The Weird Accordion to Al: Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Edition Book Excerpt: The Compleat Al
The Compleat Al
Original airdate: August 7th, 1985
VHS and Beta video release: September 25th, 1985
The history of pop music is largely the story of what our greatest artists did during their twenties, when they were beautiful and new and radiated endless promise and potential. The Beatles happened pretty much while they were all still in their twenties. We never got to experience what a thirty-something or forty-something Beatles would sound like because their career as a band began and ended while they were still in a decade we as a culture venerate above all others.
A big part of the reason the idea of a “27 Club” made up of tragic musical heroes who died at twenty-seven and includes such endlessly mourned giants as Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain proves such a source of enduring fascination is because they’re preserved forever in amber at the time when we valued them most. They’re 27 forever, young for eternity, mercifully and sadistically spared the horrors of old age and its attendant physical decline.
The number 27 is synonymous with Al, but for less morbid reasons. It’s a preeminent inside joke and Easter egg in Al’s music and iconography, popping up everywhere to the delight of his obsessive and pathologically devoted fanbase. Al was not quite 27 when he broke into long-form storytelling with the 1985 video The Compleat Al, but he was smack dab in the middle of his magnificent twenties, when he released the songs and albums and music videos that would catapult him to unlikely stardom.
The Compleat Al highlights the extraordinary strength of Al’s early career with the eight music videos that made Al a household name and the preeminent jester of MTV’s mid-1980s golden age: “Ricky,” “I Love Rocky Road,” “Eat It,” “I Lost on Jeopardy,” “This Is the Life,” “Like a Surgeon,” “One More Minute” and “Dare to Be Stupid.”
Al’s career is remarkable for its quality and consistency, but there’s something special about this particular batch of songs. Al’s twenties began with the Capitol release of the “My Bologna” single and ended with “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota” and UHF in both film and soundtrack form. He was still in his twenties when he created the seven albums (six solo and his collaboration with Wendy Carlos) upon which his legacy rests.
The Compleat Al followed the release of 1984’s In 3-D and 1985’s Dare to Be Stupid, which had been out less than two months when the early mockumentary debuted on Showtime on August 7th, 1985, and September 25th, 1985 on VHS and Beta.
Al’s faux-rockumentary begins with the requisite copyright notice informing viewers that copying any portion of the cassette “may result in civil liability or criminal prosecution as provided by law.”
The disclaimer does not end there, however. After a full screen of blackness the bland legalese is replaced by an ominous warning: “But if you do insist on copying this program, please be aware that the patented “copy-stop” system developed by the National Association of Television Research Engineers will cause severe damage to your video-cassette recording device, accompanied by a bright blue-gray gas and strong acrid odor, which may in turn affect nearby house plants and cause discoloration of fine upholstery. In addition you may experience headaches, drowsiness, nausea, severe loss of memory, high blood pressure, nosebleeds, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Household pets may develop similar symptoms including extreme personality disorders and occasional spontaneous combustion.”
Part of the genius of this opening lies in its deadpan nature. Until the part about the discoloration of fine upholstery, it’s easy to imagine scared kids believing that the geniuses who made videocassettes were genuinely capable of that technology, that they could punish you for breaking the rules.
The standard copyright notice was designed to spook you into throwing blank videocassettes in the trash out of fear of legal repercussions. This delightfully excessive parody is designed to make you burn them ritualistically for the sake of your everlasting soul.
Ah, but The Compleat Al is still not done yet. After yet another black screen the threats escalate until the videocassette is taunting, “We’re not kidding about this. Unlawful duplication of this program may result in local civil unrest, meteorological disturbances, and volcanic eruptions, causing the earth to fall out of its planetary orbit and plunge directly into the sun. The producers of this program assume no liability for any of the consequences resulting from your stupid, unthinking, greedy and careless attempt to deprive them of income. Thank you.”
