“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC
“POLKAS ON 45”

VARIOUS ARTISTS COVER

SONG

“POLKAS ON 45” (1984)

WRITTEN BY

VARIOUS

FIRST RECORDED BY

VARIOUS

“Weird Al” Yankovic and the reason he says he was “the life of any party.”

No name is more associated with parody songs than “Weird Al” Yankovic. Since he first turned a Queen hit into an ode to mass-transit hassles on “Another One Rides the Bus” back in 1981, Weird Al has elevated the parody song to an art form. Kurt Cobain famously said he wasn’t sure he’d made it until Al parodied Nirvana. His parodies are sometimes as successful as the hit songs he’s satirizing. Al’s most recent album, in a career now in its fourth decade, became his first #1 album.

One could view a parody song as the cover song’s opposite. In a parody, you keep the music but change the words. In a cover, it’s the reverse.

If a parody is the opposite of a cover, then why are we talking about Weird Al in a cover-songs book? Because Weird Al does do some covers, and they pioneered one of the biggest cover-song trends in the age of YouTube: the novelty cross-genre cover.

Weird Al still isn’t sure why his parents first bought him an accordion. “I can only conjecture, but I guess they thought that if you played the accordion, you’re a one-man band, the life of any party,” he says, laughing (many of his sentences end with a laugh). “They were just looking out for my social life.”

As part of his early accordion lessons, Al listened to a lot of polka music. People often assumed he was related to accordionist Frankie Yankovic, who in the 1940s earned the nickname “America’s Polka King” (he’s not, though the two Yankovics did collaborate on a special polka for the 1986 Grammy Awards). Even when Al wasn’t trying to play polka music, whatever he was trying to play still sounded like polka. “Everything I play on the accordion—anything from rock to reggae—winds up sounding sort of like a polka to many people,” he jokes. “I learned early on that there was humor to be gleaned from the juxtaposition of rock and roll and polka music.”

He first explored that juxtaposition in college in the late 1970s, as an architecture student performing at California Polytechnic’s campus coffee shop. “Mostly it was guys coming in with their acoustic guitar playing Dan Fogelberg covers, very mellow and laid-back,” he remembers. “I used to go up with my accordion and my friend Joel who played the bongos, and we’d do what we called ‘A Medley of Every Song Ever Written in the History of the World.’ It was just random songs—everything from the theme to [soundtrack album 2001: A Space Odyssey] to ‘Hava Nagila.’ The more random, the better. We went for ten minutes stringing these little snippets of songs together, and the crowd went nuts. That’s when I first thought ‘People like this.’”

Unlike the parodies Al later became famous for, these polka-fied medleys of popular songs were honest-to-goodness covers. He sang the words straight, not adding any of his own lyrical jokes. The humor came in the music, recontextualizing well-known songs into ridiculous accordion-and-bongo arrangements. “You’re hearing something that’s familiar in a very different way, which is also part of the reason parodies are funny,” he says. “As has been said many times, a lot of comedy is the element of surprise. It’s taking you down a road and then making a sharp left turn. The polka medleys are similar, I think. It’s something that’s familiar, but it’s tweaked a little bit. It’s not how you’re used to hearing it.”

He was particularly inspired by comedy music predecessors, like 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 says. “But it’s comedy, so my medleys owe as much to Spike Jones as they do to traditional polka music.”

As he continued his open-mic performances, Al began recording early song parodies on his tape player and gained some local notoriety on Dr. Demento’s comedy-music radio show. Even once Al got a real band and regional fame in southern California (among a small group of comedy nerds), he kept the polka covers in his setlists. Soon, bongo-playing Joel was no more, replaced by Al’s longtime drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz.

“We weren’t playing for a thousand people or anything like that,” Schwartz remembers, “but 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.”

Spike Jones’s penchant for the unusual piqued the interest of gag-rockers like “Weird Al” Yankovic.

In those early days, Al would throw random songs into his polka medleys, “local-interest kind of stuff, things that maybe people outside of L.A. wouldn’t know,” as Schwartz puts it. One early polka medley included tracks by Bad Brains, Suburban Lawns, and the Normal—not exactly “mass appeal” choices (also a Plasmatics song called “Sex Junkie,” a rare bit of early vulgarity before Al committed to an all-ages career).

Dr. Demento, the novelty radio DJ who helped popularize Yankovic’s early work.

The polka medleys remained a concert-only gag, though. When Al recorded his debut album in 1982, it blended original comedy songs with parodies of current artists like Joan Jett (“I Love Rocky Road” for “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll”) and the Knack (“My Bologna” for “My Sharona”). There were no polkas to be seen—though, as he points out today, the accordion was so prominent that every song sounded kind of like a polka.

