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"Weird Al" Yankovic

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Alfred Matthew "Weird Al" Yankovic (born October 23, 1959) is an American musician, parodist and accordion player. He is known in particular for humorous songs which satirize popular culture and/or parody specific songs by contemporary musical acts. His works include four gold and four platinum records.

Album cover from "Poodle Hat" (2003); Yankovic, center, is wearing a business suit and a poodle hat.

Biography

Weird Al first started playing the accordion one day before his seventh birthday, mastering the instrument by age ten.

After hearing Dr. Demento's radio show (a comedy radio program featuring humorous music), Al sent the Doctor a tape of a song entitled "Belvedere Cruising" in 1976. Al was a senior at Lynwood High School in Lynwood, California at the time, but that tape was the start of his eventual career.

Three years later, Al was an architecture student and a disc jockey at the Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo radio station (KCPR). Since "My Sharona" by The Knack was on the charts and The Knack was going to play at Cal Poly, Al took his accordion into the bathroom across from the listening booth and recorded a parody entitled "My Bologna", with a B-side called "School Cafeteria". The Knack thought it was funny, and arranged for the song to be released on their label, Capitol Records, which gave Al a six-month contract. Dr. Demento put this track atop his "Funny Five" list.

In 1980, Al was working the mail room at Westwood One, Dr. Demento's radio network at the time, when he announced he had another parody. Jon Schwartz was also there, and he was a percussionist, so he was recruited to bang on Al's accordion case. The resulting performance of "Another One Rides the Bus" was a parody of a Queen hit, "Another One Bites the Dust". The rare 1981 Placebo EP release of this song has as its B-Side the subtle track "Happy Birthday."

1981 brought Al on tour for the first time as part of Dr. Demento's act. His performances were particularly interesting as few, if any, people at the time were doing parodies of rock and roll songs on accordion. His stage act caught the eye of manager Jay Levey, who loved it and became Al's manager. Jay insisted that the act would sound better if Al had a full band, so he held auditions. Steve Jay became Al's bass player, and Jim West the lead guitarist. With Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz on drums, the band was complete.

The Dr. Demento Society, which issues yearly Christmas re-releases of material from Dr. Demento's Basement Tapes, often includes among these unreleased tracks from Mr. Yankovic's vaults, such as "Pacman", "It's Still Billy Joel To Me", or the demos for "I Love Rocky Road". The live version of "School Cafeteria" is also to be found on Dr. Demento's Basement Tapes.

Al claims to have been inspired by Allan Sherman, whose portrait in miniature (with name) can be found by the observant on the cover of Al's first album.

Since the mid-1990s, Al has performed annually at the Minnesota State Fair.

Though he is best known for his song parodies, Yankovic has recorded a greater number of original humorous songs, such as "Why Does This Always Happen to Me?" and "Hardware Store". Yankovic's work depends largely on the satirizing of popular culture, including television, movies, food, popular music, and sometimes issues in contemporary news. Although many of his songs are parodies of contemporary radio hits, it is rare that the song's primary topic is the lampooning of that artist. Yankovic's humor lies more in creating unexpected incongruity between an artist's image and the topic of the song, contrasting the style of the song with its content, or in pointing out trends or works which have become pop culture cliches. Some of his original songs are "style parodies," where he chooses a band's entire body of work to honor/parody rather than any single hit by that band; some bands so honored have been Devo ("Dare to Be Stupid"), The B-52's ("Mr. Popeil"), Talking Heads ("Dog Eat Dog"), Nine Inch Nails ("Germs"), The Beach Boys ("Trigger Happy"), Oingo Boingo ("You Make Me"), and They Might Be Giants ("Everything You Know is Wrong").

Yankovic has received three Grammy Awards and will be eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004, although he says, "I think my chances of ever making it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame are about as good as Milli Vanilli's."

Yankovic has been called a "cultural barometer" by The Onion's recurring dweeb character Larry Groznic (10 November 2004), who called Weird Al's music "the consummate pastiche of popular songwriting styles for our times" and cited the example of Nirvana, a 1990s grunge band, who stated that they had "made it" after Yankovic recorded "Smells Like Nirvana" (parodying "Smells Like Teen Spirit").