A straight line can be drawn from the tough talk of The Compleat Al’s opening copyright notice parody and “Don’t Download This Song.” The technology might be different, but the satirical target remains the same: the hypocrisy of an industry of scoundrels shaking a finger in hypocritical judgment at music fans for not wanting to go bankrupt buying the music they enjoy. Al has always been keenly attuned to the absurdity of the record industry waxing moralistic over consumers theoretically stealing pennies from favorite artists by downloading or making copies of songs when labels stay in business by fleecing pop stars (including Al) for untold millions.
Al and his collaborators are doodling happily and inventively in the margins, Mad magazine style, injecting jokes into unexpected places in their mad rush to make the most of the opportunity they’d been afforded.
Al had already illustrated his mastery of the sight gag via his groundbreaking music videos and his popular AL-TV segments on MTV, when Al took over the airwaves of cable television’s hippest station for legendary programming that was low on cost but long on inspiration.
The Compleat Al marked a natural progression from AL-TV in part because it includes copious clips from Al’s periodic MTV invasions that document for posterity the inherently ephemeral phenomenon that was AL-TV.
The challenge for Al was to take a smorgasbord of previously existing footage in music videos, AL-TV segments and clips of Al’s trip to Tokyo, and a modest two hundred and fifty thousand dollar budget and create a 100-minute long (60 minute in broadcast form) video with a story kids would want to watch until the tape started to break down.
Al and his collaborators, who include manager Jay Levey as co-writer and co-director and Blues Brothers and The Naked Gun producer Robert K. Weiss as co-writer and co-director, opted for a fake documentary format that blurred fact and fiction in a wildly fictionalized take on Al’s rise that filtered his genuine history as a Dr. Demento-loving accordion geek through the prism of rock star mythology.
In this alternate universe Al lives in “Yank Land,” a palatial estate previously owned by Charlie Chaplin and Ricardo Montalban, and inspires Beatlemania level hysteria everywhere he goes. This fame monster Al has traded in modest Vans sneakers and Hawaiian shirts for the flashy rock star regalia of sequined Vans sneakers and bedazzled Hawaiian shirts.
The Compleat Al offers a funhouse mirror take on Al’s ascent to household name fame where Al’s parents play themselves, as does Al’s band and Dr. Demento, but instead of Jay Levey as manager, we are presented with Kevin Seymour’s Barry Cohen, a loving parody of Al’s star-maker as an inveterate schmoozer perpetually looking for an angle.
Barry is the kind of show-business phony SCTV loved lampooning. As with SCTV, there’s an unmistakable affection for this music world perennial. Barry Cohen is a Danny Rose-like figure, an amiable schlemiel who helps get Al a record deal when his gimmick of including a single from Al as a bonus when selling monogrammed golf balls attracts the attention of Ronzoni Records, the mockumentary’s satirical take on Scotti Brothers, the scrappy label that released Al’s first albums.
The gentlemen at Ronzoni Records can’t quite keep Al’s name straight, referring to him alternately as “Crazy Al,” “Big Al” and “Wild Al,” but they see “interesting possibilities” in him all the same.
Al needs the right look and the right song to parody. That song would prove to be “Beat It,” but before our fictionalized Al can make history he must first journey to the sinister lair of the King of Pop. In The Compleat Al, Jackson is the outsized legend of the public imagination, but he’s also the shape-shifting werewolf of the “Thriller” video. In this upside-down Al world, Jackson doesn’t just like scary movies: he’s in one as well.
Al travels to Jackson’s gothic estate on a dark and stormy night, and he is greeted by a butler carrying a snake. Al follows the serpent-bearing servitor into a giant room lit by a spooky candelabra, where the master of the house sits silent, serene and imposing in his signature glitter military garb.
Before his endless fall, Michael Jackson was seen as superhuman. He wasn’t just a spectacularly talented human being: He was a god. In its own goofball way, The Compleat Al captures this sense of wonder and awe.
