The You Don’t Have to Be Jewish Players’- “When You’re in Love, the Whole World’s Jewish”.
My first exposure to Irving. Short, fat Irving.
Good lord, I miss that record.
AL
Pico and Sepulveda (where nobody’s dreams come true) by Felix Figuroa
Who is the Lolo, who stole my pakalolo. by Don Ho
I never knew ol’ Don Ho ever did anything but Tiny bubbles, but his lament over
having had his 50 plants taken from the back yard, is a classic.
The Notorious “Trepidation Contest”
Cal, you and I obviously share some tastes in music and literature.
Tom Lerher was the all-time rhyming champion, outdoing even W.S. Gilbert.
“I remember Sam, he was the villiage idiot, and though it was a pity it was so…”
“Gather round while I sing you of Werner Von Braun, a man whose allegience is ruled by expedience…”
His magnam opus? How about When you are old and Gray:
“An awful debility,
A lessened utility,
A loss of mobility
Is a strong possibility.
In all probability
I’ll lose my virility
And you your fertility
And desirability,
And this liability
Of total sterility
Will lead to hostility
And a sense of futility,
So let’s act with agility
While we still have facility,
For we’ll soon reach senility
And lose the ability…”
Napoleon XIV.
Melanie - This was not actually meant to be a joke song.
Later covered by the Wurzels, and English West Country spoof band who reworked it
Oiv got a braaand new comboine 'arvester
An I’ll give ee the key
Oi fink that we should get together in purfic 'armony
Oiv got twenty acres, and yurve got forty three…
Another funny song, though it was never intended as such was
‘Teen Angel’ by Mark Dinning,
In most songs of the ‘death genre’(such as Leader of the pack or Tell Laura I love her) the main character dies somewhere toward the end, but in ‘Teen Angel’ the first line is
That fateful night the car stalled
Upon the railraod track
You just know that a life in music has almost run its course.
I can’t believe that no one has mentioned Spike Jones and his City Slickers, they were truly brilliant, they were top rate musicians but also rather goofy looking.
The most famous number is
‘On some secluded avenue’ which was an old sentimental standard when it was originaly written, extremely cloying public house/town drunk type song.
Spike Jones version completely blew it away and sacrified one of the sacred cows of music in a welter of complete mayhem and absurdity.
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/belvedere/1226/Stranierovision/html/spike.html
Hooray! For Captain Spaulding,
The African Explorer!
Requires Real Player
http://www.republic.k12.mo.us/highschool/students/jledbett/cpt.wav
HOORAY!
HOORAY!
HOORAY!
What about Tom Lehrer’s Poisining Pigeons in the Park.
Talking about Dr. Demento reminds me of something else he used to play. It’s not exactly a song, but does anyone remember Mason Williams’ "Them Poems" ? I used to be able to recite “Moose Goosers” from memory, and my brother and I wrote some of our own.
My Dad once sang us a variation of a song “Ain’t We Crazy” by Haywire Mac:
I was born at noon one night one morn
When the whistles rang “boom boom”;
I boiled a snake and fried a cake
When the mudpies were in bloom;
If six and six is nine
Ice comes from a mine
“Old Black Joe” is an Eskimo
And pork’s from a porcupine!
A pig or cow can bark “Meow,”
And goldfish love to sing;
I saw a frog swim up a log
He fell and broke his wing;
And elephants fly up to their nests on the road to Mandalay!
[…]
The man behind the counter, was a woman, young and gray;
[…] not very far away!
Ain’t we crazy, ain’t we crazy,
[…]
The way we sing this song all night today!
How about Anaheim, Azusa & Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review And Timing Association by Jan & Dean?
*They wear organdy dresses & high-button shoes
They read Playboy magazine & Hot-Rod News
Theres Patience Proper & Prudence Prim You oughta see em do the spin
CHORUS:
They come from Anaheim, Azusa, & Cucamonga too
For the Sewing circle & book review
The little old ladies wait in wild anticipation
For the meetings of the double-A-C A-S-S-N
For the Anaheim, Azusa, & Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review, & Timing Association*
Dear Doctor by The Rolling Stones (on Beggar’s Banquet)
“For the girl I’m to marry is a four-legged sow, I been soakin’ up drink like a sponge.”