The polka covers transitioned from a live novelty to one of the most enduring components of his career when Al realized one thing: the medleys were funnier if you knew the original songs. The local-interest choices had to go. From now on, he would only polka-fy huge hits.

Al first recorded one of his polka cover medleys on his second album, 1984’s In 3-D. Gone were the obscure oddities from the live shows, the Plasmatics and Bad Brains, replaced by Clash and Talking Heads hits. “I rejiggered it to make it more mainstream and classic rock, to make it more palatable to the average music listener,” he says.

The resulting song “Polkas on 45” kicks off with Devo’s “Jocko Homo” and rockets from there into Deep Purple, Berlin, and the Beatles. In the polka context, these disparate bands blend together into a zany accordion-fueled sprint. The more somber the original, the funnier to hear it goofed up (a chipper “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” is particularly inspired).

“I like to think that my parodies are funny even if you’re not familiar with the original song material,” he says. “But I think in a polka medley, the humor is a bit more reliant on being familiar with the songs. It doesn’t hold as much punch if you’re not familiar with the angsty or hard-rocking original.”

Angsty or hard-rocking is right; Al tries to pick hits that sound as far away as possible from the jaunty polka beat. The more mopey or edgy the original song, the better. “Comedically, I like something that just seems wrong done polka-style,” he says. “If it’s a song that’s already upbeat and happy and bouncy, it’s not nearly as funny. It’s funnier to do Nine Inch Nails as a polka.”

Since that first album, he’s recorded a polka cover medley on nearly every album, polka-fying the era’s biggest hits in every one. If the early coffee-shop polkas were “A Medley of Every Song Ever Written in the History of the World,” these became more like “A Medley of Every Song Ever Written in the Past Twelve Months.”

The song choices often end up being hits he tried—and failed—to parody. On 2014’s Mandatory Fun, Daft Punk’s massive hit “Get Lucky” would have been one of the most obvious songs to parody. But all Al’s attempts failed, simply because the song has so few words. (“You need enough syllables to be able to actually make jokes,” he says.) So it ended up in the polka medley. As did Miley Cyrus, One Direction, and Macklemore, and seven other recent pop hits.

Sure, “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D had the Michael Jackson spoof-hit “Eat It,” but the underrated classic “Theme from Rocky XIII” should not be ignored.

Yankovic shows off his Michael Jackson jacket at an awards show, circa 1984 (sadly, no glove).

“A lot of those songs would be great as parodies if I could think up a clever enough idea,” he says. “But try as hard as I might, I couldn’t come up with an idea I was happy with. So I thought, okay, well, it will work in the polka medley, at least.”

Combining a dozen of the day’s biggest hits into a four-minute polka has, he admits, “gotten a little formulaic” by now. But the formula works for a reason, and his past attempts to change things have met with mixed results. In 1989, for the soundtrack of his movie UHF, Al did a Rolling Stones–only polka medley. And in 1994, after Wayne’s World made Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” a hit again, he recorded a full-length polka of the entire song. But then on the next album, he went right back to the hodgepodge-of-hits approach he’d started with “Polkas on 45.”

“As much as I like going with the tried-and-true, after a while you want to see if something else is going to work,” he says. “Both those polkas were sort of experiments. And both worked okay. But in general, I found that people tended to like the full-on random medleys better. Like, the Stones thing was a nice tribute, but there wasn’t as much of a surprise going from song to song. It was like ‘Oh, and here’s another Stones song.’ And I think a big part of the humor in the medleys is the random, jarring juxtaposition of one song to the next, done polka-style. I thought ‘Well, I tried that, now let’s go back to what works.’”

Since Weird Al’s now done a dozen polkas using more or less the same formula as the original “Polkas on 45,” recording them these days should be easy. It isn’t. Al is a perfectionist in the studio, taking these silly songs very, very seriously. As Schwartz says, “He’s extremely . . . I won’t say anal, but I will say meticulous.”

For example, Al always wants his song parodies to perfectly mimic the original music. The easy way to achieve this would be to just sing his new lyrics over the original backing track. But he doesn’t; the band members have to deconstruct how each instrument on the song was played and recorded and then re-create it exactly. And this same studio perfectionism comes out on the polka covers. He could just sing over a basic polka beat—he could even use the same one for every polka—but he doesn’t.

In the thirty-plus years since “Polkas on 45,” his polka recording process hasn’t changed much. Al combines all the song snippets together and records a demo at home, then brings it into the studio with his band—the same band that’s been with him since the very first polka. They record the main band (drums, bass, banjo—as always, from scratch), the accordion, and Al’s vocals. But where most people would call that polka done, for Al that’s where the real work begins.

