The Big Squeeze: Day One "My Bologna" (Capitol single version)
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: Welcome to the very first entry in The Big Squeeze! Our journey begins OVER four decades ago (that’s a long, long time!) with Al’s sole contribution to the Capitol Records’ legacy: a raw parody of The Knack’s “My Bologna” recorded by Al with just an accordion for accompaniment.
I feel like The Weird Accordion to Al in its original form was just as raw and just as unpolished as the song that kicked off Al’s career as a major label recording artist but I did not have the excuse of being twenty years old and at the very beginning of my career. I should know why better by this point but it took five drafts, the brilliant work of Felipe Sobreiro, an amazing, patient and obscenely gifted book designer named Mariana Rausch Chuquer and Al’s professional grammar intervention to transform the raw material of The Weird Accordion to Al the column into the beautiful literary jewel that is the Weird Accordion to Al book.
The Weird Accordion to Al was the very first idea I had for Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I started writing entries before the site launched and had a month-long stockpile when we launched that ran out way faster than I could have imagined. I conceived of it as the core, signature feature of the site, although when the A.V Club cancelled My World of Flops just before the site launched, that certainly gave it a whole lot of competition, particularly since traffic for The Weird Accordion to Al dwindled after the first introductory entry, which I believe Al was nice enough to Tweet.
Al also volunteered to fact-check an eventual book after that first entry, which played no small part in getting me past various points in the project where I might have been tempted to give up before completion.
Honestly, if it weren’t for the fear of disappointing my childhood hero, The Weird Accordion to Al might have joined the unfortunate roster of projects I never got around to finishing, mostly on account of getting fired or having columns killed, including, but not limited to, The Simpsons Decade, Nathan Rabin Versus The IMDB 250, Hip Hop and You DO Stop.
But I did not want to let Al down. So even though it took three times longer than I had intended, I finished the project and now am I able to look back on the whole experience with no small amount of pride.
I did it! I really did it! And I loved the experience so much I want to revisit it all over again with all of you.
What do you say? Up for talking a little “Weird Al” Yankovic? And boy do I have a book I think you’re gonna dig! And, if it does good, I can write more like it and do even more writing about Mr. Yankovic because, amazingly, even after two books, there’s a lot I have not gotten around to covering.
About six years ago I received a direct message on Twitter from my childhood hero “Weird Al” Yankovic that changed my life. Al wrote that of all the writers in the world, he had chosen me to tell his story and write his book. After making sure that it was not some manner of hoax, my future wife and I jumped up and down and squealed with delight. Have you ever genuinely squealed with delight? I mean, really, really squealed, with whole-soul, whole-body, utterly non-ironic delight? It feels pretty great. It also feels pretty great when someone you grew up idolizing wants to become your collaborator.
The problem was that I was already contracted to write a book at that time, a detached sociological tome about the surprising commonalities between fans of Phish and Insane Clown Posse, and that project was going terribly. I had spent a year and tens of thousands of dollars chasing this crazy project aboard the Kid Rock Chillin’ the Most and Jam Cruises, through the parking lots of dozens of Phish shows and my first Gathering of the Juggalos, yet I somehow felt farther away from finishing the book than when I first began.
And now this offer came along. I couldn’t believe it. I kept pinching myself. “Weird Al” Yankovic himself wanted me to write his book. Nathan from the group home. Nathan the man whose personal idiosyncrasies and appalling grammar were a source of quiet horror to everyone cursed to work alongside him. Nathan the guy whose first book flopped, and also whose second book flopped and whose third book was a giant question mark (to the point where it actually ended up being his fourth book). That was the guy this consummate winner wanted to write his book.
Part of me wanted to demur and explain that everything I touched failed, but the ferocious ambition a childhood of perpetual suffering had blessed and cursed me with made this an offer I could not refuse. I was a geek. What geek could possibly say no to “Weird Al” Yankovic? I also happened to be the head writer of The A.V. Club at the time, so I had to ask my boss if I could write this book.
