000 people staring at us, wandering. And then we played Wembley Arena, sold it out in London, same week. And I'm thinking, great, here we go. And I go home and, you know, wait for the call.

and telephone doesn't ring. Was the phone working? I ran in the phone company. That's exactly what I did. You think like I do. And they said, it's not us, mate. And I realized, ah, great, here we are again. Here we are not again, literally.

And so I thought, this is not how it ends for Derek. Maybe this is how it begins. Interesting, yeah, nice. And so I applied, there. There's a group in England, semi-official, called... I'm wearing their t-shirt, a British Fund for Aging Rockers. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, they take the money that was saved in austerity

and use it to give grants to aging rockers, that's the name. And I applied, and they said, what's your idea? And I said, my idea is that you give me money and I make a record. And they said, no, what's your idea idea? So then I had to do some thinking. and I thought, well, they say write about what you know. What do I know?

I know I'm getting older. I'll write about that. Interesting. And so that's what the record is. Meditations upon aging. Aging, yeah. You know, you make a good point. Roger Daltrey famously saying,

Hope I die before I get old. Where do you stand on dying versus getting old? Have you given this a lot of thought? Do you come down on one side or the other? I think you have to get old before you die I think that's the way nature works You wouldn't do it the other way around I would not do it the other way around

I think it's too much trouble It's way too much And too much arrangements have to be made So you make this application To the fun, British fund For aging rockers And you have the money to make the album Yes

Now your band Spinal Tap Behind some really iconic rock songs Like Hellhole and sex farm. Stonehenge. Stonehenge, of course. Was that something of a burden of the past that you had to deal with

as you were sitting down to write this album? I didn't want to repeat myself. No, never. The worst thing you can do is repeat yourself. So I didn't want to do that. That was one thing I did not want to do is repeat myself. So I thought, let's take advantage of this

by expanding the palette. Right. the musical palette. So Tapp was always a rock band, a loud guitar-driven rock band. Let's get a symphony orchestra involved. Let's get other kinds of different musical colors to paint with.

Let's do that. Fire alarm? I think so. Let's wait for that. Is it a real fire? Oh, this would be history in the making. We were interviewing, Terek, when the building burnt down.

I'm just going to quickly make sure that the building's not on fire. Okay. If it is on fire, are there some more different questions you want me to ask? How do we get asked? How do we get? How do we talk faster? Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to get, I thought I'll get a broader musical palette.

Mm-hmm. Get a symphony orchestra, get other colors to paint with. There's a song called Memo to Willie. Mm-hmm. Now, Willie, I don't know if you're familiar with. familiar with British slang. I am actually. Okay.

So you'll tell people what the willy is then. Right. It's an important part of the anatomy. Isn't that how you describe it? It's the distinguished member from down below. Exactly. And I would come to this country and I would watch the telly and I'd see these adverts. Nice looking bloke, late 30s, maybe early 40s.

He's got a piece of crumpet with him. And they're out in a rowboat on the lake. or they're strolling down a path in the city or, you know, they're having a good time. They're going to, it looks like they're about to get it on, right? Mm-hmm. And all of a sudden, the voice, scary voice comes on, when the time is right, will he be ready? And I'm thinking, is this an epidemic that I've missed? And it's, you know, it's for these pills.

Right, of course. And I'm thinking, we don't have this in Britain. This doesn't happen? The problem doesn't happen or the remedy doesn't happen? Well, I don't know. Or the remedy doesn't. They don't talk about it. They don't talk about it.

It's not on the telly all every night. So I just thought, it's not my problem. I make that clear. Of course not. Yeah. But here's what you need. Give them a good stern talking to. Let's listen to a little bit of memo to Willie.

