After a difficult gig in Anaheim (I couldn’t hear anything on stage, so playing and singing was a matter of trusting muscle memory, of all things), I had two sort-of homecoming shows in a row. One was not an Unwigged show, it was Judith Owen’s gig at Jazzfest. I flew down to New Orleans for one day--simultaneously soul-filling and heartbreaking, because of its brevity--to play bass with her, and the outpouring of love, from friends and strangers alike, reminded me yet again why New Orleans is like nowhere else. Then back to LA, for an almost equally warm reception for the Unwigged show at the Wiltern. Monday night in Phoenix, at the Dodge theater (are they already considering who’ll get the naming rights when Chrysler goes Chapter 11?), the sound was finally right on the money, and performing was the fun it’s supposed to be.
Now we’re in Denver, sharing a hotel with the New Orleans Hornets, fresh off a humiliating loss to the Nuggets Monday night back home. Just passed Chris Paul, he on his way to breakfast, me just done. It was the classic “you don’t know who I am, but I know who you are” handshake.
Harry Shearer

Our first real night off. We did have Saturday as a night off, but we went to the Blazers-Rockets playoff game, and I think half the people in Portland blame us for hexing the Blazers. It was my first time on the big arena screen since my wife Judith and I were at a fairly famous Hornets playoff game last year in New Orleans. As part of a commercial-time stunt, some foam was sprayed on the floor, and then, as the buzzer sounded to resume play, it was obvious the Arena crew had not rehearsed the removal of the foam stuff. They tried brooms, mops, vacuums. Twenty minutes elapsed before the game resumed, so, to keep the crowd entertained, the Kiss-Cam roamed the Arena, finding my wife and I close to the court.

Anyway, the Portland crowd was great, big and enthusiastic, in a fairly modern auditorium, and we kind of had our stuff together. A quick busride back up to Seattle, where we played the old and lovely Paramount, where Tap had performed (and met Pearl Jam and Nirvana) in ’92. This time we remembered (unlike Portland) to do a Q&A session mid-show, but we had sound-check sound problems with my standup bass, and that problem was reflected in the show itself. There was one song where I started playing, and the bass was neither in monitors nor in the house. Tree falls in the forest time.

A San Francisco story (or is it a woman story?): I was walking to dinner in SF tonight, and a woman hailed down a cab. Another woman nearby said, “I’ve been waiting for a cab for 15 minutes.” The first woman walked over to the cab, and started to get in. The second woman repeated her assertion, in a non-threatening, non-hysterical tone of voice. The first woman sighed, gave up the cab and walked away.

Harry Shearer

First show. Vancouver, B.C. Big theater, wacky soundcheck, but, the minute we walk onstage, the audience erupts with a big, warm welcome. Makes me want to retract every Canadian joke I’ve ever written, but that would keep me too busy. Sound in our little ear things was sometimes great, sometimes confusing, and one of the songs (I won’t say which) was Sigalert-worthy. Nonetheless, the adrenaline lift from the crowd lasted the whole show long. The border crossing, shortly after midnight, was as close to painless as it could get. Arrival in Portland: about 5 a.m. The glamour!
Harry Shearer

Omens? My car to the airport didn’t work, because the driver didn’t know how to close the trunk (!). So I got a lift from the lovely wife. Mike broke a handle on one of his suitcases, and Chris left his eyeglasses in the car. Pray for us.
Harry Shearer

We’re wrapping up our third and final day of concert rehearsal, testing out, swapping, and re-swapping the little earbuds that replace the “wedge” loudspeakers traditionally used for stage monitoring. Each day has been interesting and challenging, adjusting levels, routining the show, editing the videos--but nothing as remarkable as the first hour of our first day, when the guy who was rehearsing next door popped in to say hello.
Paul McCartney.
The Beatle guy.
We’d heard he was rehearsing next door, and yet, when he walked into our studio, eyewitnesses swore that the three of us have never been simultaneously speechless for so long. I’m sure people of another generation may be equally gobsmacked when Lil’ Wayne walks in.
Anyway, after our attempts at small talk, Paul (I call him Paul because he told me not to call him Sir Paul) said, “Let’s hear a tune”. We had just started fooling with monitors and levels, and now we’re playing a song for Paul McCartney. In fact, we ended up playing two songs. And, speaking for myself, I never have been, and never will be, as nervous as I was playing those two tunes (for the record, “Clam Caravan” and our Folksmen cover of “Start Me Up”). The latter includes two bridges, which I speak, and whose lyrics I can never remember. As we started it up, I had one thought in mind: Don’t fuck up these lyrics in front of Paul McCartney.
I didn’t.
See you on the road.
Harry Shearer

I came back from NYC with a throat-on-fire kind of infection, so we rehearsed on Tuesday with just Chris and Michael singing, which threw a lot of timing off, but enabled at least one of us (me) to hear what the heck we were all doing. Then, Wednesday, it was our day to appear on the Tonight Show.

