"Spinal Tap" Member, Harry Shearer, Blogs for "Unplugged & Unwigged"
Unwigged & Unplugged is a newly released musical documentary featuring an evening with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer; the legendary
musical and comedic trio performing music from heavy metal's loudest band
Spinal Tap plus more. The DVD features two plus hours of songs from the original soundtrack This
Is Spinal Tap (1984), the studio album Break Like The Wind (1992), and
A Mighty Wind (2003) along with some special surprises and rarities
thrown in. Check out Harry Shearer's blog post detailing gearing up for the tour....--Angela
Perhaps the scariest day in the six-week rehearsal period for the "Unwigged" tour came when, after about a week of rehearsing the Tap and Folksmen songs which we knew would form the bulk of our show, we decided to play 'em straight through and time them. As each song finished, one or another of us glanced at the stopwatch application on my laptop: 2:53, 3:12, 2:37...nothing even approaching four minutes. We played twenty songs and barely cracked an hour. We laughed at the result. How the hell were we going to fill an evening, let alone a DVD?
That's when we started thinking about the rest of the show--the comedy part. The three of us--comedy people with a deep love of music--had been concentrating on the songs, particularly on the most interesting challenge of the project, the question neatly summed up in the faux bumper sticker (or bracelet): WWWD? (What Would We Do?) Mssrs McKean, Guest and Shearer (sorry about the third person there) had become quite proficient at inhabiting the characters in these two distinct bands, and particularly at making the kinds of lyrical and musical decisions those guys would have made. Now we were faced with a brand new task: making the musical choices we'd make. We were covering our own tunes.
The acoustic-instrument setting (I was cheating, playing an electric bass for the Tap stuff) dictated its own changes. Even so, when we finally decided to add "Heavy Duty" to the lineup, we were capable of some quasi-Tap rocking. Other songs took some thought. We were initially skeptical of being able to replicate the pseudo-historical bombast of "Stonehenge", until we realized there was no way we weren't going to do that song. After toying with every other possible persona for the spoken passages, Christopher reverted to default Nigel. Even though some of his other attempts (I seem to recall a couple of his classically bad impersonations of older actors) were Funny At The Time.
Maybe the most dramatic musical alteration came to our most-covered Tap song, "Big Bottom". Clearly, we weren't going to muck up the simple logistics of the show by hauling around extra basses for one song. Simple logistics, after all, was one of the prime motivations for doing "Unwigged" during the 25th anniversary year of the Tap film, rather than a full-on rock tour in the teeth of an economic meltdown. So, with my one (standup) bass, I proposed a kind of swingy solo version of the tune. Chris and Mike immediately started scatty vocal parts, and then came up with the idea of guest dancers, and we had a definitively un-Tap version of "BB".
Then came the question of comedy. We knew there were some little video treats we could lay our hands on--the original theatrical trailer for "Tap", cleverly disguised as a sad little documentary about a cheese-rolling festival in Denmark, the original appearance of Tap on "The TV Show", a short clip of my appearance in "The Robe". Then there were the fan-made videos of Tap songs, about which more appears on line if you Google Lego and Tap.
Finally, Michael had squirreled away--he being our chief squirrel--a copy of a memo from the NBC censor at the time, outlining how "Tap" could be, uh, adapted for late-night television viewing. We decided on a reading of the memo, and, small world that it is, a month after the tour ended, I got an email from said censor (with the memorable name of Bill Clotworthy). He'd heard about his role in our show, and was sending his greetings, and a copy of a book he'd written about "Saturday Night Live", where he served as censor for a couple of decades. And, each night of the tour, we all discovered new things to say, and new things to leave out. In that sense, there was an improvisational element to the show, as well.
--Harry Shearer
