Story and Photos by Bethany Lee
A few minutes before the show starts, I settle into the back of the Duke Energy Center in Raleigh and take in the room. All 1,750 auditorium seats in various shades of neon and florals buzz with anticipation. Groups in the front wave their homemade signs in front of the stage and cheer.
The lights dim. The crowd quiets. A man saunters slowly to the front of the stage.
He is weird.
He’s wearing a gold jester’s suit with one black leg and one yellow, coattails dragging behind him like a dog’s tail. His hair is shaped like a triangle, and when he speaks, his slow voice modulates as if attempting to hypnotize the entire audience.
Taking in the crowd, he says softly, “There is probably not a single person here who was not bullied.”
They erupt in laughter. There’s a hint of something behind the laughter – pain, perhaps? Understanding?
The members of the audience are here to see Alfred Matthew Yankovic, or “Weird Al,” and the 67-year-old comedian, Emo Philips, is his opener.
Philips holds up a piece of paper, which he tells us is from his personal line of greeting cards. I like my women like I like my coffee, the first one says. He flips it over.
With milk. Happy Mother’s Day.
***
The people in this crowd have something in common. They are weird. You can tell this by the shoes they wear: Keds, Toms, flip flops. Comfortable shoes meant for utility, not fashion. Their clothes do not match. Many of them are wearing Hawaiian shirts and khakis, and it’s unclear whether the outfits are for Weird Al’s sake or because of the contents of their closets. Their postures and physiques reflect years spent hunched over tabletop games.
“I am not afraid to be the person that everybody’s looking at in a room,” Daniel Duncan said. He is wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt, giant wireframe glasses, a pink polka dot party hat over his long blonde curls, and holding a red accordion. He’s sitting on the balcony of the auditorium, where I spotted him from across the room.
“Last year when we all went to go see the movie ‘Dune,’ I dressed up like one of the Fremen in their stillsuits,” Duncan said. “I was the only person in the theater dressed in costume.”
Duncan has been listening to Weird Al for as long as he can remember listening to music. As a kid, he wasn’t a big fan of pop music, so he knew the parodies better than the songs they were based on.
Weird Al shaped Duncan’s personality, showed him the beauty of eccentricity. Besides, he said, “Being weird is just another way of saying you’re being original.”
***
I almost missed Alfred Yankovic when he walked onstage. If not for his iconic curly brown locks, he looks just like a regular person. Sixty-three years old, tye-dye shirt and a pair of shorts on. His band members are a couple of old men. Even when he talks, he sounds more like an NPR broadcaster than the Manson of the Weird Al cult of personality.
Looking at him, you wouldn’t think that he has a pinball machine based on his music (Weird Al’s Museum of Natural Hilarity), that he’s been playing the accordion since he was 7, or that his comedy album Mandatory Fun debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
Maybe it’s the nature of this particular tour: The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, a showcasing of original music that doesn’t include any of the theatrics and special effects of his parody tours.
“Tonight, we’re playing our unpopular songs,” Yankovic tells the crowd. When the guitars start to play, I think, I guess this guy is pretty normal after all.
That is, until he sings.
Way back when I was just a little bitty boy
Living in a box under the stairs in the corner of the basement of the house
He’s practically yelling the lyrics, accompanied by slicing rock guitar and emphatic drumming from his bandmates. The more intense the instrumentals, the stranger the lyrics become.
Well, anyway, back then life was going swell and everything was juuuuuust PEACHY!
Except, of course, for the undeniable fact that every single morning
My mother would make me a big ol’ bowl of sauerkraut for breakfast!
His eyes are wild. The lights on stage flash red and the crowd explodes as Al tells the story of the guy who won a ticket to Albuquerque by correctly guessing the number of molecules in Leonard Nimoy, aka Spock from Star Trek’s, ass.
Ten minutes into the song that features lyrics like “Well, to cut a long story short, he got away with my snorkel” and “The world was our burrito,” all the while sounding like a 90s rock anthem with electric solos and a pounding beat, Yankovic stops.
“Anyway, um, where was I?” The stage is silent. “Kinda lost my train of thought… Oh, well.”
And he starts the song from the beginning.
***
After the show, I stopped a group of fans who were hanging around the outside of the auditorium. They told me I was talking to the right people.
Between the four of them, they’ve attended hundreds of Weird Al shows. Originally from New Jersey, they’ve followed the band across the country to hear Yankovic perform.
Two of them, Dave “Elvis” Rossi and Ethan Ullman, even host a podcast about Weird Al where they’ve had him and his band members as guests on the show. Rossi has the largest Weird Al collection outside of Yankovic and his band members themselves, and they spearheaded the campaign to raise $40,000 to get Weird Al a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the few stars that was not paid for by a record label.
As if that were not enough to prove his devotion, Rossi pulled up his pant legs to show me the tattoos he has on his ankles of each band member’s face.
To this gang, Weird Al is the patron saint of misfits.
“Everybody’s used to being ostracized by the normies,” Rossi’s wife, Jackie, said. Jackie has her own set of eccentric hobbies, including collecting plastic horses and cosplaying. She said she was made fun of as a kid, never quite fitting in with her peers.
“I remember coming down into our TV room one day and MTV was on,” Jackie said. Thinking Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ was about to play, she quickly went to turn it off before realizing it wasn’t ‘Beat It.’ It was Yankovic’s parody ‘Eat It.’
“I thought, I should probably pay attention to this,” Jackie said.
What followed was a lifelong devotion to Weird Al and his music. She met her husband through him and plans her calendar around his tours.
Fans like these resonate with the music that Yankovic produces. They are White ‘n’ Nerdy. They’re Tacky. And every once in a while, they might even get Trapped in the Drive-Thru.
Listening to Weird Al is an act of catharsis. In the space between the lyrics there is the sound of recognition: Perhaps you are not alone, the music seems to say.
Perhaps someone, somewhere, is a little bit weird, too.