In Al’s simultaneously reverent and irreverent exercise in myth-making, a man legendary for singing and dancing neither sings, nor dances, nor speaks. He barely moves. He’s so still that he seems almost like a Madame Tussaud’s wax statue of Michael Jackson. He’s a king on a throne, but also a shape-shifting figure of darkness who can only keep his true, horrific form hidden for so long.
The Compleat Al follows Al on a triumphant, perplexing promotional tour of Japan, which is depicted as both a sophisticated realm of tradition and a kooky pop wonderland replete with teenagers dancing in the streets to Little Richard.
The Tokyo segment contains footage of Al’s surreal experience performing “Eat It” on what he was told was Japan’s Saturday Night Live. Looking game but mystified, Al performs in front of a glittering gold disco nightmare/fever dream of dancers gyrating in sumo attire while the Japanese John Belushi stand-in—in Michael Jackson garb—drinks copiously while glaring ominously at Al before experiencing an ostensibly comic seizure-like convulsion.
The Compleat Al is fascinating for the glimpse it provides into its star’s career up until that particular auspicious moment, but it may be even compelling for the look it gives us into his future.
So much of the weird and wild pop ephemera that would fill Al’s subsequent songs, television shows and movie can be found in embryonic form in The Compleat Al, whether in the form of nasal decongestant factories, Spider-Man comics, aluminum foil, weasels, hot dogs, amoebas, Harvey the Wonder Hamster, Dick Clark, Twinkies and fast/disgusting food of all kinds, TV and 27 upon 27 upon 27.
At this point, Al had only been releasing albums for two years, but the world he’d created through his songs, albums, music videos and MTV appearances was already rich enough to support a dense tapestry of in-jokes and allusions, pop culture references and parody.
Al had just entered his magical twenties when an ambitious cable channel focusing on the exciting new medium of music videos launched on August 1st, 1981. MTV’s life began when Al was twenty-one years old. Al and MTV enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Al’s ubiquity on MTV made it appear that the channel had a sense of humor about itself. In exchange Al received priceless exposure as evidenced by the generous sampling of AL-TV found in The Compleat Al.
Al’s AL-TV takeovers gave him an opportunity to puncture the pomposity of rock superstars from within the white-hot epicenter of the pop music world. Some of these digs are deliciously silly, like when Al teases the concert pairing of ABBA and Elvis Costello, ABBA & Costello, as it were, before quipping, “There’s still a little problem with the billing, however. They haven’t decided who’s on first.”
Al delivers the punchline with an expression that combines pride with embarrassment. It’s as if he doesn’t quite know whether to be deeply ashamed or sheepishly proud.
Al’s career followed a natural progression. AL-TV paved the way for The Compleat Al, which served as a dry run for both UHF and The Weird Al Show, introducing conceits and ideas he would refine over time and re-introduce in his music, his film, his television shows or all of the above, where they feel at once cozily familiar and new.
One of the ways The Compleat Al anticipates Al’s later work lies in the star’s willingness to cede the spotlight to supporting players, so that they can get big laughs with Al either playing the straight man or the comic foil. Indeed, in the case of one of The Compleat Al’s most inspired bits, Al absents himself from the picture altogether.
The single funniest moment in The Compleat Al might just belong, not to Al, but rather to a music industry legend and current manager of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Harvey Leeds.
In a remarkable AL-TV segment that stands as a bold, early master-class in sublime anti-comedy, host Al is excited to premiere “State of Shock,” the new collaboration between Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger. Then he gets a letter from Epic Records explaining that they could not get Jagger or Jackson to do a video for the song, “but we wanted a video real bad so we just did the best we could” signed “Yours Truly, Harvey Leeds, Epic Records.”
We learn the depths of Epic’s desperation when we then journey into Leeds’ office, where he sits looking disheveled in a dress shirt and tie and, in a display of glorious audacity, begins performing “State of Shock” a capella, accompanying himself occasionally on air guitar and air drumming.