I assured him that I would not let the fact that I was writing two books simultaneously, both requiring a fair amount of travel, knowing deep down that there was no possible way I could live up to that pledge. I had taken on too much, and I would suffer the consequences of my overreaching ambition, but I was also unbelievably blessed to live out my childhood dreams as an adult hurtling towards a nervous breakdown.
When I was a teenager obsessed with Brit-Pop, I dreamed of being the guy who got to hang around with Blur or Elastica or Oasis as they drank excessively and said wonderfully obnoxious pop-star things. Instead, I got to be a man who got to drink in moderation around “Weird Al”, his manager Jay Levey and his drummer/webmaster/archivist/all-around right hand man Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz. That suited my temperament and disposition just a little bit better.
As part of the gig, I was now professionally obligated to not just listen to “Weird Al” Yankovic but listen to all of his music. To listen to every single song the man ever wrote and performed and released commercially. I’m not sure any professional obligation ever thrilled a man the way the universe’s angry insistence that I listen to all of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s music thrilled me.
It’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that being professionally required to listen obsessively to the music of “Weird Al” helped me retain what was left of my sanity when I was deeply depressed and wrestling with major anxiety. At a time when I was feeling rootless and alienated, overwhelmed and alone, these songs felt like home.
It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that being professionally obligated to listen obsessively to the music of “Weird Al” Yankovic helped me retain what was left of my sanity when I was deeply depressed and wrestling with major anxiety. At a time when I was feeling rootless and alienated, overwhelmed and alone, these songs felt like home.
So when I learned that Yankovic would be releasing a career-spanning 15-disc box set I figured it would be the perfect time to revisit Yankovic’s work, this time on a song-by-song basis chronicling the man’s complete discography in chronological order, beginning in the waning moments of the 1970s and the last days of disco on through the present.
At this point you might be saying, “Gee, Nathan, it sounds like you’re just trying to escape the inexorable horror of the awful present by disappearing into an idealized past while simultaneously trying to recapture earlier professional triumphs.” to which I can only say, “Yes. And?”
Al’s music soothed me. It comforted me. It amused and diverted me when I needed amusement and diversion most. I think Al’s music plays that role in a lot of people’s lives. It connects them, on an almost Proustian level, to the overwhelming emotions of their childhood, when music seemed like magic and performers of Al’s caliber like magicians. Al’s music is nitro for the burning-hot engine of our childhood imagination.
I just happened to have an unusually intense relationship with Al’s music. Ironically, when one of the things that stressed me out most was whether or not I’d be able to write the book Al had hired me to write, listening to his music was one of the things I found most relaxing. Being a “Weird Al” Yankovic fan helped me deal with the stress of working for my childhood idol and trying desperately not to disappoint him and his fans.
Besides, Al’s story made sense in a way that my own did not. It had a clean, clear arc. It was the tale of a geek triumphant. I just had to tell the tale in a way that did justice to Al’s incredible accomplishments.
It was a story with clear milestones, beginning with the fateful day a young Yankovic hooked up with a wily young drummer the world would come to know as Jon “Bermuda” Schwarz and they collaborated on a parody of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” entitled “Another One Rides the Bus.” If the day The Big Bopper, Richie Valens and the nerd with the glasses perished was the Day The Music Died then the landmark moment when “Another One Rides The Bus” was recorded is The Day The Music Was Born.
Actually, Al’s story begins before the Day The Music Was Born. During the months I spent joyously, neurotically researching Al’s life and career I at one point had the incredible honor of holding in my hands, during one of several incredibly fruitful visits to the garage of Schwartz that doubles as a museum of all thing Al, the very first letter Dr. Demento sent a young, mentor-hungry Yankovic.
