"Weird Al" Yankovic Breaks Down His Most Iconic Tracks | GQ

when I signed with Capital Records they paid me 500 for the master of My Bologna three or four years later when I re-recorded it for my first real album I think they charged me a thousand dollars for the right to re-record it. and that my friends is the reason they call it the record business. Hi, I'm Weird Al Yankovic and these are my

iconic

songs. I recorded them in the bathroom across the hall from my college campus radio station kcpr 91.3 San Luis Obispo. I just sent that. That recording of the bathroom for Dr. Demento and he put it on the radio.

I couldn't believe it because he was number one in the funny five for two or three weeks in a row. I went to a talent show, I don't know how he did it. but somehow I snuck backstage after the show and met Doug Fieger, the lead singer of The Knack, and I introduced myself and he said, oh, here's a guy from My Bologna and, funnily enough, the guy who was right he was the vice president of Capitol Records, who happened to be at that exhibition. He was in school getting my degree in architecture. I wasn't passionate about it.

I didn't really want to be an architect. But I didn't really believe I could make a living in show business. It's such a foreign concept to me, but the fact that I now had a single on Capitol Records like the Beatles' house, you know, the big Hollywood tower like that, was a big deal and made me think, well, maybe Maybe I can do this, remember? When I recorded it in the studio I was very nervous when we recorded it too quickly. He didn't have a record deal at the time. It was made to spec and it's expensive to be in the studio and I was doing the math. and uh like, oh, if I take a bathroom break it's going to cost me 20 dollars.

You know, I'm still working a minimum wage job at the time and in that, you know, I was very aware of money flying out the window. and My Bologna I think I knew it when we recorded it oh this is too fast but it's okay to move on to the next song, next song, efficiency and white and nerdy, look at me, I don't think it was a spontaneous inspiration, I think I probably sat down with a Chamillionaire song because I was a big hit and I thought: what can I do with this? and then I thought, oh White and Nerdy, that's my life, that's my entire existence.

I don't need to research this song. I spent my entire life researching. On this song, the ideas came pretty quickly and I had dozens of pages of notes because I wanted to write down every nerdy thing I'd ever done or thought about doing in my life and put it all into one song. Peel at this point I think they're probably

most

famous for being on Mad TV I think I knew Key or we had some friends in common uh and I thought, oh, these guys would be great. I love them to this day, people are discovering the key and Peeler in the video like oh I just saw the white nerd key and Peeler in the video, it blows them away.

I started playing the accordion on October 22, 1966 and took lessons for three years, that's my formal musical training, they only teach you polkas and classical pieces. and you know, when I was in my preteen years I was more interested in the songs I heard on the radio. I thought it would be fun to do a parody of Another One Bites the Dust because it has such a distinctive sound. Baseline is a very simple song, it's very powerful, but simple and simple is good when you try to emulate it on an accordion that I was maybe 20 years old, maybe 21 and uh, I was debuting my new song, Another One Rides the Bus and I.

I needed someone to hit my recording case and this guy John said, oh well, I'm a drummer and I said, hit! and it turns out he's been playing now, he's been my drummer for 42 years. I had high hopes of eating. but I had no idea how big it would be, it was overnight. Fame, you know, seems like a myth, but literally, the day after eating, it went into heavy rotation on MTV. I was recognized everywhere I went because and back then, you know. People were obsessed with MTV, this is like 1984. People were so intimately familiar with the Michael Jackson video that it was very easy to make a parody because all we had to do was recreate it, but by just changing things up a little bit, we had The same uh uh choreographer Vince Patterson, who was the gang leader in the Michael Jackson video, happily agreed to be in my video and I also tried so hard to dance like Michael Jackson and that's why it's funny because I'm not a dancer.

I've never been a dancer, I'm just a lanky, uncoordinated

weird

o. And the fact that this guy is trying to dance like Michael Jackson, you know, it's funny because it's not happening. Amish products were one of my first hip-hop raps. songs, people you know are curious to know what the Amish really thought of the video, and I discovered that the Amish, as a rule, are not big MTV watchers. Yeah, I haven't gotten much feedback from the Amish. I did it on my own trick on that one. I could have died because Buster Keaton's joke about the barn falling, the house falling, there's a barn frame falling on top of me and that's all real, it's not a camera effect or anything like that.

