The Big Squeeze Day Six: "Mr. Frump In The Iron Lung" from "Another One Rides The Bus" EP and "Weird Al" Yankovic LP

A young Al, dreaming a young Al's dreams

The Big Squeeze is a chronological trip back through the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic with two big objectives in mind: to inspire conversation and appreciation of a true American hero AND to promote the Weird Accordion to Al book, which is like this column but way, way, better and this column is pretty damn good, because it has illustrations and copy-editing and is way tighter and less self-indulgent than the column that inspired it. And has more and different stuff, like a chapter on the Wendy Carlos album.

Author’s Commentary: Because of the way The Weird Accordion to Al was formatted as an online column (badly) I never quite wrestled with the glorious absurdity of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s first EP AND his first album closing not with a single or a crowd-pleasing parody but rather a vaudeville-style accordion number about a man dying a horrible death in an iron lung.

How fucking bizarre is that? THAT is what he wanted to leave audiences with? A gruesomely chipper little ditty about a man just barely hanging onto life with the help of an antiquated medical device that does all his breathing for him? “Weird Al” Yankovic is an outlier in Al’s career in so many ways, up to and including its decision to close things out not with a wildly ambitious, ten minute long epic but rather a goofy little song that never even makes it to the two minute mark.

When Al recorded “Weird Al” Yankovic quickly and cheaply he could not have envisioned just how long and distinguished his career would turn out to be. There was a very distinct possibility that Al’s first album would also be his last, and only album. If that had been the case, then Al’s unlikely career as a recording artist would have ended with a man in an iron lung’s death, a decidedly perverse conclusion for any album, let alone one from a comedy prodigy who would would go on to have an enormous family audience, in no small part because while he continued to make songs about unfortunate medical maladies like toothlessness and hernias, Al had the good sense to never do another iron lung themed song ever again.

The same, alas, cannot be said of the funsters in Radiohead, but their iron lung song was considerably less wacky and much more metaphorical.

During the “My Bologna” single and Another One Rides The Bus EP, Yankovic stage of his career, Yankovic was the king of the Dr. Demento Show’s “Funny Five”, its all-important weekly countdown of the most popular silly songs as voted by listeners. Though he somehow found the time and energy to graduate valedictorian from college, The Dr. Demento Show was Al’s world, and the world that helped create and nurture him. 

In the 1970s, The Dr. Demento Show was a meritocracy, a zany place where an ambitious kid with an accordion like Al could share airtime with men of distinction like Loudon Wainwright III and Al’s idol Frank Zappa if their music was good enough. The Dr. Demento Show was a safe, happy place for weird kids with perversely old-timey senses of humor. 

"Perversely old-timer" is the perfect description for “Mr. Frump In The Iron Lung”, one of four numbers to make the jump from the Another One Rides The Bus EP to Al’s self-titled full-length debut. The title goes a long way towards establishing the song's retro, Borsht Belt  tone. It’s one part Shel Silverstein (whose songs, not surprisingly, were a Dr. Demento Show fixture), one part Dr. Seuss and 100 percent vaudeville. 

As a young man, Al was already a connoisseur of the ancient, the outdated, the strange, the gloriously, exquisitely anachronistic. In that respect, he’s a lot like DOOM, whose Madvillain classic “Accordion” Al once helped The Roots perform on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon. Like a true vaudevillian, Al saw the endless comic potential in things that weren’t just outdated and old and creaky, but also colorfully awful.

It’s easy to imagine “Weird Al” Yankovic closing out an epic vaudeville show by ambling onstage with his accordion, Gene Shalit-worthy mustache, nerd glasses and Hawaiian shirt, looking for all the world like a sight gag, and closing out the shenanigans with a little tune about his pal Mr. Frump. Like “Happy Birthday”, “Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung” is an Al speciality: a cheerful sounding number about something almost comically depressing. 

A serious young Al honing his serious craft

The comically depressing aspect of Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung” is, of course, the iron lung of the unfortunate title character. The narrator, and once again we can safely assume that Al is signing as a character and not as that elusive figure known as his true self, doesn’t seem to mind too much that on a technical level, his pal doesn’t actually do anything. 

He mostly just exists and breathes, although even that might be overstating it, since the iron lung seems to handle an awful lot of the whole “breathing” deal itself. “Mr. Frump In The Iron Lung” is a duet where the narrator is an expressive, energetic and affectionate fellow, a faithful friend who boasts cheerfully of how he treasures his relationship with the title character, particularly his absence of negative qualities like gullibility, dishonesty and disagreeability and his duet partner is the dispiriting thump of an iron lung in action. 

As the title telegraphs ever so slightly, there is a reason Mr. Frump is “never a chump or a tease” and answers the narrator’s questions about world events with the wordless heavy breathing/eerily metallic respirating that are his default answer to everything, because, you see, he’s in an iron lung, dying a slow, painful death that finally arrives in the last verse and is the song’s sick-joke capper, or at least Mr. Frump’s dying sound is. 

Al was of course valedictorian. Meanwhile, I squeaked in at 237th in the 1994 Mather graduating class

For a song about friendship, albeit of the decidedly one-sided variety, “Mr. Frump In The Iron Lung” is a little on the dark side. So “Mr. Frump In The Iron Lung” has the curious distinction of being at once too nice and a little too mean. Or at least, it would seem too mean if Yankovic’s preternatural affability didn’t rescue it from being hopelessly mean-spirited, even cruel.

Al would never give up the organ-grinder vaudevillian old-time part of his shtick entirely. The accordion forever tied him to those roots, but that side would never be as pronounced and pure as it is on “Mr. Frump In The Iron Lung” even if the song already had many of the hallmarks of his later compositions, singles and album cuts alike. As with many of Al’s later songs, the narrator is gleefully demented and giddily unselfconscious, with a skewed perspective on the world and an utterly inappropriate cheerfulness. It’s a happy-sounding song about something soul-crushingly depressing that delights in both wordplay and the language and technology of the increasingly distant past.

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