Magdalena by The Mothers of Invention (on Just Another Band From L.A.)
(a cautionary tale about incest in Montreal)
“Magdalena,
Don’t you treat me like this,
In the hallway,
With your blouse and your tits,
If your mommy,
Ever finds us like this,
She’ll get a lawyer,
Oh, how Mama’ll be pissed…”
Hot Dog by Led Zeppelin
“I took her love at seventeen,
A little late these days, it seems…”
I couldn’t pick out just one of his.
You had to love a man who could use ‘brucellosis’ in a song, ‘Play It All Night Long.’
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park is my personal favorite.
Two major talents currently languishing in hysterical obscurity:
Camille West, author of the arousing Viagra In The Waters (which even pays tribute to Harry Chapin’s 30,000 Pounds of Bananas)
Then, there’s Les Barker, also known as The Mrs. Ackroyd Band. Perpetrators of such classics as:
*
My Snails have not yet arrived
An infinite number of occasional tables
I can’t find my camouflage net
Spot, the eternal dalmatian
Cosmo, the fairly accurate knife thrower
Dachshunds with erections can’t climb stairs*
For a sample of what he’s like, there’s an MP3 file here of him doing poetry solo. Warning: Political content.
You should check out the first Car Talk Car Songs CD, with the complete versions of some of the songs they used to play at breaks, including It’s a Rental , You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Loose Wheel, and my favorite Twenty Naked Pentecostals in a Pontiac .
As for Tom Lehrer, I’ve always taken my research direction from * Lobachevsky*
In one word, he told me secret of success in mathematics
Plagarize
…
But remember to always call it please, research
Wally Pleasant’s version of The Cat Came Back cracks me up for reasons I can’t rightly explain.
“Now I’m gonna try an ear bleeding guitar solo!”
That Elements song reminded me of the sort of thing that played on Animaniacs. My favorite of which was Yakko’s Universe:
It’s a great big universe
And we’re all really puny
We’re just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It’s big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It’s a big universe and we’re not.
Novelty songs aside, one song that never fails to make me laugh is “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”
I gotta know right now
Before we go any further
Do you love me!!!?
Will you love me forever!!!?
Let me sleep on it
Baby, baby let me sleep on it
Let me sleep on it
And I’ll give you my answer in the morning
Followed by
I started swearing to my god and on my mother’s grave
That I would love you to the end of time
I swore that I would love you to the end of time!
So now I’m praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don’t think that I can really survive
We Are the Worms, a parody of “We Are the World” that Dr. Demento played for a bit in the 80s until he got a cease and desist order from Bob Geldof’s lawyers. Though I always thought We Are the World was sappy, I liked Boomtown rats, but Geldof lost all respect from me over that for not having a sense of humor.
I have a very poor quality tape of the song that I made off of AM radio before it was pulled.
We are the worms,
there on the sidewalk
We are the ones who make a squishy mess,
so watch where you walk
Maybe he was jealous because the parody was a better song than his.
Heh! I remember that. Somewhere, there’s a taped copy of that around my house, too…
Do you remember the song the good doctor was playing right after the 1992 election? It was a parody of The Wizard of Oz’s Munchkinland segment called “The Wizard of Arkansas”…
Come out, come out,
wherever you’ve been.
For being a liberal’s no longer a sin…
Ray Stevens did a song called Dudley Dooright of the Highway Patrol, in which he describes being pulled over by a cop who turns out to be related to just about every character Ray had ever sung about.
“So I was saying to my wife, Ethel… you remember Ethel - that shameless hussy?”
And it ended with the cop saying to him, “I guess everything ain’t so dadburned beautiful now, is it?”
He started playing the whole song again in 94, and in fact it was on the most recent show.
From the sequel, “The Bertha Butt Boogie” by the Jimmy Casstor Bunch:
“Now Bertha Butt had three sisters: there was Betty Butt, Bella Butt, and Batsheba Butt!”
I did not know that. The good doctor only lasted a couple of years in these parts. After seeing a King of the Hill episode where Peggy wanted to get her road trip over before Dr. Demento came on so she wouldn’t have to listen to his show, I wondered if that was the attitude here in this corner of Arizona.