We’ve all had the experience by now of being on the stages of late-night shows which maintain an ambient temperature more suitable to a meat locker, but Jay’s studio seems to have reached Letterman-like temperatures since our last visit. Given the fact that my throat thing had now turned into a garden-variety cold (which I really didn’t want to morph into bronchitis), I kept my leather jacket on during our sound check and camera rehearsal, and daydreamed of mittens. Our sound check at 11 a.m. lasted no more than six minutes--we’ve got three instruments, two of them acoustic, and three vocal mics, and the Tonight Show sound crew appear to have done this kind of thing a few times before. Then we sat around until 1, when we had our one camera rehearsal for Ellen, the longtime Tonight Show director, who remained a good sport as Chris, in between lyrics, jokingly yelled shots (“I rode the jetstream, two shot, I reached the top, single”). Then it was nap time for me, since the show wasn’t taping until 4.

Other guests included Michael Caine and Dennis Rodman, so I iPhone-shot a picture of the cue card that had that lineup. I mean, when’s the next time this group will be together?

The show started at 4, and we watched in our dressing room as Caine and Rodman did their segments, and we started to consider a betting pool on whether we’d be bumped (as a comedy group Michael and I used to belong to were from a long-ago Tonight Show) or just sing and not have time to “do panel”. As it turned out, it’s fortunate nobody took that bet, since we sang (probably a speeded-up version of "Hell Hole", given our sense of the limited time remaining) and got to talk. Michael even got to mention, as Jay’s prodding, the fact that NBC wouldn’t let us do “Sex Farm”, our new funky version, on the show. Apparently, even 12:30 ET is too early for folks to hear those lyrics (look ‘em up).

After the taping, Rodman, next to whom I sat on the panel, actually mentioned that he recognized me as the “Simpsons guy”. Caine, to whom I tried to say it was an honor to meet him, was looking elsewhere. And the cameraman at whose camera I’d shot the cue card of the lineup came over and handed me the card itself as a lovely parting gift.
Harry Shearer

We’ve now moved solidly, if tentatively, into the 21st century. Our antepenultimate rehearsal of the week kicked off with a session of trying out various configurations of "in-ears" monitoring devices. When you stand on stage and play music, of course, technology allows you to hear not only yourself but also, hopefully (except in the case, let’s say, of Fleetwood Mac), the other players on stage. Often, that’s just a dream. When Spinal Tap tours, the volume involved means that what others onstage are playing is largely a rumor.

Properly, of course, it should be "a rumour".

But increasingly, monitoring isn’t achieved by “wedges”, speakers placed at the feet of performers, but rather by teeny-weeny speakers embedded in sophisticated earbuds, or embudded in earbeds. As you wish. So this past Wednesday, we were bud-testing.

I’d had a wonderful experience with in-ear monitoring a year ago August, when I did a live performance of "Songs Pointed and Pointless" at the Hollywood House of Blues. Anybody who’s heard me sing knows I’m not a professional singer, and the prospect of singing an album’s full of songs, many of them deliberately written outside my natural vocal range. was petrifying. Trying to sing over a loud band, even with ear plugs, posed the definite possibility of blowing out the cords by song two at the latest.

But the buds gave me such a pristine vocal monitoring experience that I became an instant convert. Mr. McKean has not been so enthusiastic as the subject has come up for discussion, even though acoustic evenings, with more miking involved, poses additional problems--more opportunity for feedback, less margin for error.

Mike was cautious as the experiment began, and Mr. Guest and I fiddled with a couple different configurations. Both of us found the "squishy" tips--careful, we’re still talking audio here--gave superior sound quality and, most important for me, some serious low end. Mike found that his two-driver buds sounded okay and, most importantly, didn’t make him feel claustrophobic. It is a challenge to have something shoved down your ears that lets you hear yourself and, possibly, your mates, while not shutting you entirely off from the non-miked portion of the universe, like, say, the audience.

So far, so good.
Harry Shearer

Thursday we got our first listen to the rough mixes of most of the new Spinal Tap album. The boys would be proud, we’re making it even louder.

