TURN IT UP Harry Shearer
Nov 03, 2008
Talking paeans to patsies, tunes for tools, and Sarah Palin's big bottom.
BY RANDY HARWARD
In Spinal Tap, Harry Shearer (as Derek Smalls) lampoons rock bands and the music industry. It's satire, the comedic equivalent of the Pixies' loud-quiet-loud dynamic, but not nearly as voluble and justly vicious, as when he's targeting the misfit toys that run our country. On Songs of the Bushmen, Shearer publicly flays the "stars and bit players" in the tragedy of errors that is George W. Bush's America. And even if Spinal Tap took a page out of the Cannibal Corpse playbook and wrote violent scenes about the rent carcasses of Karl Rove, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, et al, it still wouldn't measure up to the skewering Shearer serves up, which is rooted in the reality of these government figures' own words and deeds.
And so, speaking with Shearer shortly before the 2008 presidential election when America will choose between Hope and McSame, we learn that sometimes satire isn't so funny. And neither are candidate buttocks.
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BLURT: So, uh... Got hope?
SHEARER: [laughs] I don't think hope is what satirists are in business for. I have to say, just on the level of a professional performance, I admire Obama's performance over the last 20 months. What that translates into for the future, I don't know. As I say, I'm a professional skeptic, so I'm not sure hope is in the equation. I'm also a New Orleanian and it did not escape our notice that the largest manmade engineering disaster ever to befall a major American city was totally unmentioned throughout the presidential debate. So if that's what hope's made of, it's pretty thin gruel these days.
This bunch provides so much good material for satirists, yet the point is clearly lost on them. Is satire just a balm to soothe the choir to whom you preach?
Well, hopefully I'm preachin' to more than the choir-I once had George W. Bush say, in a sketch on my radio show, "preachin' to the chorus girls." Early on, somebody asked me how to describe this record. I said, "It's a musical impeachment ‘cause we won't get any other kind." It's for the entertainment and edification of the audience, having these folks do a musical perp walk. It's sort of the same twisted joy most people got when they saw O.J. bundled off to prison after this most recent trial: Finally, we got him. Clearly there was never any hope that it would have any effect on any of the people themselves-I mean, the targets. I don't think satire can really accomplish that.
Every once in a great while, if ridicule is persistent and ubiquitous enough, the target will shrink off the stage, a la Dan Quayle. But... that was for stuff that didn't have that much to do with his real role in politics or the administration. When ridicule has its greatest effect, the bad news is it's normally because the target has been hung out there as bait...
Getting back to the New Orleans experience, [FEMA director} Mike Brown was the target of great and effective ridicule. But his boss-the guy who really ran Homeland Security and who should've been here, Mike Chertoff, is still in office. He escaped any ridicule at all... So sometimes the job of satire is to go past ridicule to just try to figure out who's really doin' what and make usable fun of it, as opposed to just turnin' it into a tarring and feathering expedition.
You've experienced censorship with this album over the cover, which depicts Bush with a bone through his nose. Interestingly, this comes from the same people who complain when their own First Amendment rights are violated. And cry "fair use," like when Foo Fighters, Heart, Van Halen protested the McCain campaign's unauthorized use of their music.
Mmm-hmm. Well, the idea that Clear Channel, which owns those billboard companies that were censoring my ads, is also in the broadcasting business and hoists the banner of free speech whenever anybody talks about regulation of broadcasting in the public interest. So you don't even have to go outside that company to find how blatantly hypocritical this is. But, big news: Large corporations and political figures are hypocrites. This just in!
There were so many people you could have nailed on this album. How did you narrow it down?
I took the best-known people, like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Karl Rove. And then I took people that just pissed me off. Like Wolfowitz and John Yoo. I just thought that Yoo was about to escape any kind of public obloquy for his role in writing some of the torture memos, some of which are still secret to this day. And I just thought, if nobody else, the kids at Berkeley who have to have him for a law professor should know [who] they're dealing with: A guy who may be well-advised not to travel outside the borders of the United States for the next few decades, lest he be subject to war crimes prosecution.
