“Weird Al” Yankovic

After a 25-year career in which he has sold nearly 13 million albums worldwide, earned 25 gold and platinum certifications and three Grammy awards, and starred in his own network TV show and major motion picture, “Weird Al” Yankovic has proven he is much more than a novelty act.

“I’ve always had a knee-jerk reaction to the term because the connotation is ‘one-hit wonder,’” says Alfred Matthew Yankovic, who spent countless hours watching sci-fi movies on TV and devouring pop music as a child growing up in Lynwood, CA. “Which is why it was so tough for me to get started in this business in the first place. The irony of it is I’ve managed to stick around longer than many of the acts I’ve parodied.”

Young Al started playing accordion at the age of seven in the tradition of unrelated polka star Frank Yankovic before becoming an avid fan of the famed Dr. Demento Show. The syndicated radio program spotlighted precisely the kind of oddities and one-off records—and early musical humorists such as Allan Sherman, Spike Jones, Tom Lehrer and Stan Freberg—that inspired Yankovic to launch his remarkable career.

When Demento spoke at his school, the then-13-year-old handed him a demo tape of his home recordings. Three years later, Demento played Yankovic’s “Belevedere Cruising,” a squeeze box-laced ditty about the family Plymouth on his show. Working at the college radio station at San Luis Obispo while studying architecture, Yankovic adopted the moniker “Weird Al,” with his trademarked glasses, mustache, frizzy hair and Hawaiian shirts. Al recorded “My Bologna,” a parody of The Knack’s “My Sharona,” beginning a life-long obsession with food topics, which Demento promptly put on the air. The band themselves loved it so much, they convinced their label, Capitol, to release it as a single. Two more parodies, “Another One Rides the Bus” (Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”), which Al recorded live in Dr. Demento’s studios, and “I Love Rocky Road,” another food satire based on Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock & Roll,” followed.

“Doing this was not what I foresaw in my future back then,” admitted Al about his first forays into music. “But I’ve never been too good at predicting what was going to happen to me. I did that stuff to get on the Demento show and amuse my friends. Because I thought it was fun. I never gave too much thought to what it could lead to. This was just something I did for grins, and it accidentally became a career.”

Weird Al’s self-titled debut album was released on Scotti Bros. in 1983, after he hooked up with noted guitarist/producer Rick Derringer, a veteran of Edgar Winter’s White Trash and the McCoys of “Hang on Sloopy” fame. The album included “Ricky,” a tune inspired by Toni Basil’s hit “Mickey” and the old I Love Lucy TV show, parodied in the vintage black-and-white music video featuring Al as Ricky Ricardo, which was immediately adopted by the then-fledgling MTV network, catapulting the single to #63 on the Billboard charts.

The following year’s In 3-D was Yankovic’s breakthrough, a sophomore album that included “Eat It,” with a video which mocked Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” clip scene-for-scene. The single earned Al his first Grammy as best Comedy song, climbing to #12 and sending the album into the Top 20. “King of Suede” (a take-off on the Police’s “King of Pain”) and “I Lost it on Jeopardy” (the song parodied Greg Kihn’s “Jeopardy,” while the video starred the game show’s host Art Fleming, announcer Don Pardo, Al’s real parents and Kihn himself) also broke out from the album. This same year, Al contributed “This is the Life,” a ‘30s-flavored original which served as the theme song for the gangster spoof Johnny Dangerously, starring Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito, with a video directed by Al manager Jay Lavey.

In 1985, Dare to Be Stupid, the first comedy album released in the CD format, went to #50 on the Billboard 200 and garnered a gold record, thanks to the Madonna parody, “Like a Surgeon.” Yankovic’s 1988 Even Worse marked his second Grammy, with its Michael Jackson satire, “I’m Fat,” shot on the same subway set as the original Martin Scorsese-directed clip, featuring Al as a grotesquely fat, switchblade-wielding hood, taking home the statue for Best Concept Video, leading the album into the Top 30. It would be almost 16 years until Al picked up his third Grammy in 2004, mostly because NARAS limited the Comedy category to spoken-word entries until this past year, which Al ruefully refers to as “The Yankovic Exclusionary Rule.” The other track from Even Worse was “Living with a Hernia,” a parody of James Brown’s “Living in America,” with Al himself playing the hardest-working man in show business and which was shot on the same sound stage where the Godfather of Soul did his scenes for Rocky IV.

UHF marked Al’s feature film debut in 1989, a film he starred in and co-wrote. Long a cult favorite on cable and video, the DVD release of the film, which starred soon-to-be TV stars Michael Richards, Fran Drescher and Victoria Jackson, climbed into the Top 10 for sales upon its bow in 2002. The video for the film’s original theme song features Al and his band parodying (in order): Guns N’ Roses, George Michael, Robert Palmer, Prince, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, ZZ Top, Billy Idol, The Beatles, INXS and Randy Newman. The stunning animated clip parody of Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” is paired with the theme song to the TV show Beverly Hillbillies, and includes a guitar track recorded by Mark Knopfler himself.

