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'Weird Al' Yankovic (Part 1) Every journalist has a wish-list - interesting people whom they would desperately, desperately love to interview - and occasionally the dice land right and you find yourself able to sit down, at length, with someone on that list. On 5th August 1999 I was able to talk on the phone with legendary comedy rock musician and pop parodist ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. The reason was because his new album Running with Scissors was being released in the UK and the lead track was ‘The Saga Begins’, which basically sets the entire plot of The Phantom Menace to the tune of ‘American Pie’. Al has recorded several other sci-fi-themed songs, including ‘Jurassic Park’ (based on ‘MacArthur Park’) and ‘Yoda’ (based on ‘Lola’). He was extraordinarily easy to interview and genuinely interested to hear about how he is viewed on this side of the Atlantic. A few quotes from the interview appeared in a short piece in SFX, but here’s the whole thing. Jump straight to Part 2 of this long interview.
"Well, it was a few years before the movie ever came out. As soon as I learned that George Lucas was planning to do the first trilogy I smelled a pop culture phenomenon. I had a strange premonition that a new Star Wars movie might be popular, and since my career is based in a large part on doing my own take on pop culture phenomena I knew that at some point I wanted to take another stab at Star Wars. So I had my eyes set on The Phantom Menace for quite some time." Did you try lots of different angles, or did the idea of using ‘American Pie’ just come to you in a flash? "That was actually the first idea that I had and it was the one that I stuck with because I just thought it was the most appropriate. There were two different ways I could go. I could either pair Star Wars with whatever song happened to be very popular during the month that the movie actually came out, or I could pair it with a classic rock song. And I thought that the classic rock song would be the way to go because I think Star Wars feels more weighty than that. Since Star Wars is a classic movie and a classic genre unto itself, it merited a classic rock song to be paired with. And ‘American Pie’, besides being one of my favourite songs, is considered one of the all-time classics. In this country, at least, it’s almost like treading on sacred ground when you’re dealing with that song." The original version of ‘American Pie’ goes on for about a day and a half... "It’s eight and a half minutes, but it feels like a day and a half sometimes!" Did you not feel that this warranted an eight and a half minute parody? "It’s not that it didn’t warrant it. It’s just because I’m trying to get radio play and even having a five and a half minute long song was considered extraordinarily long. I just couldn’t artistically rationalise cutting the song down any more than that because I needed to have the slow intro, the slow ending and a couple of fast verses in the middle or else it just wouldn’t even feel like ’American Pie’. I cut it down as much as I possibly could, but it’s still five and a half minutes which for me is very long." Given how much secrecy there was around the film, when did you actually write the song. You must have had a fairly narrow window to get it written, recorded and videoed? "It was more of a narrow window to get permission because as it turns out I wrote the song about six weeks before I ever saw the movie. I was able to glean basically the entire plot of The Phantom Menace by looking at fan-based Star Wars websites. There are quite a few bootleg, unofficial websites out there that somehow were able to figure out the plot of the movie and post it on the internet. I carefully scanned those newsgroups and pieced together the plotline and wrote the song based on that. I did see the movie once before finalising the album. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t getting false information. But I did have the song written well in advance of the movie coming out."
"I actually changed three or four lines. Just subtle changes because there were a couple of things on the internet that didn’t wind up in the movie. A few lines of dialogue that would have subtly changed the meaning of some of the lines of my song. So I did change a few things, but it saved me the stress of having to write the whole song within a few days after seeing the movie." What permission did you have to get from Lucasfilm? "Basically just his blessing. I wouldn’t have done a parody of Star Wars if George Lucas thought it was a bad idea or was offended by it or basically didn'’t want me to have anything to do with it. I had done a Star Wars parody years and years ago called ‘Yoda’ which was a parody of ‘Lola’ by the Kinks, which George Lucas approved. So we had an indication that he had a good sense of humour about these things. So we thought we had a pretty good chance that he would approve, but of course that was a long time ago and you never know how people are going to feel from one day to the next. We just wanted to make sure, so it was very gratifying when we finally got the call from Lucasfilm saying that George loved ‘The Saga Begins’." The video has not much happening, but it’s very funny. "Thank you. It’s kind of down-scaled a bit because we don’t have an $80 million budget for the videos and it’s kind of hard to do a Star Wars video on a low budget. So we had to think in modest, low-budget terms and we thought that doing a kind of Star Wars Unplugged would be the best way to go. Especially since we’re covering five and a half minutes of screen time. That gets very expensive." I don’t know if this is a blooper or a deliberate mistake, but as you walk up the sand dune looking at the twin suns, your shadow rotates through about 90 degrees so there’s obviously a spotlight or something just behind you. "There’s no spotlight actually. That was shot in direct sunlight. But I think both of those suns were fakes and I’m sure the sun was coming from a much different angle." Although the video has a Mace Windu lookalike and your cousin is dressed a bit like Queen Amidala, most of the people are generic weird aliens but not specifically Star Wars. "Yes, we wanted to go with that because we didn’t want to take advantage of Lucasfilm’s good nature too much. We didn’t want to have too many copyrightable, trademarked characters in the video. We just wanted to kind of approximate the vibe of a ‘Star Wars cantina’ type of scene without exactly copying many of the characters. But we did get permission to use the photo of Anakin Skywalker in that one shot. And we did get permission to do the video obviously, but we didn’t want to push it too much." Has there been any thought of Lucas including your video on the DVD of The Phantom Menace as an extra? "If he wanted to, I’d be flattered and he’d be more than welcome to it! Actually the biggest compliment I’ve received is the fact that the official Star Wars website, starwars.com, gave my album and the video a very, very nice plug right on the front home page there. I was really thrilled that they did that. That’s very unusual."
"I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes if I’m dealing with a very, very current theme I like to mix and match, and have a current theme with an old song. Or sometimes I’ll take a very current song and mix it with an old TV show or something. I just like to juxtapose things like that and go for the stark contrast." Has ‘The Saga Begins’ been released as a single, or just for airplay? "In the States at least, my record label isn’t releasing any singles period. They’re basically releasing albums only but they’re releasing singles to radio stations. It’s just their company policy. They basically want to sell albums and they’re not all that interested in selling singles." Has it been getting a lot of airplay? "It’s been getting a fair amount of play. The new single which has just been released over here is doing a bit better in terms of video play. I don’t really know how much airplay it’s getting because it’s not the kind of song that gets added on radio station playlists. It’s the kind of song that, every kooky morning team on a radio station will play the song a few times. So it’ll get a lot of airplay in the morning, but it’s not the kind of thing that gets reported so it’s hard for me to know how much airplay it’s getting." Is the album selling well? "The album’s selling very well. This may be my biggest seller to date, I don’t know. It’s kind of early to tell. My last album sold over two million copies here in the States and this current album is doing just as well, if not better, right out of the box, but it remains to be seen how long it can hang around." Continue to Part 2 of this long interview, where Al discusses how he creates his songs as well as his acting roles in Amazing Stories, The Naked Gun and UHF. Official website: www.weirdal.com | ||
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