And then Karen Hughes is a longtime Bush advisor who, it just seemed to me to me, symbolize the pugnacious hubris of this crowd. She was going to take on this job as head of public diplomacy and make the Arab world love us. And actually, when she finished her tenure in that job, she did everything but hang up a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the way out. And the hubristic nerve of thinking that we've done anything but engender incendiary feelings against this country in the last seven or eight years was just mind-boggling. So I thought that had to be documented.
So basically, the stars and the bit players that got my ire up.
Did the subject of the song have any bearing on the musical style?
Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah. The Colin Powell song-I knew, sort of, the story of the guy and my feeling about him. Which is, shall we say, if I were Barack Obama, I wouldn't be flattered that he's just endorsed me...
I knew what I wanted to say about him, but not how to write the song until I got into a car on my way to the Grammy Awards last year. I was in sort of a foul mood and the driver had turned on smooth jazz. Just before I snapped at him to turn it off, I realized: smooth jazz-Colin Powell. Then the refrain came to me: "smooth move." That's sort of the way he gets through all this. So yeah, the musical form there had a lot to do with it.
I cheated a little bit with Karl Rove. Obviously he doesn't come from bluegrass country-he comes from Texas. But his nickname from Bush having been "Turd Blossom," I couldn't resist, you know, a twist on "Orange Blossom Special." Karen Hughes is from Texas, so a country ballad seemed appropriate for her.
For Rumsfeld-most of those lyrics are, of course, actual quotes from his press conferences-but I just thought I'd use the music from the time when he was a kid... You know, the Sinatra/big band era.
John Yoo, the form of that came more from the idea of the title and what it suggested: echoes of another angry rock song [The Who's "Who Are You?"]. And "935 Lies" just always felt like an angry swamp blues. That just seemed to be where it lived.
That song really does capture the anger many of us feel...
Yeah. That was one of the songs we recorded in New Orleans. And I had this great guitar player, Shane Theriot, who plays with the Neville Brothers among other people. He just brought that deep, kind of midnight swamp feel to it, which seems yeah, very appropriate to the anger of the song.
Speakin' of guitar players, how did Jeff Skunk Baxter [Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan] respond to the songs? He's a conservative, a weapons consultant...
Jeff played on "Who Is Yoo?" When the producer, Jeffrey Foskett, who is Brian Wilson's musical director and a wonderful guy, suggested Skunk, I thought, really? He said, "No! He'll be fine." And I know Skunk, he sat in with Spinal Tap a few times and he's been nothin' but nice to me, so I thought let's leave it up to him. He just set to work sayin', "Maybe you could use a little of this? How about this?" He just tore through a ferocious couple hours of playing.... We knew how good this guy is, but he was on fire. And he was listening to a playback with the lyrics, no wool was pulled over his eyes. He never reacted to it at all, just said, "Man, I wanna get back to playin' full-time."
How would you immortalize Sarah Palin in song?
I already have on MyDamnChannel.com. I just couldn't help myself. I wrote a song called "Bridge to Nowhere"... It suggested this dreamy, kind of late-fifties exotica approach. She's singing this wistful song to the bridge, itself.
Weren't you at least a little tempted to do a retread of "Big Bottom?"
[laughs] No. Not at all. I haven't even seen her bottom. You sound more knowledgeable about that-
-I don't wanna brag...
Were you a judge at the Miss Alaska pageant? No, I find that even with Sarah Palin, I tend to make jokes about things other than the anatomy of the people involved.
Well, of course. Now, considering the Pod Incident in This Is Spinal Tap, it seems that Derek Smalls could give advice about extricating oneself from a predicament. What wisdom would he impart to the new president, who'll inherit Bush's foul wind?
I don't even think Derek could be of assistance. Whoever is elected is inheriting maybe the biggest shitpile to ever fall upon a new American president. The joke going forward is gonna be a guy with this unbelievable weight of crap, of two wars that we're losing, an economy that's in the toilet, an energy crisis looming again, an environmental calamity... He's basically bent under the weight of this stuff saying ‘follow me' when he can barely stand up straight.
I think Derek's advice, about how to survive that, would be very much like his advice about most everything. Which is just, "Turn it up."
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