WASHINGTON — Call him the Mel Brooks of music, a word wizard who not only spoofs classic tunes but spins them into Grammy-winning pop-culture parodies.
The one-of-a-kind Weird Al Yankovic brings his “Mandatory World Tour” to Wolf Trap this Sunday.
“I’m told that there were a few people last year who were confused and didn’t know what the word ‘mandatory’ meant,” Yankovic joked with WTOP. “You have to go! That’s why it’s mandatory!”
According to Wolf Trap, last year’s show was sold out as fans enjoyed Weird Al’s greatest hits.
“It’s a lot of stuff from ‘Mandatory Fun,’ it’s all of the greatest hits and a few deep cuts thrown in there,” Yankovic said. “It’s as much entertainment as we can possibly cram into a two-hour show. You’ve got costume changes, props and a big LED screen. It’s a very theatrical, high-energy show.”
Born Alfred Matthew Yankovic, the artist soon to be known as “Weird Al” grew up in Lynwood, California, where he learned a wide range of musical styles at a very young age.
“I took three years of accordion lessons from ages 7-10,” Yankovic said. “They don’t teach you Led Zeppelin; it’s all polkas and things like that. Nothing wrong with that, but how cliché . … I learned that my friends didn’t want me in their rock bands because they didn’t see how an accordion fit in. So I learned early on that if I wanted to make a name for myself, I’d have to go a different direction.”
That direction was satire, as Yankovic studied all the great music, film and TV satirists.
“I loved [Frank] Zappa, SCTV and Monty Pyton,” Yankovic recalled, citing his inspirations. “Through the Dr. Demento shows, I was exposed to people like Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman, Stan Freeberg and Spike Jones. I got exposed to a lot of stuff like that and it made me think, ‘Yeah, I can do this.'”
So, he began recording spoofs and sending them to the Dr. Demento show on FM radio in California.
“This was decades before there was such a thing as YouTube, so there weren’t a lot of options for a teenage kid writing stupid songs with an accordion,” Yankovic joked. “Dr. Demento was the only person in the universe who would play that stuff on the radio. I would record stuff in my bedroom with a tiny cassette recorder and send it off to the Demento show. If he thought it was good enough, he’d play it on the air. So I got a lot of early exposure that way and he gave me encouragement.”
One such song, “My Bologna,” was such a hit that Capitol Records released it as a single in 1979.
“I was 19 years old and a disc jockey at my college station, which is where the name ‘Weird Al’ came from; it was my radio air name,” he said. “The Knack was huge that summer. Every other request was for ‘My Sharona.’ ‘My Bologna’ wasn’t the most brilliant or creative variation on the theme, but I thought that’s funny, so I took my accordion across the hall into the bathroom where there was a nice reverb … and I recorded ‘My Bologna’ and sent it to Dr. Demento and that became a huge hit.”
Dr. Demento also allowed him to record a Queen parody “Another One Rides the Bus” live on air.
“I think I wrote it the day before I played it live for the first time on the radio,” Yankovic said. “We never re-recorded it. That live aircheck of that performance on the radio became the master tape and it got bootlegged around the world. It went viral in days before things went viral. I was still in college and I’d go back to my apartment and my roommate would say, ‘Hey, you’ve got a call from a radio station in New Zealand, they wanna know how they can get a copy of ‘Another One Rides the Bus.'”
Before long, Yankovic compiled all these spoofs into his self-titled debut album “Weird Al Yankovic” (1983), featuring other gems like the Joan Jett knockoff “I Love Rocky Road.”
His sophomore album, “Weird Al Yankovic in 3-D” (1984), birthed another hit with “Eat It,” spoofing Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” with a music video that matched key elements from the King of Pop.
“Back in the day, I would go for the most obvious idea, and I like to write songs about food, so ‘Eat It’ seemed appropriate,” Yankovic recalled with self-deprecating humor. “Nowadays, I couldn’t write a song like ‘Eat It’ because there would already be a hundred thousand ‘Eat It’ parodies on YouTube. But back in the early ’80s, I kind of had the field to myself, so I could go for the low-hanging fruit.”
By the time he released his third album, “Dare to Be Stupid” (1985), major pop stars were taking note, as Madonna herself actually suggested that Weird Al spoof “Like a Virgin” with a most catchy title.
“Apparently, she was talking to a friend of hers one day in New York City and she said offhandedly, ‘I wonder when Weird Al is gonna do Like a Surgeon?'” Yankovic said. “Her friend knew a friend of my manager’s and it got back to me and I thought, ‘Oh! Not a bad idea, Madonna. I think I will.’ … I got to do that video in an actual abandoned hospital … I got to writhe around on the floor for a music video. I usually just do that for my own personal amusement, but it was nice to do it professionally.”
After his fourth album “Polka Party!” (1986) introduced the James Brown spoof “Living With a Hernia,” his fifth album marked a return to Michael Jackson. While the King of Pop was dominating the charts with “Bad,” Weird Al released his cleverly-titled album “Even Worse” (1988), featuring Weird Al in a matching leather jacket and a lot of extra weight for the signature song “Fat.”
