A Forgotten 1984 Club Show Where He Performs Eight Never-Recorded New Songs

1984-03-10, Tralfamadore Cafe, Buffalo, NY [late show]

Update: This ran on April 1st an April’s Fools joke. Now that it’s no longer April Fool’s Day, it lives on as a regular Weird Al concert deep-dive. If that’s your thing.

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Image courtesy Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz

In March 1984, Al had just released one of the biggest songs of his entire career, but you wouldn’t know it from his tour billing. Even with “Eat It” out in the world, he was still opening for the wacky radio host who first played his zany songs on the air, Dr. Demento.

Hey, at least they spelled “Al” right

Weird Al, though, was already stealing the show. A Kansas City Star headline a few weeks before today’s show in Buffalo read: “It’s Dr. Demento’s Show, but The Star Is Weird Al.” You can see from that poster up top too that sometimes the promoters would take it upon themselves to flip the order. (Al’s longtime drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz confirms that this tour was primarily Demento’s show.)

Weird Al and his band on the road with Dr. Demento (second from left). Image from Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz’s photo book Lights, Camera, Accordion!

At the time, most writers seemed skeptical that such a gimmicky act would last long. When interviewing Al before his show in Rochester, a writer wrote:

Although writing rock parodies might seem limiting to some, Yankovic feels there’s a future in it. “I figure there will always be hit songs, and there will always be people who can accept a certain amount of irreverence about them. I can see myself doing this for a while.”

“A while” is, as of this writing, 43 years and counting. Though at the time of today’s Buffalo show he was only a year or so into his professional career, you can already hear his staying power. The show was taped for the King Biscuit Flower Hour syndicated radio program. It aired as a double-bill broadcast alongside cowpunks Jason and Scorchers, who performed their great version of “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a song written by someone whose name escapes me.

Check out the cool hand-lettered calendar for this month’s run of shows at Buffalo’s Tralfamadore Cafe:

Roger McGuinn and David Crosby three weeks apart!

Al opens with “Yoda,” the Kinks parody that for several decades now has closed every show in a medley with his later Star Wars song “The Saga Begins,” the only good thing to come out of the prequels. From there it’s into “Buckingham Blues,” the John Mellencamp almost-parody Al wisely jettisoned from his set soon after (the hosts of the podcast Weird Al-Gorithm, which I appeared on a while back, have ranked it as his worst original song ever). “I’d like to play a little blues number for you now,” he says by way of introduction. “This was actually written by my great grandfather, who originally brought the blues to this country. You’ve probably heard of him, the famous Blind Lemon Yankovic.”

After that, getting its own dedicated setlist.fm slot, it’s “Drum Solo.” Which it is…technically. Al and Bermuda still do this gag today.

I wrote a whole chapter in my first book about the next song, “Polkas on 45,” the first of Al’s many polka medleys. I describe it as the exact opposite of his more-famous parodies. In the parody, he keeps the music but changes the words. In the polka medleys, he keeps the words but changes the music. The humor comes in hearing self-serious songs like “Every Breath You Take” and “Smoke on the Water” done in a goofy accordion-fueled polka, complete with copious sound effects. Weird Al adapted the technique from 1940s bandleader satirist Spike Jones, who occasionally performed a zany polka cover of some serious composer like Tchaikovsky. “I listened to a lot of polka music because I want to make sure it passes muster with a hard-core polka enthusiast,” Al told me at the time. “But it’s comedy, so my medleys owe as much to Spike Jones as they do to traditional polka.”

For the same book, drummer Schwartz recalled: “Our crowds back then really liked the polkas. He’d sing them sort of sweet; that was half the gag. We were usually playing for the Dr. Demento audience, and they were into anything wacky.”

Sure enough, “Polkas on 45” gets a huge audience response here. You can hear an enthusiastic clap-along before he even starts singing. Here’s a video from a different show a few months later (with a horn section!):

One thing you might notice watching that video is that a big hallmark of later Al shows is missing. There are no costumes, no props, no giant video screens. He either didn’t have the ambition or, more likely, the budget for the full production. It’s a fairly straightforward concert presentation. He does don a red leather jacket for “Eat It,” but a long way from the elaborate studded fat suit he’d incorporate the next time he parodied Michael Jackson.

In this show, Al performs a few of what fans have christened “style parodies.” That’s where he parodies the sound of a certain artist, but not one specific song. For instance, “Mr Popeil” is a style parody of the B-52’s generally, using the band’s distinctive yelps, synth stabs, and off-kilter guitar riffs to sing about the dude who invented the infomercial. “Buy Me a Condo” is a style parody of Bob Marley, using reggae music and Jamaican slang to sing as an extremely white suburbanite excited about tupperware parties and Lacoste polo shirts.

Unfortunately, this show took place years before Al recorded one of his best style parodies, “Bob.” Every line is a palindrome (that is, the same forwards and backwards, like “senile felines”) to spoof the lyrics and sound of some guy from the '60s. Donovan I think?

The most exciting thing about listening to Weird Al live tapes, as I’m sure all of you regular Weirding Down the Double Al’s readers know, is hearing the concert-only songs that never made an actual album. There are a few here.

