“Weird Al” Yankovic doesn’t know exactly where he is at the moment. But that’s understandable considering he played 75 concerts in the U.S. and Canada last year, and booked another 95 this year. “I’m in Saskatoon,” he tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from
the back of his tour bus. “We’re halfway between wherever I was last night and wherever I’m going to be tomorrow.”
It’s a rare off day, so he headed to the movies to see Coyote vs. Acme, and otherwise rested. The 66-year-old needs to conserve his energy since his show stretches past the two-hour mark every night, and he’s moving practically the entire time, often in cumbersome costumes. Once it ends, he poses for photographs with fans who purchased VIP tickets. The exact number varies each night, but it’s not uncommon for Yankovic to spend an additional two hours grinning for the camera as a procession of his most passionate devotees wait in line for their big moment.
The tour will end Oct. 17 with a show at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, but then he’ll have a mere 14 days to prepare for a special event at L.A.’s Greek Theater celebrating his 1989 cult classic film, UHF. The movie will be screened along with an orchestra performing the score, before Yankovic takes the stage with some surprise guests for a Q&A.
We spoke to Yankovic about his life on the road, possible plans for future tours, his upcoming UHF celebration, the status of his Broadway musical Dare to Be Stupid, and why we’re unlikely to see sequels to UHF or Weird — even though there is a script for the latter.
You played so many shows last year. What inspired you to head out this year and do even more?
I just didn’t want it to end. I was having such a great time with the expanded band, and the fans were digging it and we’re playing larger venues than ever before. And I thought, “Well, why would I want to stop now?” So we decided to do an even bigger tour this year.
Do you ever wake up and not know where you are?
Yeah. Well, sometimes I have to think about it for a minute.
You headlined theaters for the vast majority of your career. You’re suddenly playing a lot of arenas. What happened?
I’m a little surprised myself. I mean, I don’t think that’s the way it’s really supposed to happen. As you know, we haven’t released a traditional album since 2014, but the shows keep getting bigger and more popular, and I don’t know what to attribute it to. I mean, I’ve been around for long enough that I think there’s a little bit of a snowball effect that the people that have enjoyed me the last few decades are now bringing their kids, and word of mouth, I guess. People seem to enjoy the show and now more people are coming.
I brought my 14-year-old nephew to your show in Hershey. When he was 12, he just woke up one day and somehow knew all about you. That seems to happen a lot. How do you explain that?
It’s really weird. I know when I first started out in the ’80s, my core audience was definitely 12-year-old boys. And I thought that was interesting because that was the exact age where I really got obsessed with Mad magazine. So I don’t know if there’s something that happens in your brain at that particular age that makes you appreciate that kind of irreverent humor, but that was certainly the case for me, and apparently for a lot of other kids as well.
How did you feel last year when you walked onstage at Madison Square Garden, heard the roar of the crowd, and looked up at all the Billy Joel and Phish banners?
It was a lot of pressure. I can’t lie. When my manager told me a year before the gig that I was going to be playing Madison Square Garden, I was excited, but I also had this pit in my stomach that didn’t go away until directly after we played that show. I was very nervous about it. And to go walk around the Garden and see all the testimonials from the biggest stars in the world, that didn’t help ease my stress at all, but it was a great show.
Once I got onstage, most of the stress went away because the fans were so supportive. People had flown in, really, from around the world to show their support and to be part of that big moment for me, which I can’t tell you how much I appreciated that.
After you play your full set every night, you do a long meet-and-greet. How do you have the energy for that?
Well, I kind of save it all up for the stage. It is pretty taxing. It’s a very physical show. It’s my aerobics exercise every night. And then after that, I do a meet-and-greet, which lasts sometimes longer than the actual show itself.
And then after that I’m on the bus and we’re driving on to the next place. So basically during those hours when I’m not in a meet-and-greet or literally onstage, I just try to take it very easy and rest my voice and not exert a lot of energy. And just every ounce of energy I’ve got, I use on the stage.
Do you ever have a Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon moment when you’re dancing in the “Fat” suit and you think to yourself, “I’m too old for this shit?”
That was sort of the impetus for me doing the firstVanity Tour.I distinctly remember putting on my “Fat” suit for literally the thousandth time and thinking, “Do I really need to do this?” So I thought, “I want to try doing at least one tour where it’s just all about the music.”