Now, you mentioned that you don't want to repeat yourself in your music. And you never want to repeat myself. You never want to repeat yourself. And this album is full of new sounds. But there are also some, I would say, some thematic lines that you could draw from, say, spinal tap to Derek Smalls. Solo artist, artist, I'm sorry. That's all right. I was interested in sort of tracing sort of a thematic line from a song like Big Bottom,

which was a big hit for you back in the tap days, to But Call. Can you describe how you sort of made the journey from Big Bottom to Butcall? You know, when I was a kid, my dad was in the telephone business. He... Worked for the telephone company? No, no. He had a, his own company. Well, it wasn't a company.

I mean, he was the company, but he had his own van. And he would go about sanitizing telephones, proper telephone handsets, what we used to have. People were concerned about germs. And he made a nice living at it. And now, you know, we've got these little phones, which are germier than anything. I mean, if my dad were alive, he'd have invented a phone sanitizing app. Of course. And he'd be, you know...

On the phone itself. Fabulously wealthy. Yeah. But, you know, here's this thing that people, you know, ring you up and they're not even calling you. And it's a but call. Right. So it was not about, let's do another song about butts.

No. It was going from a whole other place. That's how with a lot of your music, on first glance, it might seem shallow. Simple-minded. Yeah. But then when you dig deeper, it's less shallow. It's always less shallow when you do deep. It's interesting.

It's interesting. This is, you know, this is maybe pie in the sky, just fantasy or dreaming big. But do you think there's a chance that you might be inducted as a solo artist in the rock and roll hall fame? Now that you've broken out with your own album. I don't know. You know, to tell you the honest truth, Andy, is it Andy? I think I have to die first. you know right which is not my intent no no you've been very clear about that yeah rather be alive than in the

rock and roll hall of fame right well that's that's fair and it's your choice it's a choice it's your choice let me ask before we move on to something else because i realize i've touched on a very painful topic and you're you're handling it very manfully thank you um if you could remove anybody from the rock and roll hall of fame and take their place who would that be peter frampton Thank you so much. Thank you, Andrew. Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap, as played by the great actor and comedian Harry Shearer. Derek Smalls is fictional, but his solo album is real.

You might want to ponder that if you're philosophical. It's called Smalls Change, Meditations Upon Aging. You can read Andy Borowitz at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When I'm doing my day job, one of my favorite things to do is walk around the halls of the New Yorker and pick the brains of my very informed colleagues and find out what they're listening to,

what they're reading, and what they're watching on TV or seeing at the movies. Joshua Rothman is an editor at the New Yorker, and he writes about all kinds of things, philosophy, science, technology, but lately there's been just one thing on his mind. One very big thing. That's him. That's pretty recent.

That is a beautiful child. He's cute. You've done good, Josh. He's cute, thank you. I'm with my colleague Josh Rothman, who just had a baby, and it was a stunning 11 pounds, 8 ounces, taking the breath away from everybody at the office's here, and my wife and everybody I know I told about it. I think I told everybody. How's the baby, first of all?

He's great. Yeah. Yeah. He's good-natured, smiley. Any tricks? Not yet, but he's starting to sleep for more than three hours at a time. Can he dunk yet? He can't dunk.

He does, he has a real wingspan. So I think there's a football versus baseball debate happening in the, it's going to be the giants. Dick Sneigh on the football. Bigsna on the football. So you've got some recommendations for parents and all those who love them. I do. Fire away.

Okay. So, you know, in the months leading up to his arrival, as one does, my wife and I read like hundreds of parenting books. and the best book that we read was called Expecting Better, and it's by an economist actually named Emily Oster. She's a professor at Brown. And basically the theory is that she, using her statistical skills, does a vast analysis of all of the parenting studies that exist and tells you which ones are meaningful

and which ones actually don't pass muster. This is what you read, not books about like what kind of blankets do you? or what to feed the baby or how to get the baby to sleep. It got a statistical analysis from an economist to Brown. And it was awesome. And the big discovery, I mean, I guess if you had to boil it down, it's that being an economist, she's super aware of, like, socioeconomic factors that confound most parenting studies.