The first is “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me.” Most Weird Al parodies have nothing to do, lyrically, with the original artist. “Eat It” isn’t about Michael Jackson. “Amish Paradise” isn’t about Coolio. But there’s a smaller subset of parodies that are. “Smells Like Nirvana” gently ribs Kurt Cobain for mumbling his lyrics. “Perform This Way” pokes fun at Lady Gaga’s wild outfits. This is one of those.

It’s in the even smaller subset of parodies that are, in Al’s own words, “kind of mean-spirited.” It takes copious shots at Billy Joel for jumping on the new-wave trend with his new album Glass Houses. As Al explains in a podcast interview, an interviewer actually played it for Joel at the time. Joel didn’t seem overly offended, but Al said, watching that, “That was the point where I thought, ‘I don’t want to be mean to people. You can be funny without tearing people down.’”

The second concert-exclusive song here is another anomaly in Al’s catalog. His humor is usually pretty G-rated. A decent chunk of his audience is kids, after all. When he slips in a more ribald joke, it’s usually pretty subtle. It took me years to realize the joke, in his weepy breakup song “One More Minute,” in the line “Now I’m standing all alone at the gas station of love / And I have to use the self-service pumps.”

The brief Jim Croce parody he plays in today’s show is not similarly subtle. Here are the lyrics, in their entirety:

If I could make love to a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
I’d search the world over to find one
That had the exact same circumference as you

Finally, and most excitingly, is the “Food Medley.” He intros it as his “medley of every song ever written in the history of the world,” which was a gag he used to do in college that was sort of a precursor to the polka medleys. Here, though, it’s a medley of his own parodies.

In his shows to this day, he often throws in medleys that let him rip through a dozen hits in one long chunk, maybe a quick verse and a chorus from each. That’s what this is, except he doesn’t have many hits, so most of the songs in this medley are concert-exclusive parodies. This Buffalo 1984 show features an epic 10-minute food-themed medley where a full 9 of the 12 songs are ones he never actually released:

You get, interspersed with bits from three songs you might actually know (“Theme From Rocky XIII,” “I Love Rocky Road,” “My Bologna”), the following concert-exclusive mini-parodies:

“Flatbush Avenue” (parody of Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue”)

Down on the street they got bagels
And there’s a sale on cream cheese and lox
Nosh on some blintzes at Ratner’s
Not in the mood for Jack-In-The-Box
Oy vey!

We gonna schlepp on through to Flatbush Avenue
For matzah and chopped liver
We gonna schlepp on through to Flatbush Avenue
Or maybe they’ll deliver

“Spameater” (parody of Hall & Oates’ “Maneater”):

Oh-oh, here she comes
Boy, she likes that processed meat
Oh, oh, here she comes
She’s a spameater!

“Feel Like Throwin’ Up” (parody of Bad Company’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love”):

Baby, when we go to parties
I drink too much beer
Then my tummy
Starts a-grumblin’
Feelin’ queer
And then I feel like…I feel like throwin’ up (repeat)
Feel like throwin’ up on you

“Avocado” (parody of The Eagles’ “Desperado”):

Avocado
What makes you think you’re so holy?
You’re gonna be guacamole before too long
Oh, you’re a green one
You know that you’re out of season
You’d better let somebody eat you (repeat)
Before it’s too late

“Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut” and “Take the L Out of Liver” (a double-dose of The Motels parodies: “Suddenly Last Summer” and “Take the L Out of Lover”):

Sometimes you feel like a nut
Sometimes you don’t
Peter Paul Almond Joy’s got nuts
Mounds don’t

(These are words taken from an old Almond Joy commercial)

Take the L out of liver
And it’s “iver”

(He had an earlier unreleased Talking Heads-via-Al Green parody “Take Me To The Liver”)

“Fatter” (parody of The Rolling Stones’ “Shattered”):

Fatter, fatter
Shake ‘n Bake, fatter
Shake ‘n Bake, fatter
Fatter

Pizza pie, Coca-Cola
Yogurt, butterscotch, granola
Look at me, I’m fatter!

“Whole Lotta Lunch” (parody of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”):

Wanna whole lotta lunch! (repeat)

Robert Plant-style screaming:
Way down inside…
Woman…you need…luuuuuuuunch

“We Got the Beef” (parody of The Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat”):

Had ourselves a little barbecue
Corn on the cob and mashed potatoes too
Joe got the Fritos, Ernie got the stew
So what did you bring?

We got the beef (repeat)
Yeah, we got it!

Everybody get on your feet (we got the beef)
Got a hunk of your favorite meat (we got the beef)
Chuck steak (we got the beef)
Now, ground round by the pound
We got the beef (repeat)

That’s a lot of songs you’ll never hear anywhere else! Al has explained that these concert-only songs often don’t have enough meat on the bone (no pun intended) to sustain a full-length parody. So he throws a few lines in these medleys and calls it a day. I don’t know that I need a four-minute version of “Spameater,” but at 15 seconds, it tastes great.

1984-03-10, Tralfamadore Cafe, Buffalo, NY [late show]

Weird Al will embark on the latest leg of the Rough Bigger and Rowdy Weirder tour this May!

Oh, and happy April 1st…