June 15, 2010

When I recently read that the cult radio deejay, Dr. Demento, would no longer be broadcasting his long-running novelty-bizarro music program to America’s junior high school misfits, I reacted almost exactly the same way I did when I heard Casey Kasem announced he’d soon be quitting “American Top 20”: I thought Dr. Demento was dead, and I didn’t realize they still made radios.

But Demento (actually Barret Hansen of Minneapolis, MN, and he seems far more corny than demented) has been hard at it, playing novelty tunes, comedy pieces, lewd jingles, song parodies, and plain old sick shit backed by music, since 1974, which, to give you some idea of what we’re dealing with here, would mean that the good Doctor had to hear Barnes & Barnes’ rhythm-n-Ritalin classic, “Fish Heads,” which contains these deathless lyrics...

Fish heads, fish heads
Roly-poly fish heads
Fish heads, fish heads
Eat them up
Yum

In the morning
Laughing-happy fish heads
In the morning
Floating in the soup

…almost 1,000 times before stepping away from the mic.

I haven’t listened to Dr. Demento since around 1978, and I had had it up to my neck with “Fish Heads” when I threw in the towel back then (I’d post an mp3 of the tune for your perusal, but I’m sorry— I’m not paying a dollar for a download of fucking “Fish Heads.”)

The fact that one of “Fish Heads” vocalists was Billy Mumy, the guy who played Will Robinson on “Lost in Space” - a tidbit Demento cited often, because you try to find something different to say about “Fish Heads” every weekend - wasn’t really enough to keep me interested for years on end. Novelty songs, by definition, are novelties. After you’ve heard them two or three times, the novelty wears off. And most of them aren’t really funny to begin with.

But that was always the problem with Demento’s show. There were only so many tunes, or even recorded comic routines, that suited his committed, offbeat niche. So over and over again, I’d be forced to wade through Ray Stevens’ “Guitarzan” or Rose & the Arrangement’s “The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati” in order to hear Stan Freberg’s brilliant 1953 “Dragnet” parody, “St. George and the Dragonet,” or maybe something more modern, like “King Tut” by Steve Martin & the Toot Uncommons, or Leonard Nimoy’s “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”…the latter being so unbelievably ghastly I pretty much have to post it for you.

Why Nimoy would allow himself to live after this is beyond me.

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Actually, Demento’s scales were weighted so mightily toward same-old same-old shtick, my friends and I eventually started taping the broadcasts so we could zip right to our favorites, thus cutting our weekly Demento listening time by about an hour and 47 minutes. Still, I was introduced to some really funny stuff via the Doctor, and a lot of it remains quite amusing after all these years.

The first time I ever heard the snotty college professor-musical satirist Tom Lehrer (My favorite Lehrer quote: “The reason most folk songs are so terrible is because they were written by the people.”) was on Dr. Demento, and I’m pretty sure Bill Murray and Christopher Guest’s genius-tinged "Mr. Roberts" was spun into my subconscious by Demento, too. My very favorite Demento-related tune, however, is something he was only able to play for a few weeks before the people who recorded it were threatened with a lawsuit and had to pull it from the airwaves. Why, I ask you, is the good stuff always illegal?

Little Roger and the Goosebumps’ “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” (I picked this particular shot of the castaways because Ginger is wearing a bikini) is probably best heard before I tell you anything about it. It’s pretty self-explanatory anyway.

“Stairway to Gilligan’s Island”

I love the falsetto when the ship starts getting tossed around in the storm.

Led Zeppelin somehow got wind of “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” - I’ll eat shit if they were listening to Dr. Demento on their Lear jet - and offered to sue the beejeebies out of Little Roger & the Goosebumps, who weren’t quite as lawyered-up as Jimmy Page, a mere five weeks after the song was recorded in a small San Francisco studio!

Zeppelin, it’s no big secret by now, was a band full of dicks managed by a bunch of thugs, and it seemed likely they would have carried through on their threat. So Little Roger and the boys retreated, and had “all” copies of their masterpiece destroyed.

Then God created the Internet to fuck with Led Zeppelin. Like all other music, you can now practically get your hands on “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” in convenient hat and capsule forms, if you’re willing to dig through Google for about three minutes.

It seems to me that Zeppelin could have had more of a sense of humor about it anyway. Any band full of grown men that can write and record rock songs based on the Hobbit is just begging to get kicked down a notch, and should learn to live with it. Just ask Leonard Nimoy.

Paul Tatara