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My friend Brian went to a Weird Al concert last night, so it seemed like a good impetus to do the next album. I’ve been able to go to two Weird Al concerts and they are simply fantastic.  He is 52 years old, but his energy and enthusiasm are infectiously young.  Laughter, it would seem, really is a good medicine.

This is kind of a weird album for me. It has one of my favorite Al songs but overall it’s probably my least favorite of his albums. Don’t confuse “least favorite” with “don’t like” – I still enjoy it, I just don’t enjoy it as much as some of his other albums.  I remember the first time I heard this album. I was on summer tour with a singing group for my college, performing in schools and churches. People from the church would house us for the night and we would leave for the next place in the morning. At one house I stayed in, the son had a cassette of this in his room and I stayed up way too late listening to the whole thing.  This album was released in April of 1992, but I think it was the summer of 1993 that I heard it for the first time.

Onward to the list!

11. Taco Grande – A parody of “Rico Suave” about Mexican food. I’m not a huge fan of Mexican food, nor am I huge fan of Latin-style music. This song wasn’t really targeted to me. Note: this song features Cheech Marin rapping in Spanish, even though he only knew basic Spanish. He read the rap phonetically.

10. I Was Only Kidding – A relationship song, the basic premise being “Remember when I said you were beautiful and I would love you forever? I was only kidding!” Kind of meaner than I expect Al to be.

9. You Don’t Love Me Anymore – Another relationship song, with Al figuring out that the girl in the song doesn’t love him anymore. He figures it out because she keeps trying to kill him.  The video for this song spoofs the video for “More Than Words,” but the song is an Al original.

8. The Plumbing Song – A parody of two Milli Vanilli songs, way before the lip-synching scandal broke. “Blame it on the drain” is a phrase that is handy to sing any time you have plumbing troubles, though I doubt most plumbers would get it/enjoy it.

7. Airline Amy – A sort-of relationship song, in the sense that Al’s fallen in love with a stewardess.  It includes a couple of great lines like “I found a little piece of heaven / On a  747” and “You set my ever-lovin’ heart on fire.”

6. The White Stuff – A New Kids on the Block parody about Oreo cookies. To this day I can’t eat an Oreo with singing “The white stuff!” in my head. The secret to writing a catchy parody song? Base it on a catchy original.

5. I Can’t Watch This – A TV song about horrible shows. It’s funny how often Al gripes about TV, because he clearly loves it. This is a parody of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.”

4. Polka Your Eyes Out – Polka melody that includes The B52’s, Billy Idol, R.E.M., and ends with Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” and I would go so far as to say it “ends brilliantly with Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’.”

3. Trigger Happy – A Beach Boys-inspired song about gun ownership. His pronunciation of the word “pillow” in this song always stuck out to me, because he pronounces it “pellow.” Eh, fun song any way, but probably won’t be used by the NRA any time soon.

2. When I Was Your Age – A song about how everything was so much harder when he was a kid. As the song progresses, things get worse and worse, to the point where I’d probably put this one in the “dark comedy” category. Sample lyric: “Daddy’d whup us every night til a quarter after twelve / Then he’d get too tired and he’d make us whup ourselves.”

1. Smells Like Nirvana – One of Al’s most famous songs, a parody of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” When Al talked to Kurt Cobain to ask permission to do the parody, Kurt asked if it was going to be about food. “It’s going to be about how people can’t understand your lyrics,” Al replied. Kurt was quoted as saying later he knew their band had made it big when Weird Al did a parody of their song.  This song, much like “(This Song’s Just) Six Words Long” makes fun of the song itself, and has kazoos, mooing, and yelling enough for any three other songs combined. A definite Al classic.

Bonus: Bite Me – At the very end of the last song (“You Don’t Love Me Anymore”), there’s a 10-minute gap of silence, followed by 7 seconds of Al screaming and making weird noises. It was inspired by Nirvana doing basically the same thing on their album, and was meant to “scare people who had forgotten the album was playing,” Al says. On the (sadly) short-live Weird Al Saturday morning TV show, this was used at the end of the episodes.

Some of the bigger news about this album is what didn’t make it. Al had been waiting for Michael Jackson’s next album to hit, and when he asked MJ if he could parody “Black or White,” MJ said no, because he didn’t want to dilute the message in that song. He did say Al could use any other song on the album, though, but Al did not. Al also had an idea to use Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” as a basis for “Chicken Pot Pie,” and Paul McCartney was keen to have Al do a parody of one of his songs, but had to “begrudgingly refuse,” as he was a vegetarian and could not condone the eating of meat. Al understood, since he is also a vegetarian.  Throughout the course of his career, Al has asked Prince for permission to parody his songs and has always been denied. Some people just have no sense of humor, I guess.

