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'Weird Al' Yankovic (Part 2) Go back to Part 1 of this long interview.
"A little of both. I haven’t been working on this constantly for three years; I had a lot of other projects that occupied my time. I spent about a year doing my own Saturday morning children’s TV show called The Weird Al Show. And I’ve spent some of my downtime directing videos for other artists like the Black Crowes and Hansun and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, people like that. But I started this current album about a year and a half ago, I guess. “I casually worked on the originals for the new album over the course of last year because I could take my time and there wasn’t any rush on that. But once we got closer to the release of The Phantom Menace, we set a release date because obviously we wanted to be timely and topical and come as soon after that movie as possible. I set a cut-off date and said: ‘By this date I want to know what parodies I’m doing.’ I wanted to make the parodies as timely as I can. So once we’d decided on the parodies and we had the go-ahead from the original artists, then it was a last minute crank to get everything done as soon as possible." Modern songs aren’t as catchy as they used to be, and they’re not in the charts for as long. Is that affecting your ability to find good memorable stuff that you can parody? "Not really, although it’s a little bit harder to determine what exactly is a hit because it seems like music has got so segmented. It used to be as simple as looking at the Billboard top ten to determine what a popular song is. But the top ten isn’t really a good indicator any more of what a popular song is because the top ten is based a lot on single sales and a lot of hits aren’t ever released on singles any more. So I have to look at the Billboard singles, the Billboard albums, the modern rock charts, the rock charts, the pop charts, the airplay charts, the sales charts, the MTV playlists. I have to consider a lot of different sources and a lot of different research material just to determine what’s a popular song these days." I believe you considered giving this album a Star Wars-based title. What happened there? "I considered that, yes. But we just couldn’t agree on a title, really. I thought that Album One would be a clever title and the whole gimmick would be that this album would be the prequel to all my other albums. But the record company thought that would be kind of confusing and nobody liked the title Album One. We kicked around a few other ideas but none of them seemed clever enough. And ultimately we decided to go with Running with Scissors which had nothing of course to do with Star Wars but we just thought it was a fairly good sight gag and a good generic album title and concept that didn’t tie us in necessarily to any particular song on the album." For some reason a lot of your British fanbase is science fiction fandom. "Really?" Your songs get played a lot at sci-fi convention discos. "I didn’t know that. That’s great." A couple of years ago a small British convention called (for various reasons) Year of the Wombat, surveyed its members to ask what songs would they like played at the disco, and you were the only artists with two songs in the top ten. "Oh, that’s terrific. I’m guessing ‘Yoda’ was one of them." Actually, no. ‘Trigger Happy’ was about number eight and ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ was number two. "Wow, that’s great!"
"Yes, I am. Luckily I didn't have to wait on the street corner for a month to see Star Wars. I was able to go to a benefit screening. But I guess I am still kind of a fanboy." What did you think of The Phantom Menace? "I thought it was great. I really enjoyed it. I feel like I have to defend myself every time I say that because it got a little bit of a critical drubbing. I think it’s difficult, in the States, to put something out with that much hype. It’s a precarious situation to be in, because The Phantom Menace was perhaps the most highly anticipated movie of all time and it’s just hard to make everybody happy when they’re expecting that much. But I thought that Lucas did an incredible job. I thought he set up the whole franchise very well. I thought it was an engaging story and amazing special effects and it was thoroughly entertaining." Be honest. Jar Jar Binks: funny or annoying? "Hmmm… Somewhere in the middle for me." You were in an episode of Amazing Stories many years ago. How did that come about? "Tobe Hooper - who did the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist I believe - was the director of that particular episode and he cast me in it. And it was a lot of fun. I got to play a cabbage man from outer space and I got to work with Dick Shawn and Laraine Newman and some other very cool people. It was an episode called ‘Miss Stardust’ where the conceit was: Dick Shawn was this promoter who was having a Miss Universe pageant and I was very upset because I didn’t feel he was really representing contestants from around the universe. So I brought in Miss Uranus and Miss Neptune and all these odd, odd creatures that just completely ruined his little contest. It was a lot of fun. I was in special effects make-up for about a week and a half, so I got used to looking like a cabbage!" I remember seeing the first Naked Gun movie with a bunch of friends and when you appeared in that cameo - ‘No, Frank. “Weird Al” Yankovic was on the plane.’ - we all whooped with delight, which worried everybody else in the cinema. "I’ve always wondered how that scene went over overseas because I’ve never been all that popular outside North America and I know that the Naked Gun series was very popular in England. So I was always wondering: ‘How did audiences react when that scene came up?’" Some members of the audience loved it and some were confused, but we’re used to seeing American things where a special guest star comes on who we’ve never heard of. How did you get this regular cameo gig in the Naked Gun films? "It’s kind of a mutual admiration thing. The Zucker Brothers are my all-time favourite directors, the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team. I just love their comedies. And Police Squad, the short-lived TV series that the Naked Gun series was based on, was my all-time favourite TV show. I knew Bob Weiss who produced the Naked Gun movies. In fact, I’d worked with Bob on some of my early videos. I told him: ‘Bob, I’ll do anything to be involved with this movie. I love these guys, I love this movie. I’ll run out and get their coffee, I’ll be in a crowd scene. Just please put me in the movie somewhere. And he told the guys involved that I really wanted to be in the movie and they actually wrote that scene for me which was really really nice of them." Your own movie, UHF, came out over here on rental video and has been on TV a couple of times. It’s got a cult following. "That’s exactly what it is. It came out in the States - it tested extremely well which is why Orion Pictures had put it out in the summer of ‘89 up against Batman and Lethal Weapon 2 and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and a lot of major movies - and it quickly disappeared. Looking back on it, it’s kind of an uneven movie. There are parts that I still think are great and parts that make me grimace. But it definitely has developed a cult following over the years. In fact, we do live shows - I’m in the middle of a concert tour right now - and part of what we do is we play film clips during the show, during which we do costume changes. Whenever we play a clip from UHF, the audience chants along with the dialogue like it’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show or something. It definitely has a very hardcore fanbase." Are you going to do another film? "Not in the near future. I’m going to be on the road for pretty much the rest of the year. I would really love to do another feature or another TV series, but that’s somewhere down the line, I think." How is the tour going? "It’s going great. We’re about two and a half weeks into it and we’re going to be going at least to the end of the year and possible after that. We’re having a great time - the audiences are really enthusiastic." Your popularity overseas is mixed, but you’ve been released in a lot of countries. I’ve got German and Japanese releases of your records. "Really? Wow!" How popular are you in these places? How do they even know what you’re singing about? "Well, I’d love to ask you that. I don’t know. Up until this current album it’s been kind of spotty even finding me in record stores over there. I was in England about the time that UHF came out and I was going into record stores just trying to find my on albums and I could hardly come up with one. My previous record label, I don’t even think had an international deal in place. A lot of my fans overseas have had to buy albums through import shops and pay a lot of money for them, which is unfortunate. But the new album, Running with Scissors, is going to be released in the UK, I think on the 16th of this month, so it’s going to get an actual release this time which is great." As far as I know only In 3-D and Even Worse actually got a proper release over here. "So it’s been what, over ten years since I had a proper release."
"Yes, ‘Eat It’ was a big hit in Australia back in ‘84 so I got an Australian gold record back then. And again, the same situation: I haven’t had proper international distribution so I haven’t really had any bona fide hits there for quite a few years. But the new album just got released in Australia. I’m told it’s doing extremely well there so hopefully we’ll have success over there once again." Over here, British radio stations tend to have a knee-jerk reaction against novelty songs. "Really? This is a learning experience for me. I was under the impression they really liked novelty songs." Back in the seventies there were a lot of novelty hits. "The Barron Knights I guess were very popular." They had a lot of hits in the sixties and seventies. And Benny Hill, for example, had a huge number one hit. But now it’s pretty much died out. Although the South Park single got to number two at Christmas. "Which single was that?" ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ sung by Chef. It just missed by one week being the Christmas number one. "Oh, too bad!" Which would have been great because every time they had a Christmas hits retrospective they would have had to play it "Oh yes!" Finally, what would it take to get you to to do a concert over here in the UK? "It would just take a promoter making us the right offer. I would love to ply overseas. Hopefully, first of all, the new album will do well enough to justify us coming over and supporting it. But we’ve never done a concert outside of North America, so I would love to tour the UK. That would be great.” ‘Weird Al’ is such a great guy. When the interview finished I told him that I was going that weekend to a party where most people there were fans of his work and he kindly recorded a special message on the end of my tape to play to everyone at the party. What a top bloke! Go back to Part 1 of this very long interview where Al discusses his Star Wars parody 'The Saga Begins'. Official website: www.weirdal.com | ||
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