When I was younger and music was a going concern, my friends and co-workers often talked about shows they went to like comparing battle scars: every weekend it was Hollerado at Sneaky Dee’s, or Atreyu at the Phoenix or Sublime with Rome at HippieStonerFest. By comparison, I was a draft dodger. I didn’t get out much. Oh, I did get to shows when they mattered — if my friend who was a really good singer-songwriter had an open mic anywhere I could get to, or if someone’s cousin’s band was playing a dive across town, or if someone I knew was putting together a benefit with a modicum of star power, I’d find a way. But it wasn’t important to me to see my favourite bands live. Music, to me, was mostly something I experienced privately with a set of headphones. A lot of the big shows I went to were just sloppier versions of the record in some cramped, overpriced venue I had a hard time getting to from my base in the suburbs, playing havoc on my baseline anxiety. Maybe on some level I’m just telling myself I preferred not to go out because I didn’t have many opportunities, but if you walked into my place of work and gave me an arm’s length of free tickets to Paramore that night at the ACC — which literally happened one time — I would rather give them away to grateful customers than make plans to get on a train and see what was probably a pretty great show.
I was lucky enough, as I approached my thirties, to find someone to settle down with in the most literal sense. My wife Mel and I live a quiet, nondescript life. On an average night, we make dinner, chill, and watch whatever it is we’re currently making our way through on streaming. A few times a year we’ll get out to see a stage show, the movies, or find ourselves in a bar with live music, but it wasn’t something we were spending a lot of money on annually even before we got a dog and it became a question of “how long can we leave him at home alone.” We had a few years where we lived in the city and took as much advantage as we could, then COVID hit, and we migrated and became quintessential suburbanites.
All this to say, we don’t get out a lot, and it’s never particularly been one of my values, and you can draw whatever conclusions you like about what sort of person that makes me.
Anyway. We were having a talk, a few months ago, about one of our mutual favourite artists — “Weird Al” Yankovic — and I remembered I’d heard he was going on tour, and wouldn’t it be great to see him live? Flash forward to the summer and we’re gearing up in our loudest Hawaiian shirts and ready to head out.
In a 1997 episode of King of the Hill, Hank tells his son Bobby that “Al Yankovich” committed suicide in the late 80’s due to his falling popularity.
The clip plays as one of many references and appearances by Al in various media throughout the concert to give the performers a chance to change costume for the next set piece. As it turns out, Hank was a little bit mistaken. Al is not only not dead but somehow more alive than ever. While it must have seemed impossible years ago that people would be filling huge amphitheaters to hear an accordion player change the words so that songs are about food after all this time, we’re long past the point of being amazed that Al has outlasted many of the artists he’s spoofed (an alarming number of whom have themselves passed on, from Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain to Greg Kihn and Coolio.)
In the 80’s, Al was a novelty fad whose time was surely going to end before too long. In the 90’s, he was more like a phase kids went through between Raffi and TRL, that everyone was expected to age out of. But in the time since, he’s grown from curiosity to cult figure to legend through sheer longevity and talent. Having not even released an album in more than a decade, Al is no longer a figure whose fortunes depend entirely on a lucky strike of zeitgeist like “Eat It” or “Smells Like Nirvana,” but an institution unto himself. He’s someone with a meaningful body of work and whose presence provokes fond, fond feelings across multiple generations.
Comedy is hard. Being a comedy musician for 45 years seems impossible. Jokes, by their very nature, stop being funny after a few repetitions. Chris Rock once lamented that Bono can go out there and sing “Where The Streets Have No Name” for the rest of his life, but he needs to work up new material every time he goes out on tour. Why do we still want to hear Al sing “Bologna” instead of “Sharona” after a veritable lifetime of doing it?
Okay, but comedy is an art and a craft. Do it okay and people will chuckle once. Do it well and people will howl for a bit. Do it at Al’s level and people will keep coming back for the rest of their lives to admire how you did that. It’s the same energy that keeps people coming back to old episodes of The Simpsons and Monty Python and “Who’s On First.” Maybe I’m not laughing at “all these marbles in my mouth” or the randomness of “Everything You Know Is Wrong” or the nimble knowitallism of “Word Crimes” the way I did when I first heard them, but when a well-executed joke clicks into place, let alone an entire song of them, it’s like a perfect piece of architecture you can’t help but stand in awe of.
When you’ve mastered the language of comedy, you can write a song like “Skipper Dan” — which is funny, but maybe not not ha-ha funny, but keenly observed with more to say about life than your average folk song, and more to the point frankly disturbing and depressing to certain segments of the audience who may be undergoing dramatic existential crises about not being sure what they’re doing with their lives and living up to their potential. Hypothetically speaking, mind you!
There are laughs during the show of course — Al and crew do their bit to toy with the audience and mess with expectations — but more than being funny, it’s fun. Wisely, a lot of the show is given over to medleys: a half of this song, a verse of that one, so that some of the more dated material doesn’t overstay its welcome. You don’t have to hear the entire thing of “Bedrock Anthem” or “Party in the CIA” do you?