“I thought ‘Fat’ was a logical follow-up to ‘Eat It,'” Yankovic explained. “The first time I saw Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ video on TV, before the video was even over, I thought, oh, I’ve gotta do ‘Fat.’ I could just visualize being 800 pounds and trying to get through the subway turnstiles.”
Having found success is so many mock music videos, Yankovic turned his attention to Hollywood, starring in the movie comedy “UHF” (1989), co-starring Fran Drescher and Kevin McCarthy. Naturally, Weird Al provided “UHF: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and Other Stuff” (1989).
“That was really a blast. We really enjoyed making ‘UHF,'” Yankovic said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t do that well at the box office, but it went on to become what they say is a ‘cult classic.’ It found its audience on cable TV, DVD, VHS and Blu Ray. There are people who are obsessed with it. They’ve seen it literally hundreds of times. It’s like ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ for some people.”
Returning to music, Yankovic delivered an absolute gem with a spoof with “Smells Like Nirvana” on “Off the Deep End” (1992), featuring a swimming pool album cover like Nirvana’s “Nevermind.”
“I was very happy to do that song because I was a big Nirvana fan, but I didn’t think they would become popular enough to do a parody,” he said. “I thought ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ this is a great song, too bad it’s not gonna be a big hit. When it went on to dominate our entire culture, I thought well now’s the time. … We got the same photographer that shot Nirvana’s cover to shoot that cover.”
After a slight detour into “Alapalooza” (1993), Yankovich returned with a vengeance with “Bad Hair Day” (1996), spoofing Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” with the hilarious “Amish Paradise.”
“‘Amish Paradise’ is still one of my biggest hits,” Yankovic said. “I just thought that was a fun idea because I was trying to think, ‘What would be the most diametrically opposed to the gangsta lifestyle?’ And I said, ‘Oh, Amish! I’ll do a song about what it’s like living in an Amish Paradise.’ I like that song because it references everything from ‘Gilligan’s Island’ to Prince to ‘Pulp Fiction.'”
His follow-up “Running with Scissors” (1999) featured a timely riff on Puff Daddy’s “All About the Benjamins,” as Weird Al signaled the coming of the digital age with “All About the Pentiums.”
“That was a fun one to do,” he said. “We got Drew Carey and Emo Philips and a lot of fun people in that video. I thought that was gonna get a lot more attention, but it came out at a time when MTV was by and large stopping to play music videos, so it didn’t get quite the traction I was hoping for.”
Entering an uncertain new millennium, Weird Al released “Poodle Hat” (2003), spoofing Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” with “Couch Potato” and The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” with “eBay.”
But he found his footing with his 12th studio album, “Straight Outta Lynwood” (2006), spoofing Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty” with his own dorky rendition “White & Nerdy.” The song reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100, while the album was his first to crack the Top 10 on the U.S. albums chart.
“When I did ‘White & Nerdy’ several years later, I was thinking this is sort of treading the same sort of territory, so I’m not sure if this is gonna do that well,” he said. “Then ‘White & Nerdy’ wound up being my biggest hit ever. So it’s all about timing. My nerd culture stuff just kind of hit at the right time.”
In fact, he thinks “White & Nerdy” captured society’s new zeitgeist of beloved “Nerd Culture.”
“I think there was a tipping point for nerds, quite frankly,” Yankovic said. “It was around 2006 when I think the whole world collectively said, ‘Hey, nerds are actually kinda cool. They make all the fun toys, all the shiny fun things, and they kind of rule the world. Why were we making fun of them all this time? It’s cool to be a nerd.’ All of a sudden, people were bragging about their ‘Nerd Cred,’ which is something I never heard of in high school. Nerds were the people who got beat up at recess.”
This shift allowed Yankovic to enjoy another Billboard Top 10 album with “Alpocalypse” (2011), featuring “Polka Face,” followed by his best-selling album to date, “Mandatory Fun” (2014), which spoofed Pharrell’s “Happy” with a “Tacky” video shot in a long-take with Jack Black, as well as Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” with the grammar lesson “Word Crimes” that could be used in classrooms.
“My newest album was my highest-charting album ever,” Yankovic said. “It was the No. 1 album, which kind of blew my mind. Ostensibly, it’s the biggest album of my career, so I’m really happy about that. We did the ‘eight videos in eight days’ promotion, which kind of dominated the internet the week the album came out. My mind is still kind of blown by the reaction to it.”
After 30 years of hits, Weird Al Yankovic simply can’t be written off as a silly, song-spoofing jester. With an impressive four Grammy Awards to his name, Weird Al is laughing all the way to the bank.
“There is some craft involved,” Yankovic said. “My detractors say, ‘Oh, my 5-year-old kid changes the words to songs,’ and certainly that’s not all that I do. It’s hard to do it well and do it consistently. … I’ve had the same band since the early ’80s and they’re able to do every genre imaginable. That’s really the secret to my success is I surround myself with very talented people.”
Yes, Yankovic’s intelligence is on full display in “Word Crimes,” which could double as a mockery of his doubters: “I hate these word crimes, like ‘I could care less,’ that means you do care, at least a little.”
Click here for ticket information. Listen to the full conversation with Weird Al Yankovic below:
