I was a late-’90s/early-aughts kid, so I didn’t experience Weird Al in what some may call his prime — the 1980s perhaps saw the finest culture-permeating work he had to offer, like the Michael Jackson, Devo, and Madonna parodies — though I was fully conscious by the time “Straight Outta Lynwood” came out in 2006, which had the massive lead single, “White & Nerdy.” I believe my parents would’ve known about that song even if I hadn’t been the one to introduce them to it.
But the idea of when an artist is in their prime is arguably a subjective concept, despite the accolades or attention certain eras objectively receive. Lorne Michaels has often said that a “Saturday Night Live” fan’s favorite cast is during their high school years, just as I have come to believe that “Running with Scissors” is my favorite Weird Al album because I heard it at an impressionable time.
In hindsight, “Running with Scissors” was prescient for my future tastes in music. I’d often return to the third-wave ska pastiche, “Your Horoscope for Today,” not because the stars told me to “lock my doors and windows and never, never, never, never, never leave my house again,” but because of how the horns and upstrokes made me dance around my room, prior to knowing anything else about the genre. I’d later discover that bands like Reel Big Fish and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones made me feel the same way, as if “Your Horoscope for Today” primed me to be a fan of ska music and the skanking that comes along with it.
I heard “Jerry Springer” before I heard Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week,” and I heard “My Baby’s in Love with Eddie Vedder” before I knew anything about Pearl Jam. Rap wasn’t on my radar, and polka certainly wasn’t either. But because I discovered these things via Weird Al, through the wacky and easily digestible approach he takes to tackling virtually every genre, I backtracked and discovered the bands that inspired the seemingly silly parodies. Whatever was good enough for Al was good enough for me.
The story of Weird Al opening up a listener’s tastes is not a unique one. And while I’d be lying if I said I preferred all of the parodies over the originals, it was because of the parodies that I care for the originals. It’s because of the parodies that I write about music at all.
My first Weird Al concert was at an amphitheater in Toledo, Ohio. All of the bells and whistles I’d come to expect at his shows were there: costume changes into the “Fat” and “Amish Paradise” suits, goofy kick-snare “drum solos,” and all-ages fans adrift in a sea of Hawaiian shirts. During “Wanna B Ur Lovr,” he came out into the crowd, mock-grinded against an older woman two seats away from me, and sang: “girl, you smell like Fritos / that’s why I’m giving you this hungry stare.”
I could’ve touched his shoe, mind you, but I thought that might be too weird.
I saw his “Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour” in 2017 in Lexington, Kentucky, where he offered a stripped down show of B-sides and rarities, most of which were performed sitting down. High-pitched comedian Emo Phillips opened that show, whom I nearly shared an elevator with back at the hotel. (However, I did hear his true, deeper voice say “going up?” which is my lame claim to fame.) It should also be noted that I talked to Al’s longtime guitarist Jim “Kimo” West while making waffles.
The 2019 “Strings Attached Tour” added an orchestra behind the band, acting as an additive as opposed to the reductive quality of the previous tour. I saw that show at the Fraze. And, in 2022, I saw the reprisal of the “The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour” in Bend, Oregon, with the friend who introduced me to his music two decades prior.
At that point, I’d seen Weird Al, the most important figure of my life — aside from my parents, of course — four times. So, when he announced that his 2025 “Bigger & Weirder Tour” was making a return to the Fraze, I bought tickets.
A week before the show, I received an email from his PR team asking if I would be willing to review it. I immediately told everyone I knew, which amounted to around a baker’s dozen, that “Weird Al’s people reached out and want me to review the show.”
In my brief tenure writing about the local music scene for the Dayton Daily News, I’ve had the chance to talk to some notable musicians: Buddy Guy, Rick Springfield, Lisa Loeb, Warren Haynes. Even punk legend Richard Lloyd yelled at me once. But nothing has put me beside myself quite like the opportunity to write about one of my heroes.
Sparing the details, there was ultimately no press pass available. But I had a ticket to go anyway.
Walking into the Fraze Pavilion, past security checking the pockets of floral buttoned shirts, past the serpentine line for merch, I found a seat in the bleachers. From there I had a bird’s eye view of the venue. Most attendees wore some form of appropriate novelty tee, while others were in surgeon scrubs and tinfoil hats.
Puddles Pity Party, the 6’8” Pagliacci-inspired clown and singer, opened around 8 p.m., crooning his way through Tom Waits’ covers and songs inspired by Kevin Costner.
After Puddles’ set, Weird Al’s “Fun Zone” instrumental from “UHF” teased the crowd prior to the band taking the stage. There was massive applause, as if a live band had actually played it. In fact, that phenomenon occurred constantly.
Considering the myriad wardrobe changes throughout the show, interstitial channel-surfing video montages — mostly made up of Weird Al appearances and references to him from throughout pop culture — killed time in between, and kept the momentum going.
A scene from the 2022 movie, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” in which Danielle Radcliffe as Weird Al essentially sings the entirety of “Another One Rides the Bus,” was treated as though Radcliffe was present, reenacting the scene. The video screen was viewed like it was another member of the band.
Once “Fun Zone” pumped energy into the fans, and after the “Al as Godzilla” opening credits, the band went into “Tacky,” from his 2014 (and so-called final) full-length album, “Mandatory Fun.” A camera feed tracked Al, à la the song’s music video, as he walked and sang through the back of the stage area before emerging. After it ended, he declared he was “contractually obligated” to present a PowerPoint, which segued into the more docile Crosby, Stills, & Nash pastiche, “Mission Statement,” also from his latest album.
Along with the core band — West, Steve Jay, Rubén Valtierra, and Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz — Al was joined by backup singers and multi-instrumentalists on this tour, with horns, hand drums, guitars and more.
Before the next song, he dramatically raised his accordion to the sky, as if pulling Excalibur from the stone, and yelled: “are you ready to polka!?” The band went into “Polkamania!,” a 2024 mashup of recent pop hits, such as Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” The polka medley concept has been a staple of Weird Al’s catalog since 1984, often containing songs that may not be worthy of full parody, but at least deserve a bright 2/4 time signature.
The interesting aspect of these medleys, and perhaps Weird Al parodies in general, is that they represent some sort of cultural singularity, one in which we’re all, for better or worse, experiencing the same thing. No artist has successfully distilled what is culturally relevant quite like Weird Al. But within an increasingly fractured entertainment landscape — without a grand unifier like Top 40 radio or MTV representing a cross-section of peoples’ tastes — even Al admits he is unsure what’s cool or popular now.
“Uptown Funk,” “Despacito,” and “Shake It Off” — like many of the other songs sampled in “Polkamania!” — made irrefutably indelible marks on recent pop culture. Yet despite the numbers, those songs still don’t feel as relevant as “Beat It” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or “Like a Virgin”: songs that have, again, for better or worse, persisted for generations. In a shifting culture with increasingly diminishing returns, where we can have anything we want, virtually whenever we want it, it’s difficult to imagine the magnitude of effort that it would take to process what is currently sensational for everybody across the board.
It’s the reason “Polkamania!” is a one-off single and that the idea of the Weird Al album is, unfortunately, a thing of the past.
But even in 2025, just as the tour name suggests, Weird Al is still bigger and weirder than ever before. The gambit of Hawaiian shirts is not limited to people of a certain age. Some 1980s Weird Al kids turned into Weird Al adults who had Weird Al kids of their own, thus a Weird Al family. Others may have been introduced to his music through his theme songs for newer animated shows and movies, like “Milo Murphy’s Law” and “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie,” in which case they, like me, get to retrospectively discover his back catalog — except instead of “Running with Scissors” or “Bad Hair Day,” it’s maybe more recent albums like “Mandatory Fun” or “Alpocalypse.”
The one good thing about the culture shift, though, is despite tastes being overwhelmingly fractured, the idea of having anything we want, virtually whenever we want it, can also apply to Weird Al.
Because he’s so intertwined with my youth, and is the very reason I admire all genres of music, it’s heartbreaking to see his true age sometimes displayed in his performances. At 65, songs like “Smells Like Nirvana” are grating on his voice, and “Everything You Know is Wrong” is on the verge of being too high to sing. His breaths in between lines are sometimes sharp and noticeable. The man who spawned generations of comedy and parody musicians has gray roots in his iconic, long and curly hair.
I’ve always had this idea that Weird Al will forever be youthful. And though he is absolutely spritely for his age — still kicking legs above his head and gyrating arms around like a madman — his mortality is starting to manifest in subtle ways, and it makes me think about my own.
All five of the Weird Al performances I’ve seen have ended with his “Star Wars” parodies: “A Saga Begins” and “Yoda.” Everyone stands in unity, singing “my my this here Anakin guy,” making us all believe that, someday, no matter how impossibly naive it seems, we’re all going to be Jedis. Because when Weird Al sings it, and you sing it along with him, it feels like a lighter version of reality. And that’s a reality worth living in.
It’s an odd thing to shed a few tears over a parody song. But seeing Weird Al perform has been one of my life’s great pleasures. “A Saga Begins” is the song that began my saga into being a music writer, but more importantly a music lover. While Al’s catalog isn’t always in my ears, I can still tap into being that fifth grader who had a life of discovery ahead of him whenever I need to check in, because he still knows all of the lyrics.
Brandon Berry writes about the Dayton and Southwest Ohio music and art scene. Have a story idea for him? Email branberry100@gmail.com.
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