They wanted to make sure that the frame of the barn didn't squeeze or move, so what they did was reinforce it with steel, so this thing weighed a ton, they probably literally said you have to stand here in this little square, don't worry. move because if you move you will literally die, that's how we did it. one take of that and I did some of the best acting I've ever done in my life. I had to pretend I wasn't too scared. There has been endless talk about Coolio, you know he had a problem with that. Initially, because there were some crossed wires, he apparently didn't approve it initially and we were told that he did it because his producer had approved it and there was a miscommunication there that everything was resolved.

I mean, in a few years, you know we embrace it. We dated and made up and, uh, I'm glad there wasn't any hard feelings or ill will. We were, you know, we're fine. I love Rocky Road, it was my second music video and these were non-union days. uh, one day of filming meant like 22 hours straight, like you have one day to film this, okay, this day will never end, we're going to keep filming until we're done. The musical microphone was in the video, the kind that makes the hand. music, we featured it a lot in the early material and there were things we were never able to film because, uh, I guess the day wasn't that well planned, in fact we had a dozen kids from an accordion school with their accordions that we never got.

When I was about to film, it was like two in the morning, okay kids, now you can go home. I hear those ice cream bells and start drooling. An old Hollywood trick is when you're filming ice cream on the screen. We don't use ice cream because it melts too fast, there's no continuity, so we use mashed potatoes, so every time you see me in that video holding an ice cream cone it's mashed potatoes, but there's a shot where it was supposed to be I had to take a bite of the ice cream. cone, so it's like two scoops of mashed potatoes covered in latex paint and one scoop of real Rocky Road ice cream.

I turn my head quickly and during the turn, the actual spoonful falls out, so I take a big bite of latex-covered mashed potatoes. I think I passed the take but it was a disgusting scream and I don't know what I'm singing, it smells like Nirvana. I think it was the closest we got to using the entire original because we filmed it on the same soundstage as Nirvana. We filmed their video in uh, we had

most

, if not all, of the same cheerleaders, we had the same janitor, so it felt very real, you know, and I think we had to kind of convince people that we weren't like making fun from Nirvana or do It was fun for them, you know, they understood it from the beginning, we were being very respectful, we didn't have a celebrity cameo, people were breaking down and I don't remember who, but someone on the team was like, oh, I know , Dick Van Patten, I said Ben.

Patton called him and within about an hour he was on set and doing this crazy thing where he was in the audience with all these hardcore fans, you know, Nirvana fans. He didn't even know Tony Hawk was in the video. until he tweeted it like two decades later, he was like oh this reminds me of one that's in Weird Al's video for it smells like Nirvana and I was like you're in the video so I can see it, you can freeze it. and how to identify, oh yeah, it's Tony Hawk, that's him. When I write a parody, I try to make everything as funny as possible and there's nothing funny about a guitar solo, so it's like you're like, what would be funnier than meeting a guitar solo here like oh well, you have your gargles kazoo chorus they are very pointed jones-isms as you know Spike Jones and the City Slickers a very popular comedy band in the 40s and 50s and early 60s and one of my heroes I have borrowed a lot from him , like all the crazy instruments and sound effects and stuff like that, whenever possible I try to give a little nod to Spike.

I think it might be my most popular original song to this day. It is a pastiche or parody of style that is not a direct parody but is intended to sound like an artist or group. Many of my past problems are not necessarily based on how popular an artist is, they are based on my personal love for their work. and I'm a big Devo fan and I thought I wanted to write a song like Devo would write and, uh, dare to be stupid, it was a result of that, for the video we tried to use as many devo-isms as we could.

I've studied every video Diva posted, there's the yellow radiation suits, there's the scene with the kind of pantyhose on her face. I made a list of, for example, a woman cutting a kiwi, you know, random things that We thought, oh, that's something Devo could do, why didn't Foreign write the song for the Running With Scissors album. I would write pages and pages of notes and here's an idea and here's an idea and here's an idea and I thought, "Okay, now I have." to reduce this to the length of the song and that's when I thought no, I'm not going to cut it.