So that’s what we did. We’ve done that a couple times. And I really love the Vanity tours, and we may or may not do that again in the future, but that was for me and for the hardcore fans that otherwise wouldn’t hear a lot of those deep cuts that we normally don’t have time to play in a regular show.
I was very impressed by your opening act, Puddles Pity Party. He walks onstage every night in front of a giant crowd that’s mostly never heard of him, and he quickly wins them over.
I love Puddles. I think Mike [Geier] is amazing. He’s so talented, he’s so funny, a warm guy. He’s the guy you want to be on a bus with for several months at a time, and just an amazing showman. Most opening acts have a pretty hard hill to climb because [the fans] are mostly not there to see them. They’re there to see the headliner, but Puddles wins people over instantly. It’s a perfect fit. I’m very grateful to have him on the bill.
Who else is on the bus with you and Puddles?
Well, it’s the band bus. It’s a pretty full bus. It’s me and the extended band and Puddles and his stage assistant/wife. And, obviously, the driver. That’s about 10 or 11 people.
Most people would assume you were on your own bus.
No, no. I wouldn’t want my own bus. I like having my little family on the road. And having said that, I can’t even believe how big the production has gotten because I remember just starting out and the band driving ourselves around in an RV. And for this tour, we’ve got three buses and four trucks. I just can’t even believe that we’ve gotten to this point where it’s that big of a traveling circus.
I’m a big Brian Wilson fan and saw him in concert countless times, so I’m very familiar with Probyn Gregory. How did he wind up in your band?
Probyn was referred to me through Alex Jules,who I’ve been friends with for a while. And I was looking for people who were multi-instrumentalists that could also sing because that was part of the idea of me adding four people to the band for those tours. They had to be able to do a lot of different things so that we could do a lot of songs that we weren’t able to do with just a five-piece.
Alex said, “Oh, you got to get Probyn.” And just based on that recommendation and knowing who Probyn was and seeing his work online, I immediately hired him. He was one of three people that I hired basically sight unseen. I’d never met Probyn before hiring him. And same with Scheila Gonzalez, who’s also amazing, and also Payton Rose Velligan, who’s a quarter century younger than everybody else in the band, and she’s amazing.
So I got very lucky. I mean, everybody gelled. Everybody knows the drill, they know what’s expected. They have no shame onstage. They’re happy to look silly or ridiculous in the service of doing a great show.
I love seeing the guy who helped Brian Wilson finish Smile dress up like the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” janitor and mop the stage.
Part of me feels a little bad about making people like Probyn, who are insanely talented, do such ridiculous things, but that’s sort of the gig.
Any idea what the next tour will be?
I don’t know. I’ve committed to the fact that there will be no tour next year. So next year is totally tour-free. I love touring, so I’d like to think that there will be tours in the future, but I don’t know what kind of tours those will be. I have to admit, it would be a little harder for me to go back to the original core band at this point because I love traveling with this extended group and I love the sound that we’re making onstage. I think I would miss that if we had to scale back again.
I want to move on to UHF because of the upcoming Greek Theater event. How hard was it to get a studio to bankroll a movie for you back then?
It was pretty difficult. [My manager] Jay Levey and I had been trying basically since I first came on the scene around 1984, to get a movie going, and we pitched around. I think we might’ve written the first draft of the script in 1985, and it just took forever. And we’d kind of almost given up on the idea of me doing a movie until out of the blue, we took a meeting, kind of an insane meeting with a producer who said, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do it. We’ll be shooting it next month.”
Jay and I walked out of that meeting laughing, literally laughing, because we thought, “Oh, this is the most Hollywood meeting ever. There’s no way this guy’s for real.” And a month later, we were shooting the movie.
Is it true that [Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator] Joel Hodgson was almost Philo?
He was my first choice. I kind of wrote the part of Philo with Joel Hodgson in mind because he’s an inventor. He did that character in a stand-up act, and I liked his whole weirdo deadpan delivery. So yeah, we pitched that to him and he was not interested at the time. So it went to Anthony Geary, who was amazing in the role.
I just looked at the box office stats for the entire year of 1989, and you were 112th. You were beaten even by She-Devil, Roseanne Barr’s own box office fiasco. Do you remember first seeing the box office returns and seeing what was happening?
