TAPPING HIS ALTER EGO SUITS MULTITALENTED SHEARER JUST FINE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 11, 1993                   TAG: 9302110034
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium
TAPPING HIS ALTER EGO SUITS MULTITALENTED SHEARER JUST FINE
People don't recognize Harry Shearer without the long wig and droopy moustache that are uniquely his alter ego's, Derek Smalls, bass player for the legendary (read bogus) British hard-rock band Spinal Tap.
And that suits Shearer - who has played Smalls on and off for years - just fine.
"You can live a more nearly normal life," he said this week after a performance at Virginia Tech's Burruss Auditorium.
But people are starting to recognize his voice, even in cities that don't broadcast, "Le Show," the show he does for National Public Radio.
On the show, he plays himself and a slew of other characters. He does a mean Nancy Reagan.
On television's "The Simpsons," he's one of any dozen regulars: The Rev. Lovejoy, Ned Flanders, God, Ottoman the bus river, the psychologist, Doc Hibbard, Montgomery Burns and Smithers to name a few.
Also this year he is releasing a record compilation of some of his radio shows, as well as a book of columns that he did when he was writing for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine.
He has a movie that he's written and wants to direct. ("I'm still waiting for a sucker," he said.)
Shearer, 49, calls himself "multimedia sort of guy."
Tuesday night in his dressing room, Shearer is wearing a New Orleans Jazz T-shirt and jeans, and a ring of sweat around his neck and hair. He looks shorter in person.
He has just spent the last hour and a half as Smalls for a small crowd in the auditorium, clad in a black leather suit, yellow and red leather fire at the lapels.
The crowd wanted to know everything:
"Are you going to do a second part to [the Spinal Tap single] `Jazz Odyssey'?" "Is there any truth to Spy Magazine's account that former Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith is still alive?" (The incompetent Faith sold the group's song rights to a bunch of Malaysians.) "You're not as, uh, bulky as you once were."
Smalls paced back and forth across stage, peering through a spotlight at an audience that only fills the first 20 rows of the auditorium.
"Things change, don't they?" he told his audience.
Tap has grown over the years, Smalls said in an English accent that could fool royalty. (But don't expect to see Tap play for the Queen. She issued a decree that the group never appear in Windsor.)
Tap has a history of losing its drummers, one through spontaneous combustion. "Our drummer now is, oddly enough, No. 13. We don't tell him."
"I believe there's a curse on the band," he said. For the last tour, Tap had a drummer in each city with a beeper, just in case.
"I'm always amazed by the knowledgeability and devotion to minutia of our fans," he told a reporter later. "But we love that. We respect them for it. I've always hated the idea in Hollywood and New York that the audience is stupid. We see the opposite. The more textured and detailed, the more they like it."
Spinal Tap, best known from Rob Reiner's 1984 film "This is Spinal Tap," was mostly ad lib, Shearer said. The show in Burruss was mostly ad lib too, the first that Shearer had attempted, though his years with TV's "Saturday Night Live" prepared him to work in front of a live audience.
Very likely the most planned part was when he threw a bunch of zucchini, wrapped in tinfoil, into the crowd.
People fought for them.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB