Robert Young in Studio A, Westwood One, Culver City, CA circa 1985
I have only recently begun to grasp the reality of my condition. I cannot go anywhere, have any kind of interaction with anyone…without thinking of a novelty song or a bit of a funny song that fits the situation.
“I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in….”
"...it was a '52, '53, '54, '56....."
Ah, Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. Not a novelty song but close. Like most country artists, he doesn’t stray too far from a funny lyric. Think Johnny Cash and “One Piece at a Time,” or Ray Stevens and “Gitarzan,” among others.
Okay, at this point, I have to make a confession. For years I’ve been telling people that “One Piece at a Time” was written by Shel Silverstein. Well, it was not. It was written by Wayne Kemp, and was Johnny Cash’s last #1 hit, in 1976.
Two cars were made from parts mentioned in the song (from the years ’49-’68, non-inclusive, in the case of this black Caddy). One is above, with Cash seated in the driver’s seat. The other is on display in Illinois at the Historic Auto Attractions museum.(http://www.historicautoattractions.com/)
Of course, Cash’s song is on Youtube:
I got to meet Johnny Cash and his lovely bride, June Carter Cash, when they were guests on the “Larry King Show.’ It was my duty to meet and greet and basically be the hosts to the celebs when they came in to our studios in Culver City.
June Carter Cash was the only person, of the hundreds of famous guests to the show, who sent to me a personal “Thank You” card. I think that says alot about what kind of person she was.
But I digress.
Like a person with Tourette’s Syndrome, that mental affliction that makes you blurt out things you’d be better off keeping to yourself, I have a very, very hard time stopping myself from at least singing these songs in my head. Often, I sing them out loud, or at least say the specific lines from the songs that are triggered by the event.
It doesn’t take much for this to happen as I have novelty songs coming out my wazoo, apparently. No, it’s not painful, but it has caused me a few problems that I need to tell you about….and Thank God there is no novelty song about “Wazoo,” or I’d be singing it now.
Perhaps I have Post Trauma Stress Syndrome, only replace the word “Trauma” with “Demento.” I’ll sue, and I don’t mean “Boy Named Sue,” either!! I’m gonna git me a MALL LAWYER!
By the way, “A Boy Named Sue,” another huge hit for Johnny Cash, actually WAS written by Shel Silverstein, a prolific songwriter and children’s book author (“Where the Sidewalk Ends,” “Light in the Attic,” “The Giving Tree”).
I tried to get an interview with Shel a few times in the ’80′s, and his record company was sympathetic. “Good luck with that,” said the publicist.
You see, I worked alongside radio’s “Dr. Demento” while he played countless funny, odd, sick and just plain weird songs. I heard them when we put them on tape, I heard them during the quality-control review, and I heard them when they were aired. I’ve heard them all, too many times, it would appear, and now look at me.
For instance, just today, a friend called to say that she had car trouble. The mechanic told her that she’d ‘blown a seal,’ and so I said, “Tell him ‘Leave my personal life out of it, buddy, and fix the damned thing!’” I was laughing but she wasn’t.
That friendship fracturing line is from a song called “Wet Dream,” by Kip Addotta.
You can hear it here: http://www.kipaddotta.com/sounds/comedian/wet-dream.wma
….and you can visit Kip Addotta here:
By the way, when Kip came to visit Dr. D. (in the Land of Dementia, of course), he brought with him two or three BBW’s, as they say in the Land of Porn…meaning Big Beautiful Women. Of course, that was for effect, as it turns out, as he said, loudly, “Here I am with my rather large entourage.” I was embarrassed for him and them but, hey, it was funny.
Mention bowling, or a VW bus, and I think (and sing), “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” by Camper Van Beethoven. “I had a dream last night…I slept near plastic.” I mean, really…if we took the skinheads bowling, wouldn’t it mellow them out just a tad bit? I like to think so.
Mention snow, and you might hear, “If you go where the huskies go, don’t you eat that yellow snow,” by Frank Zappa (from 1974′s “Apostrophe” album). I lived in snowy Chicago for three years as a boy and I can tell you, I never ate yellow snow nor would I kiss a girl who would.
This album made a very big impression on me and my bff, Richard Wilson. It was he who turned me on to Monty Python.
You can click on the image above to go to the Zappa site.
Go ahead, try me. Say something that just could not be made into a song. What’s that? “Cucamonga” you say! Too easy…..
My apologies to Homer and Jethro, as I don’t do justice to this excellent song:
“Well they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles, and they ran through the bushes where the rabbits couldn’t go. They ran so fast even we couldn’t catch ‘em, from Lake Aneekanike all the way to Buffalo.
A rooty toot toot, a rooty toot toot, we are the boys from the Boy Scout troop. We don’t smoke and we don’t chew, and we don’t go with the girls that do.”
Ah, a bit of perfection from Homer and Jethro…the “Battle of Cucamonga.”
This song is a parody of a fad in music at the time, the “historical ballad,” and “The Battle of New Orleans,” by Johnny Horton, who won a grammy in 1960 with that song. He also had novelty hits with “North to Alaska,” “Sink the Bismark,” and “Johnny Reb.” Try making songs like that nowadays. I double dog dare ya!
Such is the baggage that I bear from working on a nationally-syndicated radio program for 10 years that played what really was the “Greatest Hits” of novelty songs….weird, sick and twisted novelty songs and bits….for two hours each week.
And, to be played on Demento, your song had to be more than just funny. Because of where Demento was coming from, which is FM “Underground” rock….it had to be weird, something that someone with a rather stoned mind might find just downright High-larious.
Now, this doesn’t mean that you were a stoner (pot head, dope smoker, marijuana smoker) if you listened to the show. I know A LOT of people told me that they listened to it as kids hiding under their blankets in bed, so their parents wouldn’t tell them to ‘turn that damned thing off and go to sleep. You’ve got school tomorrow!”
Demento's logo in the '80's..click on it to go to his site.
If you liked our program, it could also mean that you were so intelligent that you were rather odd, that you appreciated the finer, more ‘stony’ things in life because you thought outside the box. I’ll bet you a dime that Bill Gates of Microsoft Fame is a Dementite, the title of someone who is a fan of the genre. This was rather common among our listeners.
Hey, speaking of dimes, “Geeks around here are a dime a dozen, and I’m looking for the guy who is handing out the dimes.” Thanks, Freddie Blassie. You always were hunting for those “Pencil Neck Geeks, skinny and weak, scum-sucking peaheads with a lousy physique.“ The movie that you made with Andy Kaufman, “My Breakfast with Blassie,” is a classic.
This was a take-off on the film, "My Dinner With Andre." Kaufman took Blassie out to breakfast and all hell broke loose.
In Demento’s case, he was and still is straight as an arrow and smarter than a whip. The ‘underground’ part of his career was appropriate because he started his DJ’ing days playing ‘double entendre’ R&B and Blues songs in the basement of a church in Pasadena, home to fledgling rock station “KPPC,” a very early forerunner to what would become a national phenomenon that replaced Top 40 radio with FM Rock that featured a format of ‘cooler’ DJ’s, longer track (sometimes, whole albums) and just a way of delivering the music with a ‘this is OUR thing” mentality as opposed to the puking scream of A-M jocks, “Hey, kids, Perry Allen here with the ‘Phrase that Pays!’”
To put it simply, FM “Underground” rock stations would not harsh your mellow.
Wait, there’s another one coming on….brought to my brain by “Lonzo and Oscar” (Lloyd Leslie George and Rollin Lillian Sullivan) :“Well it’s funny I know, but it really is so…..oh oh oh I’m my own grandpa….”
Many, many years ago when I was just twenty-three,
I was married to a widow, she was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red
And my father fell in Love with her. Soon they too were wed.
This made my dad my son-in-law–changed my very life!
My daughter was my mother because she was my father’s wife!
To complicate the matter even though it brought me joy,
I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.
My little baby he then became a brother-in-law to Dad.
Well, that made him my uncle–made me very sad!
Because if he was my uncle then he also was a brother
To the widow’s grown-up daughter, who, of course, was my stepmother.
CHORUS
My father’s wife then had a son who kept them on the run.
And, of course, he became my grandchild because he was my daughter’s son.
My wife is now my mother’s mother and this makes me blue
Because although she is my wife, she’s my grandmother too!
CHORUS
Now if my wife is my grandmother, well, then I am her grandchild,
And every time that I think about this, it nearly drives me wild!
Because now I have become the strangest case that you ever saw
As husband of my grandmother, I’m my own grandpa!
CHORUS:
I’m my own grandpa! I’m my own grandpa!
It sounds funny, I know, but it really is so!
Oh, I’m my own grandpa!”
Let it suffice to say that every time I hear of a family that has been fractured by divorce and then restrung together by new marriages…I hear “I’m My Own Grandpa.”
In late 1981, after going white water rafting in the Yukon with the big boss’ sister, I was hired by the Westwood One Radio Network to work on that program and others, so Demento (a.k.a. musicologist Barrett Hansen) and I worked together from January 1982 to December 1990. I was the liaison between Dr. Demento and the higher ups at the radio network and did a myriad of tasks that producers do.
I was there when Barry stuffed so 250,000 records into his house and it collapsed the floor. I went with him to Montreal for the “Jus Pour Rire” (“Just for Laughs”) Festival, twice, and together and separately through the years we met just about anybody in comedy who IS anybody in comedy.
I had a great time doing it, and I think it would help me if I blogged about it. You might enjoy it too. If so, chime in. So, here goes.