It was definitely a rug-pull because I was being led to believe that I had a big movie career ahead of me because the movie had tested so well. Orion was very excited to release the movie. And in fact, that’s one of the reasons why they decided to put it out smack dab in the middle of summer against all the big blockbusters, because they thought they had a real hit on their hands. But the competition was just too fierce and the movie disappeared quickly. And I just remember the feeling of going from a hero at the movie studio to somebody who people evaded eye contact with when I walked down the halls.
It came out the same day as When Harry Met Sally.
[Laughs.]
I guess there’s some similarities if you really stretch things to absurd degrees. There’s a couple in both films that winds up happily together at the very end after a lot of turmoil.
That’s pretty much it.
Sometimes failure can be a good thing in the long run, strangely. I remember being in elementary school and my friends telling me about this amazing movie you could rent, but the store only had one copy. It was the secret that was passed along through the hallways circa 1993 or so. It made it more enticing since there was this sense of discovery.
Yeah. Well, that was the nice thing about UHF. I mean, the box office failure really stung for a long time, and the critics were not kind either at the time, but it was a movie that people discovered. People found it at Blockbuster as a video rental. People found it on cable TV. Comedy Central ran it a lot. So it was one of those things that found its fan base over a long period of time to the point where when the actual DVD release came out, — I don’t remember the exact year, but it was a good decade or so after the movie came out originally — it was a top 10 video release, which took a lot of people by surprise.
I guess you’d say it’s a cult movie because the people that are really fans of it are kind of cultish. I’ve seen dozens if not hundreds of UHF-related tattoos, which goes to show that it’s a movie that’s got very intense appeal to some people. So that really helped me bandage those wounds from 1989, the fact that after all these years, there are people that still care pretty intensely about this movie.
Wheel of Fish still makes me laugh. I can’t even count how many times I’ve watched it.
Well, thank you.
How did this 37th anniversary event at the Greek Theater come together?
Jay Levey came up with the idea of doing this. And [he] knew that [composer] John Du Prez was sitting on the master tapes for the score. We had a UHF soundtrack album, but that was really all songs that I had done for the movie and a few extra ones to make it album length. But we never released the actual score, and it’s a great score.
So for a number of years, I was kind of nudging Jay like, “Are we ever going to put the score out?” And finally it came to be. And then Jay always likes to make things bigger and better, and he is like, “Well, we should do a concert. We should do this. We should do that.”
In addition to doing all the special edition albums and the digital and CD release, Jay wanted to do a big concert where John’s conducting, and we’re going to have special guests come out and make a real event out of it. So that was really more Jay’s idea than mine.
What’s the show going to be like?
From what I understand, it’s going to be an orchestra that John is conducting to match the action on the screen, obviously. For the songs that need a live rock band, my band will be there. Afterwards, it’ll be a little Q&A session. I don’t think I’m allowed to say who the guests are because they’re super surprise secret special guests, but it should be a fun night.
Is any sort of sequel even remotely possible?
Oh gosh, I don’t know. That’s been brought up to me for many years and many times. I kind of think that if I were to do a sequel of UHF, there’s no way that it would measure up to people’s nostalgia. Part of the appeal of UHF is it’s something that they loved when they were kids, and they’ve got a really deep place in their heart where they treasure it. No matter how good it is, I think that any kind of sequel people would be measuring it against that nostalgia and it would always fall short. Comedy sequels in general tend to not do well. Eric Appel and I wrote a sequel to [my 2022 biopic] Weird and we’re trying to get that going, but apparently nobody’s interested in it.
Really?
Yeah. And if we were to do a sequel, we already have a script for Weird Two.
Do you come back to life since you died at the end of the first one?
Or did I?
Good point. But I can also imagine a UHF 2. In my mind, it begins like a Rambo sequel where you’re living deep in the jungle and have to be called back to service when Bob regains the rights to U-62. You then reunite with Michael Richards, Victoria Jackson, Fran Drescher, Gedde Watanabe, and get the station going again. People in the town eventually stop watching YouTube and TikTok and embrace analog media.
Well, if you can sell that to Sony or Warner Brothers, let me know.