Off the Deep End, released in 1992, went to #17 in Billboard, thanks to Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana,” his Top 40 hit take-off on Nirvana’s smash “Smells Like Teen Spirit” single and video. Shot on the same soundstage with the same janitor and many of the same extras, featuring a cameo by Dick Van Patten, the video earned Al an MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best Male Performance, while Rolling Stone named it one of the Top 100 Videos of all Time. “You Don’t Love Me Anymore” followed, with a Jay Leavey-directed video modeled on Extreme’s “More Than Words,” featuring Robert Goulet getting fake blood all over his immaculate tux.

“Weird Al”’s 1993 Alapalooza climbed into Billboard’s Top 50, thanks to one of Al’s perennial film parodies, this time of Jurassic Park, with a Steve Spielberg-approved animated video accompanying the song based on Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park.” Bad Hair Day, released in 1996, was Al’s highest-charting record to date, going to #14, thanks to “Amish Paradise,” his take-off on Coolio’s “Gangsta Paradise,” which climbed to #54 on the Top 200 but, to Al’s dismay, was the first time an artist ever objected to one of his satires.

“It’s quite a misunderstanding, and to this day, I don’t know what happened,” says Al. “I certainly didn’t mean to dis him, but my record label claims they went to him directly and he gave them his permission to use it. And the next thing I know someone asked him about it at the Grammys and he went off, saying he never approved it, but that the label went ahead and said OK anyway.”

Bad Hair Day’s “Gump,” a retelling of the Forrest Gump story set to the Presidents of the United States of America’s “Lump,” featured a “Weird Al”-directed video starring Laugh In’s Ruth Buzzi and Pat Boone sitting on the Gump bench. Later that same year, Al directed the acclaimed opening, a spot-on parody of a James Bond title sequence, to Disney’s comedy film Spy Hard with Leslie Nielsen, accompanied by the Weird one crooning the main theme. Al launched a Saturday morning children’s program, The Weird Al Show, on CBS, which ran from 1997-’98. VH1 featured him on a Behind the Music segment that, to this day, is one of the network’s most popular installments of the hit series. In addition to his own clips, “Weird Al” has directed music videos for Ben Folds, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Hanson and the Black Crowes.

Running With Scissors, released in 1999, marked Al’s first album on the Way Moby/Volcano label, following the demise of Scotti Bros. It succeeded Bad Hair Day in the Top 20 in the U.S. and Canada, and also went to #3 on Billboard’s Internet chart, showing Al’s fans were as technically savvy as he was. The “Weird Al”-directed video for the album’s single, “The Saga Begins,” narrates the plot of Star Wars_Episode 1, The Phantom Menace to the tune of Don McLean’s “American Pie.” The Yankovic-helmed “It’s All About the Pentiums” is a high-tech take-off on Puff Daddy’s “It’s All About the Benjamins,” with hilarious cameos by Al pals Emo Philips and Drew Carey.

Poodle Hat, released last year, was Al’s highest-debuting album ever at #17, featuring “Couch Potato,” a spot-on parody of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” which poked fun at TV’s current obsession with reality shows amid a channel-surfing free association. The disc earned “Weird Al” his third Grammy for Best Comedy Album at the 1994 ceremony, where he beat out spoken-word efforts from Garrison Keiller, George Lopez, David Cross and Margaret Cho for his first award since 1988.

“I really enjoy going to the Grammys,” says Al, who has been nominated a total of nine times. “It’s always a lot of fun. I was extremely excited when they reinstated music to the category.”

Late last year, “Weird Al” released The Ultimate Video Collection on DVD, featuring 24 of his most famous music videos, which was certified gold.

Meanwhile, Al continues to tour the U.S. and the world with his crack band, most of whom have been with him for more than 20 years. His live show, a multimedia extravaganza that features numerous costume changes and incredible simulations of his groundbreaking videos, never fails to bring down the house.

Does he mind that critics don’t seem to take him, unh, seriously?
“It is a little bit of an oxymoron,” admits Al. “The people who really know my work and listen to the albums, appreciate and understand what I’m doing. I just want to be taken seriously enough to be invited on network TV shows and booked into concert venues to do what I do.”

After 25 years, “Weird Al” still enjoys what he does.

“If it ever seemed like work to me, I’d probably think of something else to amuse myself with,” he says. “I’m not going to say it comes easily. It takes a lot of effort, but I can’t imagine anything else I’d rather be doing. I still feel compelled to improve, make every album better than the one before, which I think I’ve done. I’m fortunate in that I’ve done everything I’ve ever dreamed of doing. I feel blessed every morning that I wake up and get to be Weird Al for another day.”

DISCOGRAPHY

“Weird Al” Yankovic (Scotti Bros.) 1983
In 3-D (Scotti Bros.) 1984
Dare To Be Stupid (Scotti Bros.) 1985
Polka Party! (Scotti Bros.) 1986
Even Worse (Scotti Bros.) 1988
UHF (Scotti Bros.) 1989
Off the Deep End (Scotti Bros.) 1992
Alapalooza (Scotti Bros.) 1993
The TV Album (Scotti Bros.)
Bad Hair Day (Scotti Bros.) 1996
Running With Scissors (Way Moby/Volcano) 1999
Poodle Hat (Way Moby/Volcano) 2003