We've come to the part of the Top 19 where I no longer talked about these albums on Facebook. Even though they're still in the Top 19 I guess you can consider them honorable mentions or runners up to the Top 10 Facebook list.*
* This preamble seems highly unnecessary but so is this list.
I can't be 100% certain of this, but if you grew up in the 1980s; there's a good chance you had a "Weird Al" Yankovic phase. I know that I did. I got Al's biggest album "In 3-D" (the one with "Eat It") back in 1984 and I listened to that tape a lot. In a lot of ways, it was a primer on classic rock due to his "Polka on 45s" medley. He mashed "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix, "LA Woman" by the Doors and "Hey Jude" by the Beatles, among other songs, into one really hyper polka. It was a strange experience to hear one of those songs year later for the first time and think, "I know this song, but where do I know it from?"
So for me, Al is the source for my pop culture deja vu.
My best friend at the time, had Al's follow-up to "In 3-D", called "Dare to Be Stupid". Even though I didn't own the cassette at the time, we listened to it a lot. And laughed a lot. That was the thing about Weird Al tapes, the musicianship was really good, but the lyrics were also really funny. For a guy that's labelled only as a "parodist", I am certain that Al and his band don't get a lot of credit for how well they play their instruments*, nor for how well Yankovic writes his songs.
* I've read someone make the claim that Yankovic's band has to be the best touring bands ever due to the different types of music that they have to master. From hip hop to pop to country to metal to grunge to doo wop to punk, they need to be able to play these genres and make sure that they sound great. I don't know, this guy made a really good argument.
For Christmas of 1986, I really wanted Al's follow up to "DtbS", entitled "Polka Party". I saw the James Brown/Rocky IV parody video, "Living with a Hernia" all over MTV and needed to hear what other tricks Al had up his sleeve. December 25 came and under the tree was "Polka Party". I'm sure that I busted out the tape player and gave that bad boy a listen as I put together my He-Man and M.A.S.K. toys or while I was reading comics and looking at baseball cards--the 1986 Topps Traded Set, dontchaknow.
I did a very brief bit of research on this album and found that it was one of Yankovic's worst selling albums ever. The release was met with commercial and critical silence. But I didn't care, I loved this album so much. At the time I owned probably about six tapes, two of them were Weird Al, two were Men at Work, one was a Billy Joel's "Piano Man" (I wanted "An Innocent Man" but I got this instead) and I'm not sure what the other album was. The only two that I ever listened to were from Weird Al.
The influence that this tape had on me was pretty big. My favorite song was the El Debarge "Who's Johnny" parody, "Here's Johnny", which was about Johnny Carson's sidekick Ed McMahon. In 1986, I was 12-years-old and I doubt that I ever stayed up later than 10:00, but I laughed at that song like I've been watching Carson for 25 years. The only thing that I knew about McMahon was that he and Dick Clark used to host, "Foul Ups, Bleeps and Blunders" and he used to give away big checks once a year for Publisher's Clearing House. Al's song made me want to learn more about McMahon and his full-time job so that vacation, I stayed up to watch the Tonight Show. Since it was during the dead time between Christmas and New Year's, I was shocked to find a rerun. And if I remember right, I don't think that my hero Ed McMahon was even on the show that night.
I can't tell you how long my Weird Al infatuation lasted. It probably wasn't much longer after that I decided that him and his music was "kids stuff" and that I needed to listen to more adult music like Poison or Mötley Crüe. You know, songs with real meaning in them.
But a funny thing happened, people kept trying to bury him in the late 80s, but Weird Al Yankovic is still pretty popular. He has his ebbs and flows, but there are a lot of comedians that I respect who cite him as an early influence. And from what I've read, he's one of the nicest people in showbiz.
My daughter's first music obsession was Weird Al and that was her first concert too. Al was great, he put on an awesome show and my daughter had a blast. It was really cool to be able to pass that down from one generation to the next and I know that it stuck. My daughter doesn't love Weird Al as much as she used to, but she can be as goofy as he can be. We still talk about "Christmas at Ground Zero" (first released on "Polka Party") and not a week goes by without one of us referencing "Just One of Those Days" (another "Polka Party" jam). It's like our own secret language and one that I love speaking.
I never would have guessed that the first time that I listened to "Polka Party" under the Christmas tree that I'd be sharing a love of Weird Al 34 years later with my daughter. But it happened and that's good.
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