Let’s get back to Weird 2. The first one was embraced by so many people. Why does nobody want to make a sequel?
Yeah. I mean, everybody liked it, but it wasn’t the direction their studio was going in apparently, or whatever excuse they had.
Daniel Radcliffe was down for it?
Yeah. He was into it.
Does the story go into the ’90s and get into grunge and everything?
I really probably shouldn’t get into it more than that because it’s probably not going to happen. But it was one of those things where we thought because it got nominated for the Emmys and people seemed to enjoy it a lot, we thought, “Oh, certainly somebody would go and make this movie.” And as of right now, that’s not the case.
Do you think the success of the first movie is one reason you’re able to play such big places right now?
I don’t know. I would assume it helped, certainly. Yeah, people just want to see if I really did get assassinated by Madonna’s Cartel. So I guess they’re happy to see I’m still alive.
What’s the status of Dare to Be Stupid on Broadway?
Strangely enough, it’s moving ahead. We’ve already had one reading with actors in New York, which I get to watch on Zoom. And we’re kind of pumping the brakes a little bit until all the music gets cleared. And then I think in January, we’re getting together for two weeks and working out the details and going forward. I have no idea when it’s actually coming to the Broadway stage. I’m not holding my breath. It’s probably going to be a while yet, but it’s very much moving forward, so I’m thrilled about that.
Is the story similar to the movie?
No, it’s not at all. Not at all. It’s not based on the movie.
Is it at all based on your life?
Again, I can’t really give out this information. But all I can say, it’s a jukebox musical incorporating a number of songs from my catalog, and it involves some really amazing Broadway people. I guess I can say Alex Lacamoire is a musical director, which I’m thrilled about.
Alex Timbers, of course, is directing. I’m writing the book with Anthony King and Scott Brown, who did Gutenberg! and Beetlejuice. So it’s like high-powered players involved in this, and it seems to be happening. Knock wood, but I mean, it seems like it’s moving along.
Are the music rights complicated since this is a play and not a tour or album?
I don’t know because I’ve never dealt with Broadway before, but it’s one of those kind of things where I will sleep better knowing that everything’s locked down. Because we had that issue with Weird where I thought we had all the music rights locked down and then all of a sudden like, “Oh no, the Queen estate needs to approve this and the Michael Jackson estate needs to approve this,” after we had shot the movie.
Oh, God…
So I had a couple of sleepless weeks where I’m thinking, “Oh no, my movie’s going to get destroyed.” Thankfully, everybody calmed down, and we got everything cleared. But I get very nervous about those kind of things, so I don’t want to count my chickens until we know that everything’s going to be legally cleared.
Any idea what’ll fill your time next year?
Next year is kind of a big question mark because I don’t have any real big plans other than working on the Broadway musical whenever I’m needed to work on that. Other than that, I don’t know. Things tend to drop into my lap, so I’m sure I will be busy for parts of it, but I’m not quite sure doing what yet. And if it winds up to be a lot of hanging out with my wife at home or going traveling, that’s great too.
Do you ever hear a big song on the radio like “Choosin’ Texas” and start thinking of possible parodies, or does your brain just not go there now?
Usually I don’t hear something and then immediately go, “Oh, I’ve got a great idea. I need to start writing this.” I kind of shut off that part of my brain, and I only write those kind of songs when I’m really focused and trying to do that. I haven’t been haunted over the last 10 years by ideas that I didn’t wind up doing. I’ve basically been focusing on other things. I’m not saying I’m never going to do that again, but it’s just not my priority now and it hasn’t been for a little while.
Do you still want to be touring in your 70s? Do you think the day will come in which you hang up the “Fat” suit and head home?
Well, maybe hang up the fat suit, I don’t know, but I love touring. I honestly do. And this band is amazing. We’re all getting older. That’s just a part of life. I mean, Ruben Valtierra missed the whole first half of this tour because he was undergoing cancer treatments. So the clock is ticking, but we’re all still here and we’re all still enjoying it. So I can’t imagine any reason why we wouldn’t want to keep touring for as long as we’re physically able.
It’s been the same core group of guys for well over 40 years. That’s very unique.
We haven’t driven each other crazy yet. We still enjoy each other’s company and we still love what we do, so it works out.
Click here to read the full article.