Then Chris, Michael and I made the perilous journey across the Hollywood Hills at rush hour to attend a West Hollywood dinner with a gaggle of folks from our digital music distributor and the executives of iTunes. I personally don’t eat out much in L.A. these days, since I like to cook, and since I find the restaurants in my second home town, New Orleans, far more irresistible. So this was a rare opportunity to experience a real Hollywood-style restaurant in all its magnificence--beautiful people vying for each other’s glances, a buzz you could run a small town’s lighting system on for a year, an implication that you were lucky to be allowed in (probably inherited from the previous restaurant tenant, Morton’s, where the big Vanity Fair Oscar parties used to be held).

And an interesting design touch: we were meeting and eating in a private dining room. I’m old fashioned enough to think that still means a private room, separated from the rest of the restaurant by, oh, I don’t know, walls or something. The long side of the this particular room that adjoined the regular dining room was separated from it by...a curtain. So you could continue to hear the high-decibel buzzy chatter from them throughout your “private’ eat and meet. I’d tell you what went on during our meeting, but I couldn’t hear it.
Harry Shearer

Today we got our first look at the designs for t-shirts, hoodies, caps, belt buckles, and other Spinal Tap (and Folksmen) merchandise, which will be generously offered to the public at larcenously high prices during the Unwigged tour. Some pretty funny stuff from the designers at BandMerch, especially the “Ea a Oe’s” tote bag. Public television, stick to mugs from now on.

Finishing up our first week of rehearsals, still working on the few songs that are “late adds” to the liineup--we’ve figured out how to play “The Majesty of Rock” in a credibly acoustic setting, full of underamplified power, and we’re working out vocal and guitar parts for my song paying tribute to Elvis Presley’s exact mode of death (according to police reports at the time), “All Backed Up”.

And we had a meeting where we finally confronted the major question of the tour: take the bus all night long, and spend a day off in Columbus, Ohio, or sleep at the hotel in Philly, and do the busride the next day. Two guesses, babe. (Nothing against Columbus, it's our favorite city. Honest)
Harry Shearer

An “UNwigged” diary

Harry Shearer writes:

Our big first day out, as ourselves, as an unwigged trio in public: Monday’s press conference at the Hollywood House of Blues at the ungodly hour of 11 a.m. We speed-rehearsed our medley of Tap-and-Folksmen tunes upstairs in the Foundation Room, then scampered downstairs for a faux-soundcheck behind the curtain while the audience for the previous event, a blues performance for schoolkids, was slowly ushered out into the daylight.

Our job was to communicate the fact that this was us--Chris, Michael, and me--going on tour, not Tap, not the Folksmen. We played around with different soundbites and answers, and then decided to, kind of, use all of them. The shotgun approach.

The medley went off okay, then we started answering the questions, first of Kurt Loder--the first person to earn the title of MTV Newsman Emeritus--and then the general roomful of entertainment reporters. My personal favorite was the guy over on the aisle to my left who kept asking painfully perceptive questions about the money side of our deals. In the next life, he gets to be our lawyer.

The verdict: I peeked at some of the written and broadcast coverage over the next couple of days, and some of it actually grasped the point we were trying to make: this was the real guys behind the fake guys, performing the songs we’d written for the fake guys. Some of the coverage went in the predictably wrong direction, “Spinal Tap”s Going on Tour and NOT Turning It Up to 11!!!”. But, hey, given how wrong American journalists got, just to take two examples, the runup to the Iraq War and the cause of the flooding of New Orleans, the entertainment media didn’t do so poorly.

Tuesday and Wednesday were our first full days of rehearsal for the tour, if you don’t count the time out we had to spend on conference calls about legal bullshit. The job, it turns out, is not just to figure out what’s funny about us onstage, as opposed to the much easier job of figuring out what’s funny about the characters in Tap and the Folksmen (as one of us said at the press conference, answering the question, “What Would We Do?”), the job is also to figure out how we want to play this music. We’re not just doing acoustic strip-downs of Tap’s loud rock and The Folksmen’s already-acoustic songs. But, after the first two days, it’s clear we’re finding interesting ways to reinterpret these songs, some that make us laugh, even.

A footnote about “the ungodly hour of 11 a.m.”: I think the last time we performed at that hour was Spinal Tap’s only performance in New Orleans, ever, at the NARM convention, one of the many ways the record business used to spend the money it no longer has. But an 11 a.m. performance wasn’t the worst of it; it was preceded by a 3 A.M. SOUNDCHECK. We actually trooped, in robes and pajamas, across Canal Street, from the Sheraton to the Marriott, to do the soundcheck, then trooped back to bed. However, we didn’t do so at street level. The great discovery of this adventure: there’s a pedestrian tunnel under Canal St. at that corner--at least there was in 1993. Next time you’re at Mardi Gras an unable to cross Canal St., see if you can find the tunnel.