Actors - "Weird Al" Yankovic

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	Actors - "Weird Al" Yankovic

Alfred Matthew "Weird Al" Yankovic (born October 23, 1959) is an American musician best known for his parodies of contemporary radio hits. His lyrics depend largely on the satirizing of popular culture including television, movies, food, music, and news stories. Though parodies earned him his fame, Yankovic has recorded a greater number of humorous songs with original tunes. Some of these pieces are pastiches (or style parodies), where he chooses a band's entire body of work to emulate rather than any single hit. Most of his albums include a medley which juxtaposes the choruses of various songs in a polka style, complete with accordion.

Biography

Yankovic, the only child of Nikolas Louis Yankovic (a Serb-American) and Mary Elizabeth Vivalda (of Italian descent), was born in Downey, California, but raised in the nearby town of Lynwood. He first started playing the accordion one day before his seventh birthday, mastering the instrument by age ten.

After hearing Dr. Demento's radio show (a comedy radio program featuring humorous music), Yankovic sent the Doctor a tape of a song entitled "Belvedere Cruising" in 1976. He was a senior at Lynwood High School in Lynwood, California at the time, but that tape was the start of his eventual career.

Three years later, Yankovic was an architecture student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and a disc jockey at the university's radio station (KCPR). His air name was Weird Al, and he has used it since. Since "My Sharona" by The Knack was on the charts and The Knack was scheduled to play at Cal Poly, he took his accordion into the bathroom across the hall from the radio station and recorded a parody entitled "My Bologna", with a B-side called "School Cafeteria". The Knack thought it was funny, and arranged for the song to be released on their label, Capitol Records, which gave Yankovic a six-month contract. Dr. Demento's listeners put this track atop his "Funny Five" list.

In 1980, Yankovic was working the mail room at Westwood One, Dr. Demento's radio network at the time, when he developed another parody called "Another One Rides The Bus", a parody of Queen's hit, "Another One Bites The Dust". While practicing the song outside the sound booth, he ran into Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz, who told him he was a drummer and agreed to bang on Yankovic's accordion case to keep a good steady beat to the song. "Another One Rides The Bus" became so popular that it got Yankovic his first television appearance, The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. On the show, he played his accordion and again Jon banged on his accordion case. The rare 1981 Placebo EP release of this song has as its B-side the track "Happy Birthday", an unusually (for Yankovic) dark song about the world's problems and imminent destruction ("There's garbage in the water, there's poison in the sky, I guess it won't be long before we're all gonna die"), with the sarcastic suggestion that denial is the natural solution ("So if you think it's scary, if it's more than you can take, just blow out the candles, and have a piece of cake!"). The Placebo EP recording of that song was recently remixed into stereo by Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz for inclusion on the Hurricane Katrina charity compilation '.

The Dr. Demento Society, which issues yearly Christmas re-releases of material from Dr. Demento's Basement Tapes, often includes among these unreleased tracks from Yankovic's vaults, such as "Pacman", "It's Still Billy Joel To Me", or the demos for "I Love Rocky Road". The live version of "School Cafeteria" is also to be found on Dr. Demento's Basement Tapes.

1981 brought Yankovic on tour for the first time as part of Dr. Demento's act. His performances were particularly interesting as few, if any, people at the time were doing parodies of rock and roll songs on accordion. His stage act caught the eye of manager Jay Levey, who loved it and became Yankovic's manager. Levey insisted that the act would sound better if he had a full band, so he held auditions. Steve Jay became Yankovic's bass player, and Jim West played guitar. With Bermuda Schwartz on drums, the band was complete. In 1992, Rubén Valtierra joined the band on keyboards, to allow Yankovic to concentrate more on singing during concerts. Rick Derringer would produce all of his albums until the 1992 release Off the Deep End
. After Derringer's departure, Yankovic began to produce his own albums. So far he has produced five albums, with a sixth on its way in early 2006.

In 1985, Yankovic co-wrote and starred in a mockumentary of his own life entitled The Compleat Al
that intertwined fact and fiction of his life up to that point. The movie was co-directed by Jay Levey, who would direct UHF (see below) four years later.
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