Harold: If you knew you were gonna die, possibly soon, what would you do?

Dave: That’s easy. I’d go to Space Camp.

Harold: Space Camp?

Dave: Yeah, it’s in Alabama. It’s where kids go to learn how to become astronauts. I’ve always wanted to go since I was nine.

Harold: Aren’t you too old to go to Space Camp?

Dave: You’re never too old to go to space camp, dude.

(edited out non-essential in-between lines – you can see the original scene here, but be warned that the clip continues after that and does spoil some parts of the movie.)

If you know me well enough, you’ve been expecting this quote for some time.  It’s from Stranger Than Fiction, which is not only my favorite Will Ferrell movie but also one of my favorite movies – Top 20, for sure.

I love the joy in this line, the hope. “As long as you’re alive, you can chase your dreams,” it says. I love the look on Dave’s face when he says it, like he can’t figure out why a person would think anyone would ever be too old to go to Space Camp.

This is a tough one to write – not because I can’t put the songs in favored order, but because I want to write about the movie!  …which I suppose I could do, but it doesn’t fit in this series.  The official title of this album is “UHF - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and Other Stuff.” It includes a few things that were in the movie, but the bulk of it is like any other album. Seven of the songs aren’t even in the movie, and a couple of the tracks aren’t even songs. I’m going to do two lists from this one.

The first list is the “extras” list:

• Gandhi II – The audio of the Gandhi II movie commercial in UHF. “Don’t move, slimeball!” and “I’ll have a steak, medium-rare” are the highlights here.
• Spatula City  – Commercial in the movie that is so great I’m just going to link to a video of it.
• Let Me Be Your Hog – They couldn’t afford the song they wanted for a particular scene, so Al wrote this as a bit of filler.
• Fun Zone – An instrumental song used as the theme to Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse in the movie.

The second list is the song ranking list:

9. Attack of the Radioactive Hamsters from a Planet near Mars – Pretty much what the title of the song says. Reminds me a lot of the Slime Creatures from Outer Space song from a few albums back.

8. She Drives Like Crazy – Spoof of FYC’s “She Drives Me Crazy,” about how bad a girl drives. Kind of a “meh” song for me, partially because he does such a good job approximating the FYC singing style that it’s not terribly enjoyable.

7. UHF – All about TV, used as the theme song for the movie.

6. Spam -Spoof of REM’s “Stand” that exceeds the original, I feel.

5. The Hot Rocks Polka – I really like this concept: it’s one of Al’s standard polkas, but it only uses Rolling Stones songs. Neat! I’d love to see him do a Beatles polka.

4. Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies – Spoof of, well, “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits. Al didn’t want to title this track this way but was forced to. It was an odd thing for the label to make him do, but they figured no one would know what song it was based on. Who knows? I’ve heard plenty of stories about how music labels wouldn’t know their heads from a hole in the ground.  Anyway, this one’s about the TV show The Beverly Hillbillies, if that wasn’t evident from the title. “That little Clampett got his own cement pond” is just one of many great lines. Fun fact: Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits gave Al permission to use this song on the condition he be allowed to play guitar on it.  Al has talked about how it ended up being kind of difficult to get it all worked out, because Knopfler had played the song live so many times that his solos sounded different than the release track, which is what Al was after.  I think it ended up okay.

3. Isle Thing – Another TV song!  This one about Gilligan’s Island and is just a hoot.

2. Generic Blues – The only blues song you’ll ever need. My wife is a choir/music teacher at a middle school, and she’s in the middle of a series on teaching the blues. I gave her this one to use as an example in class and according to her it meets all the criteria. I figured I did those kids a favor.  Apparently B.B. King counts this among his favorites as well. I love that.

1. The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota – This right here is my answer to the question, “What’s your favorite Weird Al song?” It’s a folk song about a family taking a road trip to see the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota (based on an actual thing in Darwin, MN). I love the story of this stereotypical middle-of-the-country family taking this trip, one of a grillion that they’ve taken (fun fact: all the other attractions mentioned in the song are based on real places, too).  While this might not be the Al song I’ve listened to the most, it’s still my favorite. My only wish is that he would’ve included an Abe Vigoda/Minnesota rhyme in it somewhere. A missed opportunity, that.

I highly recommend the movie, as it is just silly fun. Al does for movies and TV what he’s been doing for songs, but it isn’t just a series of spoof scenes – there’s an actual plot and everything! Plus, you get to see a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards doing a proto-Kramer schtick with a lot of fun moments.  This movie is easily in my top 20, and might even be top 10, I’d have to think about it.