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The rapper Chamillionare praised Yankovic for his geeky re-working of “Ridin” into “White and Nerdy.”

The rapper Chamillionare praised Yankovic for his geeky re-working of “Ridin” into “White and Nerdy.”

Let’s forget about the lyrics for a minute. Weird Al Yankovic has blown audiences away for 30 years partly due to nailing every note, layer and distorted tone in the industry’s hugest pop songs. Yankovic and his group turned “Beat It” into it “Eat It,” “Lola” into “Yoda” and the Offsprings’s “Pretty Fly” into “Pretty Fly (For a Rabbi)”—mastering the sound each time.

Yankovic and his group are the unofficial tribute band to everyone from Michael Jackson to Chamillionare—who even praised Yankovic for his geeky re-working of “Ridin” into “White and Nerdy.” On his latest album Alpocalypse, Yankovic took on the 21st century sounds of Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus with “Perform This Way” and “Party in the CIA,” respectively.

For an experienced rocker like Yankovic, music is still serious business. And as far as words go, when the parody master sets out to destroy and reassemble a pop song, the result is often something more brilliant than the original—like what Yankovic did to R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet,” for example (a song with few redeeming qualities), which he morphed into “Trapped in the Drive-thru,” an 11-minute argument about dinner.

Yankovic, the leading parody artist of all time, is the Allan Sherman for a generation that never knew who Allan Sherman was. The singing satirist, who performed at Civic Auditorium this Nov. 4, talked to Santa Cruz Weekly about his career, the radio DJ who made him famous and the art of poking fun.

Santa Cruz Weekly: Tom Lehrer, who lives in Santa Cruz, was a hilarious songwriter from the 1960s and ’70s and a UCSC math professor. Were you a fan?
Weird Al: Absolutely. Tom Lehrer is one of my two living heroes, the other being Stan Freburg. He was apparently a fan of my movie UHF. At one point when I was deciding where to go to college, I almost picked Santa Cruz because I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to have him as a professor?”

“Party in the CIA” sounds more political than most of your work. Was that intentional?
The whole point was just to flip the tone of the song on its head. The Miley Cyrus song is a very bright, effervescent, bubbly pop song, and I thought, “If I’m going to do a parody of this, I’m going to have to make it very dark and sick and twisted.”

The electric guitar is starting to feel like Stone Age technology in today’s music industry. How is your small band adapting to the era of Gaga? I have an affinity for real instruments. I miss the ’90s, when there were all the grunge bands and all the DIY garage bands. And I like guitars, what can I tell ya? But we are adapting, and a lot of the pop songs that we’re emulating now don’t require live instruments. My guitar player will walk into the studio with a DVD with sound files on it that he made on his synthesizer and say, “Here you go,” and walk out.

“Skipper Dan,” your new Weezer-esque tune, is about a failed actor giving tours on the Jungle Cruise. Are you afraid to go back on the ride after singing it?
[Laughing] I actually have gone back once! And I was waiting for the skipper to say something, but he never did.

Are you paying homage to artists or teasing them?
Well, both, actually, but it’s not in a mean-spirited way. It’s more of a poke in the ribs than kick in the face.

How does the conversation go when you call up an artist and you ask if you can make fun of them?
There’s been a few cases where I have had to talk to the artist directly. It’s always been very friendly and oftentimes [laughing] they’re thrilled to get the Weird Al parody! I didn’t talk to her directly, but I heard in Lady Gaga’s interview with Rolling Stone she called it a rite of passage. It’s nice to hear that the artists can take a joke.
You might be the most accomplished rocker to be left out of both the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What gives? [Laughs] Well, it’s not up to me. They’re probably both long shots. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is probably a longer shot because there’s only a small handful of people that get in every year. And regardless, I think they would hear such an uproar if I got in that they would preemptively have to think twice. Obviously, I would be honored. Being a realist, I don’t ever think it’s going to happen.

Is it hard for you to sing “My Bologna”—one of your earliest pop parodies—since you became a vegetarian in 1992?
No, because I can sing about people getting decapitated even though I haven’t decapitated anybody. I can still sing “My Bologna” and not really mean it.

How do you make costume changes so fast? Are there two of you?
We have anywhere from a minute to a couple minutes for each change. And I’ve designed the show so that there’s barely enough time during the film clip to accomplish the changes. Half the show is actually taking place backstage. You never see all the crazy stuff going on.

Dr. Demento’s radio program, which helped launch your career, recently went online only. Could something like Dr. Demento survive on today’s airwaves?
I’d like to think. I’m sure he would like to live in a world where he’d be syndicated and have a lot of affiliates airing the show, but I guess that’s the reason he’s internet only right now, which is a shame because he’s such an American institution.

How old were you when you started recording cassette tapes, and how good (or bad) were they?
They were horrible—as bad as you would think a 13-year-old recording in his bedroom with an accordion onto a 39-cent compact cassette would be. It wasn’t what anybody would call “good,” but that’s what made Dr. Demento so amazing. He saw some kind of spark of originality or talent or novelty in those primitive, horrible moments.

You studied architecture at Cal Poly. If you had been an architect, what kind of structures would you have built?
Once in architecture school I made [a model of] a giant accordion-shaped building, so maybe—it would have rocked the architecture world. It would have brought in a whole new era.