Schwartz says a good example of Al’s meticulousness comes when it is time to record the horns. Horns propel much traditional polka music, but it’s a safe bet that few Weird Al listeners pay a whole lot of attention to the horn section on a comedy song. The live circus tuba used when he sings the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” (accompanied by theatrical gasping for air) is a nice touch, but inessential to the joke. Al doesn’t care.

“Where a lot of guys would just do the horn parts on a synth and nobody would know the difference, Al knows the difference,” Schwartz says. “We bring in the same live horn section almost every time: tuba, trumpet, clarinet, maybe trombone. It’s important to him to have those things sound live, just the little inflections that make a live tuba sound different than a synth tuba are important to him.”

The silly sound effects and funny noises that make the polka covers more The Simpsons than the symphony are also done live. “The quacks, the wacky horns, the fart cushion—they’re live every time,” Schwartz says. “I keep telling him, I’ve got samples from the last one, we could just assemble them. He’ll say, ‘No, I want to do them live.’ We’ve done like five or six takes on a toy siren whistle until he gets it exactly right. You wouldn’t believe it, to see him standing there conducting this thing. It has to be exactly the right ‘quack’ on the duck call—and if it’s not exactly right, you’re going to do it again.”

When pressed, Al explains why he puts so much effort into the polkas’ goofy sound effects—again, it’s not clear anyone would notice if he just played computer files:

Honestly, it’s just more fun that way. One of my favorite parts of recording in the studio is being with my whole band, sitting in a circle around a microphone and doing claps. We certainly have so many clapping samples at this point that we could just use those, but that’s not fun! For example, on [nonpolka original song] “Weasel Stomping Day,” we went through a lot of iterations of trying to come up with sound effects for weasels being stomped and crushed and bones breaking and weasels squealing. We literally had a microphone over a trash bucket, and we would try every single fruit—biting into an apple, crunching celery—until the waste barrel filled up with food items and various other things we broke and mangled and bit into to try to get the proper sounds. I like doing it the organic, hands-on way. It’s just one of the simple pleasures in life.

Once recorded, there is one more hurdle to clear before a polka cover’s release, and it shows another way in which a parody and a cover song differ: legality. Artists don’t need anyone’s permission to cover a song, but they do need to buy a mechanical license. With a parody, though, one needs neither permission nor any sort of license. A parody is considered satire and falls under a totally different law. Yankovic does get permission from the artists he parodies, but only because he wants to, not because he has to (most of his parody peers don’t bother).

When he is recording the polka covers, though, he, like anyone else, needs to get a license. In fact, he needs a bunch of licenses: one for each song he’s covering. “Polkas on 45” contained thirteen songs, so he needed thirteen licenses: from the Beatles, the Police, Devo, etc. Which brings up a particular quirk of cover-song copyright law.

When you cover a song, you need to pay a set royalty rate—but the same rate applies even if you only cover part of that song. In Yankovic’s polka medleys, he is sometimes covering only five or ten seconds of a song, but the law doesn’t make that distinction. A cover is a cover, and the royalty rate does not change no matter how little of the song he uses.

Which presented him and his label with a problem. Thirteen licenses is a lot to buy. Especially in the early days, the license fees would add up to more than his budget for the entire album. So he and his longtime manager Jay Levey worked out a system that they still use to this day. When Yankovic finishes recording a polka medley, they figure out exactly what percentage each song takes up, and negotiate with that song’s publisher to pay that percentage of the regular royalty.

For instance, on that first polka, The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” takes up roughly 7 percent of the song. But the five seconds he sings of Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” takes up only 2 percent. The Clash’s publisher would have to agree to take 7 percent of their usual fee, and Talking Heads’ publisher 2 percent. Instead of paying thirteen royalties, Al would pay one royalty, split thirteen ways.

“It’s daunting from a legal standpoint,” Yankovic says. “My manager has to go to every one of those publishers that owns the song rights and get their permission to use it in a medley. If we had to pay full royalties on every single song, I would lose money and the record company would lose money. For every polka medley, my manager has a thick file of paperwork to deal with regarding just the legalities.”

With this system, though, he loses one of the main protections copyright law offers cover songs. If you’re asking for something other than the standard mechanical license—like a discount—the publisher can say no. And occasionally they do. Yankovic once tried an all-U2 covers medley that died when the publisher wouldn’t agree to his royalty system. Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” had to be struck from a medley when the publisher demanded the full rate (they relented a decade later, letting Al polka the band’s “Beverly Hills”).

“At this point, thankfully, I’ve got a track record so we get very few turn-downs from publishers,” Yankovic says. “The artists themselves generally have a good sense of humor about it. A lot of times if a publisher is giving us a hard time—and sometimes they do because they’d only make a fraction of what they’d normally make and don’t think it’s worth their time—I have to go to their artist and say, ‘Hey, your publisher’s not playing nice with us. Can you please get on that?’ Some of these artists have grown up on my music at this point, which is of course very flattering, but it’s also helpful when I’m trying to get permission for things.”