So what did you learn? So, for example, there's a lot of studies saying, don't drink while you're pregnant, right? But as we all know, in some countries, people do drink while they're pregnant. So it kind of makes you wonder what's the deal. It turns out that most of these studies have some kind of socioeconomic confound, some kind of variable that messes it up. Usually it has to do with the fact that mothers who drink more are poorer than mothers who drink less.

When you find the studies that actually account for all those variables, all those socioeconomic variables to which Emily Oster is especially sensitive because she's an economist, it turns out you can have like one to two glasses of wine and it's fine. per day, which is what people do in other countries. So that's what we did. How else did it help you? I think the big thing it made you do was just like use your head instead of being freaked out all the time. Were you freaked out all the time, anticipating your first child?

Yeah, a little bit, I think. What freaked you out the most? I guess like I had visions of it being a lot scarier than it was or than it's turned out to be. Like I thought that the whole having kids thing would be way more, way less fun. and just way more alarming, like the way it was the first, like, couple days in the hospital where I didn't know what I was doing and felt incompetent and terrified. That you'd break the baby in so much. Yeah, exactly, that I'd break the baby. What else?

Okay, the other thing I did was I read lots of dad blogs, like tons of dad blogs. You're making me feel so guilty. Dad blogs are, like, unbelievable. They're all obsessed with gear, you know, like baby stuff that dads can buy. a lot of them have a, for lack of a better word, like a tactical sensibility. What does that mean? It means a lot of the stuff looks sort of militaristic. And there's a whole kind of like tactical dad.

Like you're ready for all eventualities. You have a backpack with tons of pockets in it. And it has like a special compartment for diapers and another special compartment for one. So like military cargo pants, but for the baby. Yeah. Somehow I got down this rabbit hole. And there was one blog that I found recommended it. It went through the best tiny.

flashlights for a dad to own to be prepared for anything. And I bought one and I have it here and it's awesome. It's made by this company called Raylight. You were having a child or going on an expedition into like the jungles of Indonesia. So it's like this huge brass heavy flashlight. Oh my god. It looks like it's about five inches long and it you would find it buried under the sea by in some sort of Jules Verne Expedition. The thing weighs 22 pounds. It's awesome. And the main reason it's great is it has this special low-light mode that you can use

to inspect like the diaper situation in the dark without waking your kid. So you can go on like a covert mission. A little tip here from a longtime parent. You should be able to do that with your eyes closed, my friend. That might be true. Sense of smell should give it right away. So this has been like the best thing. I hope you're happy.

I use it every night. Excellent. Okay. We've got a book We got the flashlight Yeah And then I guess in the year up to

When our baby was born I had read The Norwegian novelist Carlova Canowsgard Has this series of books That he's written That are letters to his Unborn Daughters

And he wrote four books They're each named after season So there's like Autumn, winter, spring, summer It's this like Hyper sweet concept. And I read these books. They sort of encouraged you to think about what life would be like for this new person. And they made you think about how when you had this kid, you would like

see life differently too. In the first of those books, which is called Autumn, and Oskarad has this little essay called infants, and it's just about babies. So he writes, Holding an infant close to one's body is one of the great joys in life, perhaps the greatest. This is when the child is newborn and so tiny that the adult's palms nearly cover its little body completely

when its gaze seems to float and only rarely fastens on something in its surroundings. And one senses that for the baby being in the world is almost exclusively sensual, the warmth and softness of the body that the infant nestles against. the lukewarm milk that fills its tummy, sleep which overcomes it so deliciously every few hours.

For the newborn infant, everything revolves around equalizing the differences between itself and the surroundings, getting everything warm, close, soft. A sudden drop in temperature opens a chasm between the infant in reality. So does a sudden sound or a sudden movement, and it screams. Satisfying these simple demands is a pleasure, because they're simple, because doing so involves an interaction, a rhythm, a song,

and because the closeness it requires, fulfills a wish, which is almost a desire to protect, to give, to care for. Joshua Rothman, a newly minted father, reading from Carl Ove Canalsgarde's essay collection, Autumn. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for today. Thanks for joining us. I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and

The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.