The Atrocious Music Collection: #25 in a series
Artist: Dr. Demento, curator
Album Title: Dementia Royale
Category: Compilation
Year: 1980
Cover art style: Radio DJ choas
Audio samples:
- Barnes & Barnes Three Drunk Newts
- Ruth Wallis Davy’s Dinghy
- Wild Man Fischer My Name is Larry
- Dr. Demento Shaving Cream
Click on picture for full-sized image
Without Dr. Demento, would we have Irwin Chusid, and his encyclopedia of outsider art? Would we have Weird Al? Would Rhino Records (the publisher of this disc) have released Golden Throats? Would we even remember that William Shatner did something unnatural to Bowie’s Space Oddity at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards?
Who knows! But without the Dr. Demento show, I would have never had an Atrocious Music Collection, that is for sure. And without the “old-timers” the good Doctor played on his show – Spike Jones, Stan Freberg, Ruth Wallis, Tom Lehrer, et al – there would be no Dr. Demento, I suppose. So thank you, everyone!
The Dr. Demento radio show was broadcast on Sundays, midmorning, at least in the NYC listening area I grew up in. And, therefore, it conflicted with church – fitting, I suppose. My solution was to capture the radio show on the longest cassette I could find (usually a 180-minute one, 90 minutes per side), pressing "record" at the last possible moment before heading out the door. This gave me at least the first hour of his show each week. Dr.D. was my first music history teacher, when you get right down to it. It’s just the subject of the class was a bit different from what I’d later learn from Peter Burkholder.
To be honest, novelty music such as this occupies the fringes of the Collection. It is not the meat-and-potatoes of the A.M.C. set-list for the simple reason that it is often not at all atrocious. Nevertheless, we celebrate this music, particularly for the importance the good Doc had in my “other” musical development (that being the one that wasn’t rock or classically based).
The 14 tracks on this collection occupy various positions on the silly-range. Weird Al’s My Bologna and The Yiddish People’s Kosher Delight played with parody on contemporary music. Fred Blassie (once among the greatest “wrestlers”) provides the sole celebrity cut, Pencil Neck Geek, which ages about as well as Balssie’s fame. Frosty the Dope Man (Marc Zydiac) is the lone druggie cut – there is a modest, but not insubstantial, tradition of stoner comedy songs our there, although turning a children’s holiday cartoon character into a pusher is kind of disturbing.
More straight-up novelty numbers include The Phantom Windbreaker, I Gotta Get a Fake ID, Punk Polka, and, from the days before universal buckets seats, a song about the complications of Making Love in a Subaru.
Scott Beach’s Religion and Politics occupies a unique spot as a spoken-word (proto-rap) piece, and continues to be contemporary, all these many years later. In 1975 Stardrek may have been a clever Star Trek spoof with Captain Jerk, Mr. Schlock, Snotty, and their adventure on Planet Schwartz, but the field is over-crowded now, and this chestnut by Bobby Pickett and Peter Ferrara doesn't stand out the way it once did.
Two of my favorite tracks are oldies-but-goodies, both creative plays-on-words. The 1950s banned-from-the-radio Davy’s Dinghy is sung by the unflappable Ruth Wallis to great effect, and it’s also hard not to laugh at Shaving Cream (sung here by the good Dr. himself). Shaving Cream was written by the legendary Benny Hill in 1946 – and it’s so stupid, it’s even funny when you know what’s coming.
Standing out from the crowd of more recent creations are the oddly weird Three Drunk Newts (Barnes and Barnes, who also gave us the classic Fish Heads), and Wild Man Fischer’s declaration of self, My Name is Larry. If you’ve not heard these, you are in for a treat, let me tell you.
Reading the back of the album is also worth your time and effort, because Dr. D. knows how to annotate his examples. A sample: "Birds sing to tell who they are, who their relatives are, and that we ought to give them some respect for what they are. People usually have more convoluted motives for bursting out in song, but My Name is Larry by Wild Man Fischer is as close as music will ever get to expressing the basic identity of Homo Sapiens."
Where did he learn to do this so well? Music school, of course: Barry Hansen, AKA Dr. Demento, has a Master’s degree in musicology. Because of course he does!