Fictional bassist Derek Smalls is making new music
Spinal Tap has been silent for years, but one of the band’s septuagenarian rockers has turned his amps up to 11 once again: bassist Derek Smalls.
Smalls is the satirical character dreamed up by comedian Harry Shearer — also know for being a two-time cast member on “Saturday Night Live” and for voicing many characters on “The Simpsons” — for “This is Spinal Tap,” the 1984 mockumentary about a British heavy metal band.
Christopher Guest, who starred in and co-wrote the movie with Shearer, would go on to make a series of mockumentaries about everything from dog shows (“Best in Show”) to small-town theatre (“Waiting for Guffman”), but “This is Spinal Tap,” which the Library of Congress preserved in the National Film Registry, is the only movie that gained a significant offscreen life.
Spinal Tap may not be a real band, but it’s released real music. Last Friday, Smalls released his first full solo album on his 75th birthday, which was inspired by “fear of turning 76.”
The record, titled “Smalls Change,” is about aging in the modern world. Think of it like the comedic version the swan songs from Leonard Cohen (“You Want it Darker”) and David Bowie (“Blackstar”).
MRIs, butt dials and erectile dysfunction receive full songlength treatments. The lyrics are funny, but the music is no joke, flipping from pounding heavy metal to lush symphonic segues. Real guest musicians fill out the album, including David Crosby, Peter Frampton, Paul Shaffer, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, Foo Fighters’ Taylor Hawkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, Styx’s Todd Sucherman and former Yes member Rick Wakeman.
Then, the fictional aging rock- er is embarking on a real nationwide tour — playing with real orchestras — which kicks off in New Orleans and ends in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy Center, where he’ll play with the National Symphony Orchestra.
As Smalls tells it, Spinal Tap is officially done. Finding himself without his band, Smalls decided to “trot back up the ladder and see if there’s an attic up there.” There was. He found a wellspring of inspiration, ideas and opinions — some of which he shared here. On the end of Spinal Tap Nigel Tufnel (Guest’s character in the film), who played lead guitar in the band, now spends his time experimenting with breeding miniature animals: first horses (but couldn’t find jockeys small enough to ride them), then goats (but they were too small to milk). Meanwhile, lead singer David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) sends the occasional letter which Smalls opens “with a mixture of anticipation and bewilderment that I can’t find the scissors.” Unfortunately, they’re all written in Chinese pictograms, which Smalls can’t read, “so I can’t tell if he’s saying ‘Let’s get back together’ or ‘I miss you’ or ‘I love the new record’ or ‘Dim sum for three and I’ll have the duck.’”
On the record’s themes “They say write about what you know. I thought, what do I know? I know I’m getting older, so I’ll write about that,” Smalls said, adding that he was often met with pushback. “Friends said, ‘Derek that’s very limiting, that idea,’ and I said, ‘no,’ and then I thought about it, and I said ‘no’ again. And I said, ‘If you think about it — which I just did — you realize there’s only two kinds of people in the world: people who are getting older, and dead people. So I’m aiming very accurately, I think, at the active half of the market.’”
On being a frontman
“As a bass player, you’re standing in the back,” Smalls said. “You don’t realize the lighters are brighter up front. And they’re warmer, because light equals heat. When you get older, you get a little more sensitive to the cold.” If he could go back, he said he would always have been a frontman “if for no other reason than the warmth.”