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

when I signed with Capital Records they they paid me 500 for the master of 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 was why they call it the record business hello I'm Weird Al Yankovic and these are my iconic tracks [Music] I recorded it in the bathroom across the hall from my college campus radio station kcpr 91.3 San Luis Obispo I just sent in that that bathroom recording to Dr Demento and he played it on the radio I couldn't believe it because it was number one on the funny five for like two three weeks in a row I went to a a knack concert I don't know how he did but I snuck backstage somehow uh after the show and I met Doug Fieger the lead singer of The Knack and I introduced myself and he was like oh here's a My Bologna guy and oddly enough the guy who was right was the Vice President of Capitol Records who just happened to be at that show I was in school getting my degree in architecture I wasn't passionate about that I didn't really want to be an architect uh but I didn't really think I could make a living in Showbiz that was just such an alien concept to me but the fact that I now had a single on Capitol Records like the home of the Beatles you know the big tower in Hollywood like that was a huge deal and it got me thinking well maybe I can do this remember when I recorded it in the studio I was so nervous when we recorded it way too fast I didn't have a record deal at the time it was kind of done on 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 bucks you know I'm still working in a minimum wage job at the time and at that you know I was very aware of like you know money flying out the window and My Bologna I think I knew when we recorded it oh this is way too fast but it's fine move on next song next song efficiency and white and nerdy look at me I don't think it was like spontaneous inspiration I think I probably sat with a Chamillionaire track because I was a huge hit and I was like what can I do with this and then I thought oh White and Nerdy that's my life that's my whole existence I don't need to research this song I spent my whole life doing research on this song so uh the ideas came pretty quickly and I had dozens of pages of notes because I wanted to write down every single nerdy thing that I'd ever done or thought about doing in my life and put it all in one song key and peel at this point I believe are probably most famous for being on Mad TV I think I knew key or we had some some mutual friends uh and I thought oh these guys would be great I love these guys to this day people are discovering the key and peeler in the video like oh I just watched the white nerdy key and peeler in the video it blows their minds [Music] I started playing the accordion October 22nd 1966 and I 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 getting in my pre-teen years I just was more interested in the songs I was hearing on the radio I thought it would be fun to do a parody of Another One Bites the Dust because it's got a such a distinctive Baseline it's a very simple song it's very powerful but simple and simple is good when you're trying to emulate it on an accordion that was maybe what 20 years old maybe 21 and uh I was debuting my new song Another One Rides the Bus and I I needed somebody to to bang on my recording case and this guy John said oh well I'm a drummer and I said bang away and uh as it turns out he's now been banging away he's been my drummer for 42 years [Music] [Applause] [Music] I had high hopes for eat it but I had no conception of how big it would be it was overnight Fame you know it that which seems like a myth but literally the day after eat 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 do a parody because all we had to do was recreate it but just tweak things just a little bit we did have the same uh uh choreographer Vince Patterson who was the gang leader in the Michael Jackson video happily he agreed to be in my video as well I tried as hard as I could to dance like Michael Jackson and that's why it's funny because I am not a dancer I've never been a dancer I'm just this uncoordinated lanky Weirdo And and the fact that this guy is trying to dance like Michael Jackson you know that that's funny because it's it's not happening [Music] Amish products was one of my first hip-hop slash rap songs people you know are curious about what the Amish actually thought of the video and I found out the Amish as a rule aren't big MTV Watchers yeah I haven't gotten a lot of Amish feedback I did in my own stunt in that one I could have died because the the Buster Keaton gag of the falling Barn the falling house there's a barn frame that falls on top of me and that's all real that's not a camera effect or anything like that they wanted to make sure that the barn frame wouldn't torque or move so what they did was they reinforced it with steel so this thing weighed a ton probably literally they said you have to stand right here in this little square don't move because if you move literally you will die so we did one take of that and I did some of my best acting I've done in my life I had to pretend like I wasn't scared out of my mind the Coolio thing has been talked about to death you know he had a problem with it initially because there were some crossed wires he did not approve it apparently initially and we we were told that he did because his producer had approved it and there's miscommunication there that all got straightened out I mean you know within a few years you know we hugged it out and we made up and uh I'm glad that there wasn't any kind of you know bad blood or ill will we were you know we're fine [Music] I love Rocky Road was my second music video and these were non-union days uh one day shoot meant like 22 hours in a row like you got one day to shoot this like okay this day will never end we're gonna keep shooting till we're done musical mic was in the video the guy that does the the hand music we featured him a lot in the early material and there were stuff that we never got around to shooting because uh I guess the day wasn't planned out that well we actually had a dozen kids from an accordion school with their accordions we never got around to shooting it got to be like two o'clock in the morning like okay kids you can go home now I hear those ice cream bells and I start to drool an old Hollywood trick is when you're shooting ice cream on screen you don't use ice cream because it melts very quickly there's no continuity so we use mashed potatoes so anytime you see me in that video holding an ice cream cone it's mashed potatoes but there's one shot where I was supposed to take a bite to the ice cream cone so it's like two scoops of latex paint covered mashed potatoes and one scoop of real Rocky Road ice cream I turned my head quickly and during my head turn the actual scoop falls off so I take a huge bite of latex covered mashed potatoes I think we got through the shot but it was disgusting screaming and I don't know what I'm singing smells like Nirvana I I think was uh the closest we've ever gotten to using the original everything because we shot that on the same Sound Stage that Nirvana shot their video on uh we had most if not all of the same cheerleaders we had the same janitor guy so it felt very real you know and and we I think we had a kind of convince people that we weren't like mocking Nirvana or making fun of them you know they understood pretty early on we were being very respectful we didn't have a celebrity Cameo people were kind of flaking out on us and I forget who but somebody in the crew said oh I know Dick Van Patten I said Ben Patton so he called him up and within like an hour he was on the set and he was doing that crazy thing where