Weird Al

How come you're always such a fussy young man?
Don't want no Captain Crunch, don't want no Raisin Bran
Well, don't you know that other kids are starving in Japan?
So eat it, just eat it

Follow me back to the era of Trapper Keepers and Transformers. Michael Jackson and Madonna are dominating pop music charts, and MTV is a brand new cultural phenomenon.

In the midst of all the hero-worship and lowest common denominator songwriting, what we need more than anything else is for someone to throw a rock right into the middle of the pond.

In the same way that Monty Python questioned the status quo by way of humor during the 1970s, along came Weird Al Yankovic doing something similar during the 80s, but with his own particular style. Some heroes wear capes; Al wore trademark Hawaiian shirts and played the accordion.

I first heard Al some time in elementary school, where the coolest thing you could imagine was a Michael Jackson jacket (at least one kid had a good one). It’s really hard to overstate how popular MJ was with us elementary school kids.

Along came Weird Al’s Eat It, poking fun of Beat It. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure which version I liked more. I was discovering parody.

Fast forward just a few years to middle school. My friend Tim and I bonded over Al’s weirdness, and Tim introduced me to full albums, where Weird Al had several covers, and quite a few original songs. Some of the originals were even better than the covers, at least to our ears.

Neither Tim nor I completely fit in with any particular group in middle school, and you can read a little more about that time here if you’re interested. It’s a good thing we had someone like Weird Al, helping us understand that we were not alone in observing how screwed up the world was.

I still have Weird Al’s first record on vinyl. I probably bought it some time in the early 90s, right as I was getting into punk. Al stayed with me through all of these changes.

I managed to see Weird Al play live one time during the year 2000, at an amusement park called Carowinds. Al and his band played an incredibly tight show, aided with visual elements and a ton of energy. This was probably one of the best live performances I’ve ever seen, right up there with Depeche Mode both in terms of energy and accuracy.

I could talk a lot about his original songs here. In many of them, Al plays a character of sorts to make a point, like with You Don’t Love Me Anymore or the much more scathing Gonna Buy Me a Condo. Other times, he simply points out something silly society is doing.

Since Mariah Carey is already beginning to thaw, it seems appropriate to share this Al original:

Now, the cat is well out of the bag with Weird Al’s biography, thanks to Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, “the unexaggerated true story about the greatest musician of our time.” All sorts of info I could provide you about Al’s origin story (which took decades to collect) can now be digested in a couple of hours. The movie is fun, if you’re curious.

Regardless, I feel some obligation to tell this story. It’s a good one. To tell the full story, I’m enlisting

Brad Kyle

from

Front Row & Backstage

to commit a full piece on Al’s mentor, Dr. Demento. Be sure to bookmark Brad’s piece here for later.

Alfred Matthew Yankovic was born in 1959 in California. As legend now has it, a door-to-door salesman fatefully stopped by the Yankovic household one day during the 1960s, and offered guitar or accordion lessons for their young son. Al chose the accordion.

Weird, right?

That’s probably because Al was a very, very smart kid, and other kids immediately labeled him a nerd. Having skipped a grade and started school early, he was now two years younger than most of his classmates. All of this early turmoil certainly shaped Al’s worldview, and led him to creative outlets.

Nevertheless, he graduated valedictorian from his high school (I told you he was smart!), and then headed to college at California Polytechnic State University, graduating with a degree in architecture. This is when Dr. Demento enters the picture.

If there hadn't been a Dr. Demento, I'd probably have a real job now.

Back in high school, Al’s mother caught him listening to Dr. Demento's program and forbade him from listening to it again. In a twist of fate that will shock nobody who ever was a teenager, you can probably guess what Al did next: he found ways to listen even more. One day, Dr. Demento spoke at Al’s school.

Al handed Dr. D a homemade recording of a few original songs, and Demento played one of them on the radio. It was rapidly uphill from there for Al, as he produced My Bologna and Another One Rides the Bus during his college years, recording songs in the bathroom of the studio (the only place where the acoustics were any good).

Throughout the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, Weird Al has sometimes been more popular than the original artists he parodied. Many of his homages are now even better known than the original, especially White & Nerdy

Al’s polkas are among my favorite songs he’s produced. Let me share an early live version of Polkas on 45 with you here, a song from that first album I own:

I have a hard time articulating how amazing this music is to me, even today.

Weird Al's adaptability to changing musical trends over four decades is impressive. Not only does he still have rabid fans, he’s also attained mainstream critical and commercial success, winning several Grammys, producing number one albums, and having YouTube videos with hundreds of millions of views.

If you’ve never seen UHF, you will certainly enjoy it if you’re a fan of Weird Al already, but if not, you might enjoy the biopic more. Either way, dude has mastered both visual and audio media in ways few others have.

This was a gift, and I now keep it in my office at Revolution BJJ:

That’s it for today, folks. I may have more to say about Weird Al in the future, but for now, don’t forget to check out

Front Row & Backstage

for Brad’s Dr Demento piece. Substack is a team effort for me, and I love leveraging the brainpower and experience within our community! Brad indulged me talking about my love for old-school punk. We also played a game of Tune-Tag.

Let me ask you a direct question today: what’s your favorite Weird Al song?

If you’re not into Al, are there other parody artists you really enjoy?

Let’s talk!