Not all artists are flattered, though. Mick Jagger had loved Devo’s cover, but his bandmate proved less enthusiastic towards Al’s. “In the late ’80s, I had just done the Rolling Stones polka medley,” Al says. “I was in New York in an elevator, and I realized the only other person in the elevator was Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer. I just started saying, ‘Oh, Charlie Watts, hey! I just did a Rolling Stones polka medley and blah blah blah.’ I was just rambling on, and I kind of got the feeling he had no idea who I was. I think he probably pushed a button to get off on a different floor than he wanted to ’cause he just wanted to get away from me so quickly.”

Weird Al’s latest album, Mandatory Fun, was the biggest hit of his thirty-plus-year career—his first-ever #1 album. It was also the last album on his longtime contract with RCA Records. During interviews, he repeatedly claimed it might be his last album, period.

He’s long complained that the traditional album cycle is ill-suited for parody songs; due to needing to produce a dozen tracks and then deal with labels and press CDs and records, the parodies risk coming out after people have forgotten the originals. He may switch to just releasing singles in the future, putting out a new parody song as soon as he’s done with it.

But without an album—and without a record company’s budget to license all these cover songs—is there a future for the polka medleys? Al doesn’t know.

“That’s a very good question. It is a lot of work, particularly for my manager, but I know that fans like them a lot. One option is maybe I won’t record them anymore, maybe it will just be something I do live in concert. Maybe when I go back on the road, maybe there will be a new polka medley that is just concert-only. Or maybe I will release a new polka as a single. Now that I’m in the free-form stage of my career and not beholden to releasing albums, I can do anything I want to. I guess I just don’t know what I want yet.”

He’s tried to retire the polka covers before, though, to no avail. For his fifth album Even Worse (with his hit Michael Jackson parody “Fat”), he didn’t bother doing a new medley. “I thought, well, I’ve done three polkas now, I think people have gotten the joke,” he says. “But there was a huge public outcry. Fans were running wild in the streets, crying and gnashing their teeth and throwing bombs and holding picket signs. I thought ‘I can’t be responsible for that public unrest!’” More seriously, he adds: “Fans made it pretty clear that, for a lot of them, the polka medleys are their favorite part of the albums. So I decided ‘well, I’m going to make this just a part of the album formula—half parodies, half originals, then we’ll throw in a polka medley.’”

He hasn’t released an album without a polka-covers medley since.

Even on the off chance that Weird Al never records another polka cover, they will live on in another way: their many imitators. Though Al is quick to admit that he did not invent the cross-genre novelty cover, he certainly popularized it, and many others have followed in his wake. He and Schwartz both cite Mark Jonathan Davis, who under the name “Richard Cheese” has been performing lounge-style covers of big pop hits for going on twenty years. Then there’s Hayseed Dixie, who have been performing bluegrass AC/DC cover songs nearly as long. And there are now hundreds of albums in the “The [Genre] Tribute to [Artist]” mold: The String Quartet Tribute to Nirvana, The Lullaby Tribute to Michael Jackson, etc.

In the YouTube era, genre mixup covers have become a cottage industry. Over the ten years since the Cover Me blog was started, cross-genre tributes have become a huge percentage of the songs we get emailed. A cappella covers are popular, as are ironically mellow covers of aggressive rap songs. Someone has even made their own polka medley—of all Weird Al’s own songs!

Yankovic celebrates his Best Comedy Album Grammy for Mandatory Fun, 2015.

Ever humble, Al refuses to take too much credit for his cross-genre-cover followers. “I’d like to think that—just from the sheer fact that I’ve been around as long as I have—I’ve been an inspiration to some people making their living in music and comedy,” he says. “I’m not going to claim total responsibility for all those other genre-crossing covers, but if people want to claim me as an inspiration I’d be very flattered.”

One unexpected person does claim Weird Al’s polka covers as an inspiration: Lin-Manuel Miranda. Miranda told the Washington Post in 2017 that he and fellow Weird Al superfan Jimmy Fallon once sang along to Al’s 1986 medley “Polka Party!” in Fallon’s basement and that they both knew every word. In 2016 he told Marc Maron that he might never have written the record-breaking Broadway rap-musical Hamilton without Weird Al as inspiration. When Maron asked him how he got first the idea to blend musical theater and hip-hop, Miranda responded:

I always loved music that told stories, so genre becomes fluid. A huge help in that was fucking Weird Al Yankovic. When you listen to Weird Al, you realize genre is just the clothes the artist puts on. Like, he’ll do a polka version of [the Rolling Stones], and you’re like, ‘It’s the same chord progressions, the same melody, it’s just played on an accordion.’ And suddenly, it’s a polka.