It was an exhilarating experience, a potent geek high. I wanted to call my then girlfriend, now wife, and tearfully explain to her the significance of what I held in my hand, and how it moved me nearly to tears, but I’m pretty sure her response would have been, “I don’t know who Dr. Demento is or why his mail would be important to you.”
My wife has many wonderful qualities, such as being a voracious reader and great mother, so I am reluctantly willing to overlook her lack of interest in people like Stan Freberg and Dr. Demento and Tom Lehrer and the other silly, brilliant men who created the world Yankovic grew up, pop-culture-wise.
Yankovic spent many of the happiest hours of his teen years as part of the coterie of kooks who gravitated around Dr. Demento’s eponymous shows. These were characters out of vaudeville, sometimes literally, in the case of Benny Bell of “Shaving Cream” fame but Yankovic felt at home among the misfits. He was a young man with a very old sense of humor and a real cultural affinity for Borsht Belt Jewish Catskills humor.
Like old Jews, and also Jews of all ages, the young Yankovic was obsessed with food, and deeply enamored of its comic possibilities, in part because Yankovic understood and exploited, like no other artists, how funny so many words related to food sound. Spam, salami; you almost don’t need jokes. These words are funny in and of themselves.
This is certainly true of Yankovic’s first released single, “My Bologna”, which was released by Capitol Records (the folks who put out bands such as, I dunno, The Beatles) on Christmas Day, 1979.
The comic possibilities posed by the word “Bologna” had already been proven by the world-famous Oscar Meyer jingle, that sadistic ear worm that tricked children into not only wrongly desiring this sub-par meat product, but knowing how to spell it as well.
Like so much of Yankovic’s early music, “My Bologna” is a tale of obsession and devotion, only with food standing in for romance and sex. The Knack’s“My Sharona”, which inspired Al’s first official release, isn’t just an extremely sexual song, it’s sexual in a gross, jailbait, “Gosh, maybe people should stop releasing songs about the hotness of the underage”, very 1970s kind of way.
Around the time of Pulp Fiction’s release, Quentin Tarantino told Movieline that he originally wanted to use The Knack’s “My Sharona” for the Gimp scene because, in the cult auteur’s mind at least, the naughty hit New Wave smash had a beat conducive to onscreen depictions of nonconsensual anal sex.
The sodomy-conducive groove of “My Sharona” is not the only filthy aspect of the song. Like most rock and roll songs, “My Sharona” is a hymn of sexual obsession about a horrible man’s erotic fixation with a teenaged girl. If a song could get #MeTooed a whole bunch of pervy songs from the 1970s and 1980s would get cancelled, including this lurid little ditty.
Given the filthy nature of “My Sharona” musically and lyrically, you would naturally assume that if a frizzy-haired, accordion-playing teenaged weirdo were to make a parody of it called “My Bologna” the parody would be, if anything, even dirtier than the infamously dirty original. You would imagine, understandably, that the wisenheimer would be talking about his bologna the same way a more ribald soul might discuss his trouser salami.
Not Al. When Al put out a song about bologna, you better believe it was actually about processed lunch meat, not a crude double entendre for his genitalia.
The original version of “My Bologna” is raw alright, but not in terms of lyrical content or sexuality. The young Al was a ferocious sexual beast but on wax he kept things PG and family friendly.
No, the rawness of Al’s modest, homemade addition to Capitol’s legacy is musical in nature. When Al revisited this seminal early parody for his self-titled debut legendary guitar god Rick Derringer was handling production and guitar and Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz mastered the song’s driving, pounding rhythm. But on the Capitol version of “My Bologna” Al is a one man band, and not of the busker-with-harmonica-acoustic guitar-and-knee cymbals-in-the-subway variety.
Some artists can sound like a band all by themselves. That’s not Al here. No, Al exactly like what he was: a supremely talented kid trying to replicate the filthy fury of The Knack with just an accordion and his voice. Instead of a beat redolent of sweaty fornication, the song moves to the much more leisurely rhythms of the solo accordion.