I'm just going to do everything. I really thought no one was going to hear this more than once. I did it on purpose. The longest and nastiest thing I could do was I was basically trolling my fans being like oh you want you want a long song and uh it goes on forever it ended up being one of my most popular songs like the fans were like please , play Albuquerque, like the real thing. So we've been playing it live and it blows my mind that people love that song. I went back the first time I saw the bad video.

I think it was the world premiere of the Michael Jackson Bad video that I got the idea for. fat before the video even ended, you know, I usually think a lot about my Concepts and think about all the options, but no, I had the idea right away because I pictured this 900 pound guy trying to get through the turnstile. on the subway and I thought, oh actually, it has to be fat and it will be like a sequel to eating it, it just makes so much sense, I have to do this. I went back to Michael Jackson to make sure he was okay with it. and he was and in fact and this was amazing, he let us use his set this time.

We were actually filming on Michael Jackson's set and they were about to hit him, they were about to knock him down and we found out he said no, no, let us film there, we did two days of filming with the dancers and everything and then the third day we shot in the morning, which was just the zoomed-in face shot and nowadays that would be like an easy CGI thing you could do. That with computers is not a big deal, but this was in 1988, so that was practically done, so what they did was stick them like latex bladders, like balloons, they stuck it to my face, but then they had tubes that went from my face to the ground and there were specials. effects people lying on the ground blowing through these straws essentially to expand my face and uh I think the shot that we used I said well the last shot just blows my face up until it explodes so they just blew my face up until it It exploded in my head and we used everything up to the frame where it explodes.

Hey, I've had a polka medley on pretty much every album. I think there may be two where I somehow didn't put a polka medley in the medleys. Let me make fun of a lot of songs all at once, it's easier for me in a way because I don't have to make up funny lyrics. I mean, the fun part is the arrangement, so I can focus on the musical part and, you know. finding humor through the instrumentation that exercise is a muscle I can't really work out much with heterosexual polka face parodies. I think it was the first real music video we created for one of the Pokémon Going Away because before I had these kind of bootleg videos where I literally took the original videos that you know from the original artists and sped them up to match my singing, so he did it and we couldn't officially release them because I stole them, except for polka.

Damn, we made an Anna Jam. I found a dozen animators that I really thought were amazing and I said: make this song, make this song, make this song. I didn't even ask them what they were doing. I just said have fun. andthen we just cut it all together and that was the video. It is a personal policy of mine to never let anyone suggest a parody idea. I have someone going through my fan mail and pulling out all the song suggestions so I just don't want someone else said oh I gave that idea to Al the only exception I made was Madonna because as legend goes I told her story a thousand times, but Madonna was talking to a friend of hers one day in New York City and accidentally Who said oh, I wonder when Weird Al is going to appear? acting like a surgeon and her friend knew my manager and I got the news and I thought it wasn't a bad idea.

The most memorable thing about that day was, uh, the lion, there was a lion in the video because uh, there was a lion in Madonna's Like. A Virgin video, for no apparent reason, we had to have a lion in the hospital just wandering the halls, it was fun and random, but I will say that we lost a lot of our extras that day, a lot of the actors who played people at random. In the hallways, as soon as the lion was on set, they said yes. I don't think this is worth my 50 a day. I think I'm going home now, but it was a fun video, you know?

I travel a lot. on the floor as a hobby it's just something personal that I like to do and it was nice to be able to use it in a music video hardware store it's a completely original song it's not a Pastiche or anything although in all honesty I started as an active Pastiche, I won't tell you which band because then it will end up like a Wikipedia entry, but it went in a different direction while it was being written and recorded and we decided, oh no, this is like On a real Weird Al original, I wanted to write a song that was incredibly fast, you know, impossible to do live because again it became one of my most popular songs and people like What are you going to play at the hardware store live?

It's like it's difficult. doing that live is difficult that bridge in four part harmony, it would be quite difficult for me to do it, but the rest of the band likes to sing in perfect forward synchronization. Harmony probably won't happen, the number 27 has become kind of an inside joke with my fans because I don't know how it really started. I guess I wrote a song or two that had the number 27 in it and people you know in the past said why the number 27 and uh instead of answering. I kept using the number more and more, you know, throughout my career until it became like that as a joke, so it's like when you see the number 27, it's like a little secret handshake with the fans.

I'm Weird Al. Yankovic thanks for watching and these were my

iconic

clues.