Albuquerque, the final track on the 1999 album, “Running With Scissors,” represents all that makes “Weird Al” Yankovic worthy of Rock & Roll immortality. The sprawling, meandering, delightfully random epic is Weird Al’s magnum opus. It embodies all that makes Weird Al a distinct and legitimate musical artist and showcases his abilities as a songwriter, joke-teller, and rock band leader. Further, “Albuquerque” is the acme of the “Spoken-Word-Story-Song” (SWSS) by exemplifying the form effectively through both narrative structure and musical text painting.
The SWSS is a common rock style that utilizes an instrumental - and sometimes tuneful - backing, but the lead vocals are spoken and mostly unbounded by a predetermined rhythm. The lead singer tells a story through spoken word while the backing band either operates completely independently or interjects musical accents to the story. Almost all SWSSs have some unity between the singer and the band, often in a unified chorus or lyrical motive.
Also common in SWSSs is altered-mind or dream references. For example, Spill the Wine by War (1970) takes the listener through Eric Burdon’s dream about meeting a woman in the Hall of the Mountain King. One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer by George Thorogood and the Destroyers (1977) follows the story of the lead singer’s experience on skid row, but always ordering his favorite drink. The Gift by The Velvet Underground (1967) is about...I have no idea… some kind of love story?...but it ends with somebody getting mistakenly stabbed in the head.
With SWSSs having roots in the psychedelic, it is no surprise that they often contain elements of humor and weirdness too – as if to provide the lead singer an opportunity to get as imaginative as possible without having to worry as much about making the music match the narrative’s weirdness. As we move closer to the 1990s, Stuart by The Dead Milkmen (1988) and Detachable Penis by King Missile (1992) play the juxtaposition of the spoken word with the background music for humor by seemingly excising rhythmic expectations from the vocals. I say “seemingly” because, particularly in “Stuart,” the backing musicians provide text painting when the narrative repeats a lyrical motive or changes moods. Clearly, the performance of a SWSS requires strategic coordination between the lead singer and the band members (more on this later).
In 1994, The Rugburns released Dick’s Automotive, an amalgam of all the previous practices in SWSSs. It has elements of weirdness (like a mommy and baby deer who die of dropping too much acid…to name one vignette). It has unifying musical themes that occasionally align with the lead singer (“We’re going on a picnic”). It is a long and sinuous story loosely connected by a single location (the song runs a little under 9 minutes on the album and can run longer during live performances, but the story always returns to “Dick’s Automotive”). And it is here where Weird Al finds his inspiration for “Albuquerque.”
Now, “Dick’s Automotive” may seem like questionable inspiration for Weird Al because the song involves sexual assault, animal torture, and a double murder – as if Steve Poltz, the lead singer, was telling an Aristocrats Joke with a rock band accompaniment. But, Weird Al sometimes has a dark sense of humor. He has also a penchant for stripping away a song’s offensive content, often substituting one version of the problematic material with less problematic one. Lily Hirsch (2020) illustrates how Weird Al dismantles the toxic masculinity from songs “Rico Suave” and “Hot in Herre” through parodies “Taco Grande” and “Trash Day,” where machismo is swapped with admiration for Mexican food and living in one’s own filth respectively (pp. 139-144). For “Albuquerque,” Weird Al substitutes the disturbing weirdness of “Dick’s Automotive” for his own brand of non-sequitur weirdness. Because who knows weird better than “Weird Al” Yankovic?
To offer one example:
In “Dick’s Automotive,” there’s a scene where Dick is interviewing the protagonist for a job at his garage. Dick asks a series of four auto-repair questions before asking “Do you have a girlfriend with long, red, curly hair, creamy, milk-white thighs, big full lips, biceps like Henry Rollins? And can she just scream like a hyena in the summer?” This exchange is “creepy weird,” to say the least. But, Weird Al takes that off-putting weirdness and transforms it into a much less NSFW scene.
Weird Al replaces the job interview with an exchange between the protagonist and a donut store clerk who asks with a sneer “Yeaaaaaah, what do ya want?” (accompanied by a Jim West guitar lick that would also be at home in a George Thorogood song). The protagonist asks for five different donut types (often much more during a live performance) and gets the same negative response in a joke structured like The Rake Effect. But, on the final try, Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz cues the band to stop with a strong down beat on the snare drum and the clerk goes and checks in the back…only to return with the same negative response. Finally, the clerk offers what he does have: one dozen starving, crazed weasels. And of course, the protagonist gets that box of weasels from the donut shop and hilarity ensues.
Both songs offer similarly structured non-sequiturs, but what is disturbingly weird in “Dick’s Automotive” is now cartoonishly weird in “Albuquerque.” This pattern is consistent throughout the vignettes of “Albuquerque,” even down to the randomness of the individual episodes bounded only by the eponymous city. Weird Al sanitizes the source material into a madcap story that feels like it’s just one big yes/and from a zany imagination. But, the song is anything but random. It is a highly coordinated effort between Weird Al and his band.
Rubén Valtierra plays keyboards in the band, but he’s only been with Weird Al since 1991, so he’s still new.
Perhaps the most underrated part of Weird Al’s entire career is his backing band. They twist, turn, and adapt to every pop style and complement Weird Al’s lyrics with the music that is near identical to the original song or style they’re parodying. His core band has been the same since his first album in 1983. Jim West on guitar, Steve Jay on bass, and Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz on drums have been recording and touring with Weird Al for almost 40 years, with Schwartz being the drummer on Weird Al’s earliest recordings.
A band would have to know what each other are thinking to pull off a song like “Albuquerque.” The depth and subtlety of the accompaniment is what sets this song apart from the other SWSSs mentioned earlier. The entire band tells the story by either setting up or accentuating the punchlines throughout the song. Whether they’re dropping dynamic levels to emphasize the silence of the protagonist’s mother before she shouts “IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!” or stopping on a dime multiple times to allow space for a verbal punchline, they are who really tell this story, especially Schwartz on drums.
It’s easy to forget there’s a band in the background of this song because Weird Al delivers the vocals with such conviction, but it is really Schwartz who drives this song. He tells the entire story with his hi-hat and snare. Whenever the weirdness and intensity ramp up, Schwartz loosens his hi-hat as a cue that the story is about to get stranger. The looser the hi-hat, the more chaotic the lyrics. The snare is also aggressively loose and live (Not St. Anger loose, but noticeably loose). So, when Schwartz wants to, he can cut through every other sound to really punctuate the lyrics with downbeats or lead the transitions between a calm vamp and whatever section is next.
This lyrical and musical craftsmanship is consistent throughout the entire 11+ minute song. According to a June 28, 2006 interview from his website, Weird Al only parodies music he respects and “[his] homages to them are always done with great affection and attention to detail.” So, it is no surprise that Weird Al’s approach to the SWSS would be meticulously and skillfully composed – thus creating the apex of the art form and then breaking its mold.