An executive with no business singing outside his shower is inexplicably handling the guitar as well as the Jagger and Jackson parts. A once in a lifetime collaboration between rock gods is being limply but hilariously realized by nobody’s idea of a performer.
After heroically white-knuckling it through the first verse, Leeds puts on a drum machine for accompaniment. The perversely unflappable Leeds keeps augmenting his performance with gloriously home-made, child-like attempts at theatricality, like a toy space gun, a tiny disco ball, a mask, a smoke machine, and a red filter.
Through sheer force of will, this strange man manages to fill in for two of the greatest rock stars ever in an oddly mesmerizing triumph of chutzpah.
The Compleat Al starts largely from a place of reality as it recounts Al’s early days in Lynwood, apprenticeship under Dr. Demento, and MTV-fueled early stardom. The story takes a sharp turn to the surreal when its bizarro world Al hooks up with shadowy spiritual advisor Baba Fred Denandananda (“a suburban guru who extolled the virtues of existentialism and low-interest second mortgage payments”) and goes on a musical and spiritual journey of self-discovery a la Brian Wilson or the Beatles.
In The Compleat Al rock is about selling stuff first and self-expression a distant second. That includes Al himself, who is merchandised and monetized through sold-out shows and albums, as well as merchandising. Al’s face gets put on lots of stuff here and it’d be on even more if he didn’t reject ideas that make his manager grin like an idiot, like frisbees, punching bags, Al look-a-like kits and finally, for young lovers, edible panties reading “Weird Al Says Eat It” that could easily represent the single filthiest joke in Al’s work.
The “Dare to Be Stupid” video gets an origin story that posits it as the fruit of Al’s most zonked-out genius instincts and ideas. That’s fitting, since the enduring appeal of “Dare to Be Stupid” is that it is dada art that five-year-olds can understand and appreciate. “Dare To Be Stupid” represents a madcap marriage between Marcel Duchamp and Chef Boyardee.
The Compleat Al concludes with Al facing the camera and, his voice quaking with fake earnestness, thanking his devoted fans, because without them he would be nothing. This triggers a whiplash turn towards self-hatred, as Al specifies that without his fans he would be less than nothing, namely a “worthless hunk of slime” as well as a, “horrible, smelly, weasel-faced shell of a man just crawling around in the gutter and eating leftover macaroni and cheese out of the garbage can,” not to mention a “fat, hairy, disgusting slob with green teeth talking to fire hydrants and drooling on myself.”
By the time Al is comparing himself to a kangaroo, an amoeba and a paramecium, The Compleat Al has lost interest in him in favor of directing the camera skyward, to wax philosophical about “Weird Al, the man, the myth, the legend.” The narrator finishes by asking big questions: “Where will he go from here? What new worlds will he conquer? Who does he think he is? Will he continue to capture the hearts of millions or will he fade into oblivion like some insignificant pest?”
The narrator’s final line subverts the pretension by conceding, “How should I know?” This winking verbal shrug is a welcome reminder that the eye of god narrator in rockumentaries is not actually God, but rather a guy with a nice voice reading into a microphone for money.
Al’s journey is far from over, but we nevertheless have deeply satisfying answers to the questions that end The Compleat Al, a fond look back at the career of a man who had been releasing albums for a little over two years at that point, all the way back to April 26th, 1983.
These days there’s nothing ironic about calling Al a man, a myth, and a legend. Al most assuredly did not fade into oblivion like some insignificant pest or lousy paramecium in the years following The Compleat Al.
There would be the occasional flop or disappointment, of course, but in a field full of one hit wonders and quickly forgotten novelty acts, Al went the distance. Al would go on to conquer the worlds of film and television. He would do so without compromising his integrity, his ideals, or his high standards.
The seeds planted in The Compleat Al and his first three albums would blossom in time into a career as extraordinary as it is unique. After all, there are plenty of legends, a goodly assortment of myths and an awful lot of men, but there’s only “Weird Al” Yankovic.
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