Al might have been performing a parody, a juvenile goof based on someone else’s ubiquitous smash but he was always unique, always a character, always an original even when spoofing someone else’s song.
The “Weird Al” Yankovic of “My Bologna” and his self-titled debut album was younger, crazier and rawer than the version that would win America’s hearts and become an essential component of the past half century of American pop culture. To put it in The Simpsons terms, it’s the difference between the Klasky-Csupo years and the Film Roman Era, when everything is smoother, rounder, more pleasing and palatable.
The Al of “My Bologna” is at once immediately recognizable as the preeminent jester of pop music and, to once again use animation metaphors, a little off-model. For starters, the hungry young pop parodist was accompanied only by himself on accordion.
Here’s an image of some bologna for ya #TheBookisBetter #BuyMyBookBuyMyBookBuyMyBook!
As Al’s career progressed, he leaned on the novelty of performing rock music on an accordion less and less. But in this rough, embryonic stage, much of the humor and novelty comes from one weird dude barely out of his teens recreating the anxious, manic, hyper-sexual nerviness of “My Sharona” using a single instrument seldom associated with rock music.
Lyrically, the song is equally spare and straightforward. Although the lyrics open with a reference to “my little hungry one” the rest of the song deals with the narrator’s compulsive desire to consume mass quantities of overly processed lunch meat.
The lyrics are comically obsessive, and obsessively comic, in breaking down every step in the bologna-sandwich-consumption process, from the making of toast to the careful application of mustard on the toast, to staving off disaster by ensuring that the bologna never runs out.
Yankovic embraced the fertile comic territory of mindless consumption as one of his earliest and most fruitful themes. In Al’s angry-nerd world, the joys of consumerism replace the sensual pleasure of sex and romance. Many of Al’s early songs are about both consumerism and consumption.
In “My Bologna” the urge to consume isn’t just unhealthy. It is downright pathological. The narrator doesn’t just love to eat bologna. As he manically insists, “Such a tasty snack I always eat too much, then throw up, but I’ll soon be back.” This is no mere bologna aficionado we’re dealing with here. No, we are dealing with someone who overeats to such an extent that they throw up, then begin the process again.
It is safe to say that “My Bologna” is not a message song about the dangers of bulimia but it finds in the need to consume until you purge a potent and savage metaphor for the way consumer culture encourages us to consume to unhealthy, even dangerous degree. Though “My Bologna” is primitive, rudimentary stuff in many ways, the musical equivalent of a high school yearbook photo, revealing and embarrassing at the same time, a lot of the hallmarks of Yankovic’s aesthetic are already in evidence.
Hyper-competitiveness and excess are at the core of much of Yankovic’s lyrics. Think of the man with a TV so big it blots out the sun in “Frank’s 2000 Inch TV.” In “My Bologna” the narrator claims the dubious distinction of being “the city's biggest bologna buyer” before vowing to go to the “shopping aisles” to buy some “Oscar Meyer.”
It’s no coincidence that Yankovic’s bologna in the song has a first name, and it's O-S-C-A-R, nor that it has a second name, which is “M-E-Y-E-R.” Yankovic is referencing the processed lunch meat titans who conquered the airwaves with a legendarily catchy jingle that began, appropriately enough with the words, “My bologna.” From the very beginning, TV and commercials and advertisements and the pleasures and aggravations of consumer culture were at the core of Al’s satire of American life.
It’s not easy for a mustachioed, bespectacled geek with an accordion and a big brain full of often food-themed parody lyrics to convince rock label that he’s a viable commercial entity.
So it helps, I imagine, if the song he’s peddling advertises a consumer product and sounds more than a little like a commercial itself.
Despite being released by a monolith like Capitol, the single version of “My Bologna” sounds charmingly homemade, closer to a raw little demo than polished studio project. It was an inauspicious but exceedingly likable beginning to an auspicious career.
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