For almost 30 years he has been an intermittent musical presence on the radio, a fixture of Dr. Demento’s gradually vanishing show and always a constant in any nerd’s music collection (I have all the standard, commercial releases). What a nice birthday present he received recently too. His new album Straight out of Lynwood came out several weeks ago and today it is number 13 on the iTunes Top 100 Albums with its first single “White & Nerdy” at number five on the Top 100 Songs section. I personally feel Weird Al has used the three-year gap since Poodle Hat to seriously hone his own songwriting and style parodies. “Pancreas,” on the surface sounds like another one of his food songs (Kurt Cobain’s only objection to his material being used) yet if you know music, Pop-Culture history and/or are a Beach Boys fan, it is a very impressive and skilled style parody of the hits from Pet Sounds.
The straightforward parodies of contemporary hits may pay the bills for him but the general public is pretty ignorant of his original work. I read he still is interviewed by morons, aka music journalists, asking him, “Do you ever write any of your own songs?” Even last month, a young man at the coffee shop was not only unaware of Weird Al being around since the late Seventies, he then stated, “He does some of his own songs?” I’m sure the birthday boy learned to take this in stride after the first decade of his career.
He has a special place in my life, mainly the North Dakota days. Before there was They Might Be Giants, Weird Al usually “spoke” to me and my clique of friends who would leave the crummy little town of Beulah for college. We weren’t geniuses but we were the smart kids. It didn’t help being the “foreigners” too; as in, not from North Dakota or in Jon Kulas’ case, not from West ND. The popular or dominant clique of kids there were jocks, junkies, sluts, “native” NoDaks or any combination of the previous four. Their music of choice was Eighties Hair Metal: Ratt, Motley Crue, Ozzy, etc. Blech! Weird Al was our louder counterweapon to their trash. Okay, we were 15-17, we knew everything then. Looking back 20 years later, it seems rather silly and petty. Yet I always have great memories from when Jon Kulas introduced us to Al’s first, self-titled album while we were working on the school paper. Those original tracks cinched me into always liking him. My appreciation wavered with Polka Party which is his least favorite because the record label rushed him to complete something or else he’d be forgotten. I bought it on CD in the early Nineties to be a completist and again, his original work compensated for the three uninspiring parodies, all of which came from crappy movies. Whoever can tell me which three movies correctly and first wins a funny t-shirt from me.
For more information, try to catch the 1999 episode about him on VH-1’s Behind the Music. You may be impressed. He’s a rather modest guy who feels no resentment over any failures in his career. For example, his only movie UHF was a flop at the box office when it debuted in 1989 yet he has a positive attitude regarding it; he actually got to make a film which is something few get the opportunity to do. That and the royalty checks for when Comedy Central shows it to fill time.
Update Nov. 14, 2006: Since this is the last day the story will appear on the site’s front page, I have closed the contest. Sadly, Mark was the only person who tried and he was about half right so maybe I’ll get him a muscle shirt to relive the glory of the Eighties White Trash fashion statement.
The question was, “Which three horrible movies did Weird Al derive his weaker parodies from on Polka Party? The answer is Rocky IV, Ruthless People and Short Circuit. Three utterly awful and forgettable films that I don’t think even cable channels will air in the middle of the night…Comedy Central, I’m looking in your direction. I didn’t ask for the songs but I’ll throw them in too. Rocky IV had James Brown’s “Living in America,” which became Al’s “Living with a Hernia.” Clever but not memorable. Ruthless People had Mick Jagger’s song of the same title and resulted in Al’s rather uninspiring “Toothless People.” This probably strengthened the concerns of Kurt Cobain having his songs put to food. Finally, Short Circuit had El DeBarge’s annoying “Who’s Johnny?” salvaged into the rather timely joke “Here’s Johnny” for those of us who remember Ed McMahon being the number two guy on the Tonight Show.
Hmmm. I remember “Living with a Hernia” as a parody of “Living in America” which I think was from Rocky V (was that the one where he fought the Russian Cyborg with the Mr. T mohawk?) and “Toothless People,” is a parody of “Ruthless People” from the Stones (who must have needed to cover their tax bill or something to get hooked into performing such a crummy song) which was the theme from a bad movie of the same name. I don’t remember what other bad movie track was parodied. Does this mean I get 2/3rd’s of a T-shirt — sleeveless perhaps?