he's like in the audience with all these like hardcore you know Nirvana fans I did not even know that Tony Hawk was in the video until like he tweeted it like two decades later he said something like oh this reminds me of one who's on the Weird Al video for smells like Nirvana and I was like you were in the video so I I can kind of see him you can freeze frame it and kind of pinpoint oh yeah it's Tony Hawk that's him when I write a parody I try to make everything as funny as I possibly can and there's nothing funny about a guitar solo so it's like you think okay what would be funnier than like you know a guitar solo here like oh well you got your gargling kazoo chorus they're very spiked jones-isms like 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've borrowed a lot of things from him like all the crazy instruments and the sound effects and things like that uh whenever possible I try to have a little nod to spike [Music] I think to this day it might be my most popular uh original song It's a Pastiche or a Style parody where it's not a direct parody but it's it's meant to sound like an artist or or a group a lot of my past issues aren't necessarily based on how popular an artist is it's based on my personal love of their body of work and I'm a huge Devo fan and I was like I want to write a song like Devo would write and uh dare to be stupid was the result of that for the video we tried to use as many devo-isms as we possibly could we've studied every single video that Diva put out there's the yellow radiation suits there's the the scene with the uh the kind of pantyhose pulled over their faces I made a list of like you know a woman cutting a kiwi you know just like random things that we thought like oh that's something Devo might do why not foreign wrote the song for the uh Running With Scissors album I would like 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 got to cut this down to song Length and that's when I thought no I'm not going to cut it down I'm just going to do the whole thing I really thought nobody's going to listen to this more than once I made it on purpose as long and as obnoxious as I possibly could it was I was basically trolling my fans saying like oh you want you want a long song and uh it goes on forever it wound up being one of my most popular songs like fans like please play Albuquerque like really so we've been playing it live and uh it just boggles my mind that people are love that song [Music] I'm back the first time I saw the bad video I I think it was the world premiere the Michael Jackson Bad video I had the idea for fat before the video was even over you know usually I really think a long time about my Concepts and think of all the various options but no that I had the idea immediately because I I just envisioned like this 900 pound guy trying to get through the turnstile in the subway and I thought oh fact it's got to be fat and it's it'll be like a sequel to eat it it just makes so much sense sense like 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 it was actually Michael Jackson's set we were shooting on and they were just about to strike it they were just about to tear it down and we found out we said no no let us shoot there we did two days of shooting with the dancers and everything and then the third day we shot in the morning which was only the face blowing up shot and nowadays that would be like an easy CGI thing you could just do that with computers no big deal but this was 1988 so that was done practically so what they did was they glued these like latex bladders like balloons they glued it to my face but then they had tubes running from my face to the ground and there were special effects people laying on the ground blowing through these straws essentially to expand my face and uh I think the take that we used I said okay last take just blow up my face until it explodes so they just blew up my face until like it exploded on my head and we used everything up until the the frame where it explodes [Music] hey I have had a polka medley on virtually every album I think there may be two that I somehow didn't put a polka medley on the medleys allow me to poke fun at a lot of songs all at once it's easier for me in a way because I'm not having to come up with funny lyrics I mean the it's the arrangement that's funny so I get to focus on the the music part of it and to to you know to find the humor through the instrumentation that exercise is a muscle that I don't really get to exercise that much with with the straight parodies polka face I think was the first actual music video that we created for one of the Pokemon leaves because prior to that I had these kind of pirate videos where I would literally take the original videos you know of the original artists and speed them up so they would match my singing so he did and we couldn't release those officially because I stole them but for polka face we did an Anna Jam I found like a dozen or so animators that I really thought were amazing and I said you do this song you do this song you do this song I didn't even ask what they were doing I just said have fun and then we just cut it all together and that was the video [Music] it's a personal policy of mine never to let somebody else suggest a parody idea I I have somebody going through my fan mail and taking out all the song suggestions so I just don't want somebody else saying oh I gave that Al that idea the one exception that I made was Madonna because uh as Legend has it and I told the story a thousand times but Madonna was talking to a friend of hers one day in New York City and just offhandedly who said oh I wonder when Weird Al's gonna do like a surgeon and her friend knew my manager and word got back to me and I thought not 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 roaming the Halls it was funny and random but I will say that we lost a lot of our extras that day a lot of the uh actors that were playing random people in the hallways as soon as the the lion was on set they said yeah I don't think this is worth my 50 a day I think I'm going home now but it was a fun video to do you know I I ride around a lot on the floor as a hobby just it's a personal thing that I like to do and it was nice to be able to use that in a music video hardware store is a completely original song it's not a Pastiche or anything although I in all honesty it started out as asset Pastiche I won't tell you of which band because then it's going to wind up as a Wikipedia entry but it kind of went in a different direction as it was being written and being recorded and we decided oh no this is just like a an actual Weird Al original I wanted to write a song that was like impossibly fast you know like impossible to do live because again that became one of my most popular songs and people like what are you gonna play hardware store live it's like it's hard to do that live it's hard to that bridge in four-part harmony it would be hard enough for me to do it but for the rest of the band to like sing in perfect sync in forward Harmony probably not going to happen the number 27 has become sort of an in-joke with my fans because I don't know how it started really I guess I wrote a song or two that had the number 27 and people you know back in the day said like why the number 27 and uh instead of answering them I just kept using the number more and more you know throughout my career until it became like this in joke so it's sort of like when you see the number 27 it's just sort of like a little secret handshake with the fans I'm Weird Al Yankovic thanks for watching and these were my iconic tracks

Channel: GQ

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Id: ETyCK9mqhDI

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022