Weird Al has also directed many of his own music videos, as well as several by such artists as Hanson, The Black Crowes, and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. He contributed parody songs to several films, including "This Is The Life", featured on the soundtrack for Johnny Dangerously, and a parody of the James Bond title sequences in Spy Hard, a 1996 Leslie Nielsen vehicle directed by Rick Friedberg.

The popularity of Al's music among users of Internet file sharing networks has led to many parody or comedy songs being made available as "Weird Al" tracks which in fact have no connection to him. One major victim of this seems to be Bob Rivers, but so many such wrongly attributed tracks exist that several fans have set up websites attempting to list such tracks along with their real artists. It has been argued that this not only deprives the real artists involved of credit for their creations, but sometimes associates Al's name with types of music he would never produce and would not want to be known for.

Controversially, Yankovic decided to get LASIK eye surgery and shave off his mustache, radically changing his trademark look.

On April 9, 2004, Al's parents, Nick Louis Yankovic, 86, and Mary, 81, were found dead in their Fallbrook, California home, apparently the victims of carbon monoxide poisoning. The night after their bodies were found, Al went on with his concert in Mankato, Minnesota, saying that since his music had helped many of his fans through tough times, maybe it would work for him as well.

In late 2004, the parodic newspaper The Onion featured a complaint by one Larry Groznic that this Wikipedia article is not long enough to do justice to Yankovic, remarking that it is "laughably brief, and fails to account for the grand impact and scope of his career."

Albums

Since Al got a record contract in 1983, he has released many albums and parodies. The following is a comprehensive list of his albums to 2003:

Compilation albums

Singles

In addition to parodies such as these, most of Al's albums include a medley of popular songs played in polka style, as well as original songs with his own lyrics and words. Originals such as "Melanie" and "Albuquerque" are favorites of many of his fans.

Other Projects

  • UHF- 1989: A commercially unsuccessful movie satirizing the television industry, starring Yankovic, Michael Richards, and Victoria Jackson.
  • Babalu Music - 1991: A collection of I Love Lucy music.
  • Peter and the Wolf - 1988: "This warped classical children's record featuring narration and poems written by "Weird Al" Yankovic and music arranged, composed and performed by synthesizer whiz Wendy Carlos" - WeirdAl.com. Weird Al's text modifies the original story considerably: "The Grandfather will be played by... Don Ameche! What? He can't make it?", while the music features various innovations by Wendy Carlos over the original by Sergei Prokofiev. Side two of the album is "Carnival of the Animals, Part II" which is a sort of homage to The Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saens, with Weird Al taking the role of Edward Lear in writing humorous poems about the slug, the shark, etc.

Television appearances

Weird Al had a short-lived TV series called The Weird Al Show, which aired from September 1997 to January 1998 on CBS. The show was in the Saturday morning lineup and appeared to be geared at children, but the humor was really more for adult fans of Weird Al. Its cast of characters included the Hooded Avenger (Brian Haley), Madame Judy (Judy Tenuta), J.B. Toppersmith (Stan Freberg), and Harvey The Wonder Hamster.

Al has hosted AL-TV on MTV many years, generally coinciding with the release of each new album. For Poodle Hat, however, AL-TV appeared on VH1. The most popular part of AL-TV is Al manipulating interviews especially commissioned for AL-TV by the network for comic effect.

VH1 produced a Behind the Music episode on Al. Al is so clean-cut that the producers couldn't find any of the typical angst-laced problems that make many rock stars' stories compelling (as Al noted in an interview with BTM), so their angle was on Al's life as a bachelor and (what they presumed was) his loneliness. (Also, the commercial failures of UHF and Polka Party). However, since the taping, Al has married. He and his wife, Suzanne, recently had a daughter, Nina.

Al has also made a number of cameo appearances in films such as all three Naked Gun films. He has also appeared in cartoons such as EEK! The Cat, The Simpsons, The Brak Show, Johnny Bravo and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, lending his voice to that of the Squid Hat, a parody of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter series.

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