Dr. Demento gets his due on new album
64 tracks pull together the mad music and crazy comedy of the unsung punk rock legend
As the zany-but-brainy on-air alter ego of music historian Barret Hansen, veteran radio show host Dr. Demento has championed the career of “Weird Al” Yankovic, the wacky music of humorists Spike Jones, Allen Sherman, Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer, and obscure recordings that push the limits of propriety.
Less known is that he also was an early advocate of punk rock. No surprise, considering this is a man with a distinctive raspy and squeaky voice who continues to greet listeners as “Dementoids and Dementites.”
The punk connection takes centre stage with “Dr. Demento Covered in Punk,” an exceedingly ambitious and densely packed double album — triple in the vinyl edition — released Friday.
The album comprises 64 tracks spread over a pair of CDs, pulling together new recordings of “mad music and crazy comedy” songs long associated with the quirky radio MC. Participants include Yankovic, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, William Shatner, Adam West, the Vandals, Fred Schneider of the B-52’s, the Misfits, Japan’s Shonen Knife, Los Straitjackets, Missing Persons, the Dead Milkmen and at least a dozen more.
“I was always a fan of rock ’n’ roll, and some of the early punk music of the ‘60s with groups like the Music Machine,” Hansen, 76, said in the cosy living room of his home in Lakewood, where he also records his shows that now reach listeners through subscriptions by way of his official website.
“So when the new punk rock showed up around 1976 and 1977, I played a few samples on my show,” he said. Hansen graduated as a classical music major from Reed College in Portland, Ore., and also earned his master’s degree in folk music studies from UCLA.
“I got the Ramones’ first album and played several of those songs, including ‘Beat on the Brat,’ the song Weird Al did for this album,” said Hansen, who has been inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame, the Comedy Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. And the response from his listeners to first-wave punk rock?
“There was a little bit of ‘What the ... is that?’” he said. “But mostly people took it in stride. They were used to hearing me drop in odd things that might have been unexpected. In fact, I’m sure that was part of the appeal of the show for many people. My audience was quite young in those days — lots of high school kids. That’s how the show became popular: Monday morning conversations about songs I’d played the night before, some of which were scandalous ….”
As it turns out, many of those groups were already, or soon-to-be, fans of Demento’s twisted sense of humour.
“We are children of the Demento legacy,” said Joe Escalante, bassist of long-running Southland punk band the Vandals, which contributes its version of Lehrer’s sardonic “National Brotherhood Week.” “We are hugely grateful to him.”
The new recordings were made at the behest of John Cafiero, a musician and producer who has worked with the Misfits, the Ramones and fronts the pop-punk band Osaka Popstar.
For his band’s track, Cafiero chose to update the goofy “Pico and Sepulveda” song recorded in 1947 by Felix Figueroa and his Orchestra, and which Hansen adopted as his show’s theme song.
“I can’t say how old I was — probably 6 or 7 — when a friend of mine who lived downstairs, played me the original version of Benny Bell’s ‘Shaving Cream,’ which he had taped off Dr. Demento’s show. That was mind-blowing for me.
“His show was hard to follow for me because I was on the East Coast, and it was always changing stations,” he said. “I came to think of it as this elusive UFO that would appear and then disappear, but I was religiously following it as much as I could.”
Cafiero’s goal is “to introduce a new generation of listeners to Dr. Demento, those who maybe have never heard his show, so they can experience some of the same thrill and sense of discovery I got from it.
About four years ago he came up with the idea of creating a tribute album with new versions of many of the songs Demento played over the decades.
“From the beginning, I envisioned it as a full-length tribute album to Dr. Demento, structured like one of his radio shows,” Cafiero said. “I didn’t plan on it being a double album, but the more I got into it, the more I got into the groove.”
Among the coups Cafiero scored for “Dr. Demento Covered in Punk” are tracks from the stars of two of the biggest cult-classic TV series of the 1960s: “Star Trek’s” Shatner, who recorded the song “Garbageman” and “Batman’s” West, heard in one of his final performances before his death in June at 88. He sings “The Thing,” a vaguely suggestive song recorded in 1950 by Phil Harris.
The biggest success story out of Hansen’s nearly 50 years on the air — his first radio gig using the Dr. Demento persona came in 1970 at Pasadena-based underground station KPPC-FM (106.7) — was no doubt “Weird Al” Yankovic. His appearance here with “Beat on the Brat” is his first studio recording that’s not a parody or one of his original songs.