Credit confidence or craft, but 1984's “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D is where Yankovic hits his stride, maybe because he discovered his muse: Michael Jackson. While Yankovic’s instincts aren’t wrong, he’s too anxious to sell his premises, and the album relies on goofy original numbers that don’t bear the mark of a savvy pop stylist.Īlmost immediately, Al sharpened his pop instincts. Even with this polish, Al’s eponymous 1983 debut is ragged, almost confrontational in its jokes.
He made sure the albums worked as pop records-a novelty within novelties, since the format usually placed jokes above hooks.
Derringer didn’t produce “Weird Al” as if he was a freak. and teamed with Rick Derringer, the guitarist who had a smash with “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” in 1973. Some of this nervous energy was dampened when he signed to Scotti Bros. He’s not a polished performer there’s a fevered desperation that gives the music a kinetic edge. Listening to these early singles now-along with various oddities on the bonus disc Medium Rarities, one of which is a frenetic “Pac-Man” set to the Beatles’ “Taxman”-what’s striking is Yankovic’s qualities. (They assumed it was a one-shot novelty, though, and dispensed with Al after a single 45.) Almost immediately, he topped it with “Another One Rides the Bus,” a pumping parody of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” that landed Yankovic on national television, including a spot on Tom Snyder in 1981. Doug Fieger, the author of “My Sharona,” loved it and tipped off his record label, which released it as a single. Demento: a version of the Knack’s “My Sharona,” which he spun into “My Bologna.” Demento wasn’t the only one who liked it. ”Weird Al” sent one of these bathroom recordings to Dr. Things got going a few years later when Yankovic was studying architecture at Cal Poly, where he spent his spare time recording himself in the men’s bathroom, which had just enough echo to round out his sound. Al passed along a tape to Demento in 1976, which got on the air but didn’t spark much attention. He’d play new oddities, which is why Yankovic made it a mission to get himself onto the Dr. Novelties were his métier, but he didn’t limit himself to old Nervous Norvous 45s he had excavated. Demento-born Barret Hansen, so who could blame him adopting a nom de plume–specialized in airing the weirdest records he could find, a task suited for an ethnomusicology major masquerading as a ringmaster. Operating out of the darkest reaches of Pasadena, Dr. Rock‘n’roll wasn’t really his thing Al’s personal Elvis was Dr.
To make matters worse, when he was six, his parents gave him an accordion, not a guitar, and he embraced the anachronistic instrument. He started kindergarten a year too early and skipped second grade growing up in the southern Los Angeles suburb of Lynwood, he was always the runt of the litter.
Chalk it up to smarts or good timing, but “Weird Al” Yankovic arrived at a time where the counterculture met the monoculture, beginning his career as an outsider and winding up as a beloved institution.Ī nerd by birthright, “Weird Al” was always a step ahead of the curve. Joke songs are a tricky idiom even for clever musicians, but “Weird Al” finagled a robust career out of novelties. It wasn’t simply that these familiar tunes were mocked his send-ups underscored the ways that hits become part of the fabric of daily life. Sure, the songs he sent up are pillars of pop music-whether it was “Beat It,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Ridin’,” or “Blurred Lines”-but hearing Yankovic’s parodies provided a sense of their deep, lasting impact. Listening to the complete recorded works of “Weird Al” Yankovic-which is now easy to do, thanks to the release of the 15-disc Squeeze Box, which contains all 14 of his studio albums along with a disc of rarities, housed in a replica of his signature accordion-provides a graduate course in the junk culture of the 20th century.
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