0 Comments
Email to a friend
Printer-friendly
Digg this
Show Preview
Weird Al Yankovic
Weird Al Yankovic The Murat Thursday, April 1 While Weird Al Yankovic’s parody songs have become icons of American music, his career got its start, more or less, as a fluke. Yankovic first began toying with parodies as a teen-ager, sending homemade tapes to syndicated radio host — and fellow humorist — Dr. Demento. The “Doctor” aired several of Yankovic’s spoofs, but Yankovic said he didn’t see any sort of future in musical satire. Instead, Yankovic, a valedictorian at his high school who received his diploma at age 16, went on to college at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and majored in architecture. “It was truly for grins that I sent in tapes to the Dr. Demento show,” Yankovic said. “I enjoyed the notoriety and I loved hearing my songs on the radio. But I really had no serious intentions of going into the music biz or had any pipe dreams of having a career in the music industry.” A well-timed stint as a DJ at his college radio station, though, changed the course of his career. Returning to his love of satire, Yankovic came up with a spoof of the Knack hit “My Sharona” — retitled “My Bologna” — and made a tape of the song, in of all places, a bathroom at the radio station. The exposure eventually led to a record deal and a 1983 self-titled debut CD that began an uninterrupted recording career that has made Yankovic the best-selling comedy artist of all time and earned him two Grammy awards. Looking back, Yankovic said the timing of “My Bologna” couldn’t have been better. “It was all kind of serendipity that I had completely lost interest in architecture about my third year in college,” he said. “I had this moment when I really had no idea what my future was going to hold, because I didn’t want to be an architect and I didn’t think I could do anything else and what was I gong to do? Thankfully, things kind of fell into place for me because I definitely had a couple of scary years when I didn’t know what was going on.”
Post a comment