More importantly, the show is a few hours of crisp professionalism. Al introduces a few songs with canned patter that you know gets ported night after night, but feels sufficiently off-the-cuff to please tonight’s crowd. I mentioned earlier how much I felt that concerts usually provided lesser versions of songs I loved on record, often under less-than-ideal sound quality conditions. I think Al would be dead in the water if this happened. Moreso than at a rock show, where perfection would probably detract from the spirit of the performance, every note, every line, has to be crystal clear, or else it’s not funny or entertaining. You can’t take time to mess with the monitors while you’re tooling around on a Segway trying to rap “White & Nerdy.” If you had to start “Dare to Be Stupid” over from the top partway through, the whole show would feel out-of-whack. Luckily, the whole thing is a well-oiled machine, and Al’s voice and delivery is just about as good as it’s ever been on the record, and the band provides note-perfect renditions with everything from keyboards and guitars to clarinets and tubas, as needed.
With 14 studio albums, all of which feature somebody’s random favourite song, Al may not play every big tune you want to hear, but what’s in is entirely crowd-pleasers.
There’s a power animating this fandom that goes beyond garden-variety nostalgia for a childhood favourite.
Looking around the audience, there’s a sense of community. A few thousand people have come together for one night to wear Hawaiian shirts, forget their troubles, and revel in a shared experience. What amazed me was the number of families with kids who were exited to be there. There was probably once something odd about being an adult fan of Weird Al, but now it seems more unusual to be a young fan of his. Al’s career is older than I am, and I’m not young, but there was a sizeable number of people at that concert who were very young, perhaps even not-yet-alive, when his last album, 2014’s Mandatory Fun, was released, parodying Pharrell’s “Happy,” Lorde’s “Royals” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.”
Even if the material he’s parodied is no longer up-to-date, Al is a foundational artist for young people to get into. Even just by cherry-picking the hits, you get introduced to a plethora of mostly-timeless songs of all different styles from over the course of four decades of music history, from pop to metal to hip hop to whatever “Albuquerque” was (which, no, he didn’t perform, but I understand.) And while I haven’t done any scientific studies yet, I am fairly certain that listening and trying to understand what every joke laced into those parodies means is guaranteed to boost brain power and turn those kids into the free-thinking, mold-breaking, paradigm-shifting leaders of tomorrow, who will hopefully steer this society out of its current all-consuming tailspin toward annihilation and usher in a new era of harmony and understanding. No pressure though.
I can confidently say that a “Weird Al” show is worth the price of admission, which in our case was not just the ticket but the effort expended to get out of our suburban hiding place and get there. This begins with navigating Ticketmaster’s bizarre sales process where the little doll from the SAW movies emailing you to tell you he has a ticket for you but only if you can solve a puzzle that unlocks a beartrap he’s placed around your pancreas.
The venue was Toronto’s Budweiser Stage, which is both easy to get to (take the train to Exhibition Station) and also kind of a hassle (it’s a bit of a hike from there.) Compounding this schlep to the outdoor venue was the fact that the forecast called for rain literally at showtime. Then there are the usual homebody anxieties like “Will there be food? Do we need to get dinner before we get on the train at like 4:00?” (We did.)
There are also the usual shenanigans that go along with doing any major outing: belligerent drunk guys getting kicked out on your way in (luv 2 get wasted and scream at cops at the Weird Al show), having to put our bags in a locker (which required figuring out the weird QR-code based electronic lock, thanks the future) because we felt the need to bring our whole lives on a 55-minute train ride, and sitting way at the back of the bleachers, with a somewhat obscured, somewhat angular view of the big screens, behind a family that may not have been giants per se, but might as well be from how little the seats were staggered in height, and who also spent a lot of the concert with their phones out and held high making recordings they might never look at again. Being in the back row, at least we were able to stand up as needed without blocking anyone.
I can confidently recommend going to a “Weird Al” show if you have a chance, just not in section 402 Row O of the Budweiser Stage in Toronto.
By the end of the night, we were admittedly fatigued. At a few points we turned out attention to the pet cam on my phone to make sure our boy was resting comfortably. The rain had resulted in only a few sprinkles thankfully, but Mel was starting to feel a bit unwell. Being Star Wars agnostic she might have appreciated if I had given her the nod that we could skip the encore presentation of “The Saga Begins” and “Yoda,” but she stuck it out anyway. A long cattle call back to the train and we were on our way home, getting in the door sometime around 1 — on a weekday night, no less.
At our age, there are a lot of reasons not to get out and do something fun — home entertainment is cheap and plentiful — but sometimes you’ve got to shrug off the same-old-same-old and get weird.
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Scotto Williams - Better Late Than Never Blog 
So weird. In a wonderful kind of way.
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