An Interview with Dr. Demento

Steve Johnson: We'll start with Cruise Through The Blues. Did Rhino decide to produce the book and ask you to write it?
Dr. Demento: Yes. This was planned to be part of a series of guidebooks to different genres of music. So far they've done mine and one other, which I had nothing to do with, and whether any more are going to see the light of day I don't know. But anyway, that was the genesis of it.

SJ: How did you go about researching the book?
Dr. D: Well, blues has been...for a while it was really my first love, before my career took a left turn into the Dr. Demento Show -- the comedy and novelty stuff. I did a lot of writing on blues and other roots of rock type music in the 60s and 70s for Hit Parader, Rolling Stone, and things like that. I worked at a local club called The Ash Grove in the 60s and got to meet and sometimes know a good many of the blues musicians who were around at that time like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, "Lightnin'" Hopkins, and dozens more. So that was part of it, and I just kept up with my reading. This book is meant to be an introduction rather than an original piece of field research. It's meant to be an introduction to the genre for people who'd like to know a little more about it.

SJ: How did you decide which artists to include in the book?
Dr. D: It was just my judgment based on knowing the field pretty well for forty years.

SJ: Ok. A sort of related question -- I know you've got an extensive collection of records -- are most of the records pictured in the book yours?
Dr. D: Yes. All the 78s and 45s and many of the LPs are mine.

SJ: What is it that appeals to you most about the blues?
Dr. D: Well, when I first discovered it in the 50s, the electric blues -- people like Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker -- was fairly new music at that time. We're not talking about something old timey. This was music that was still alive and singles were coming out all the time, and this was electric blues. To me it sounded like rock n' roll, which I'd certainly grown to love in the heyday of Elvis and Chuck Berry and people like that. But blues was just as electric and deeper. So that's basically how I first came to love blues, and after Sam Charter's book The Country Blues came out in 1959 I realized that this electric music had come from somewhere else. I'd heard some Lead Belly and Josh White, but that book helped me kind of fill in the pieces. I began searching out everything I could find, both records and written material about the older styles of blues -- the 20s, 30s, 40s, whatever -- hearing as many of the live musicians as were still on the road, at the Ash Grove and other places. As I said, a good many of them were still touring -- Skip James came through there.

SJ: You mention throughout the book just what a wide appeal the blues has. I hadn't realized how many songs and names and whatnot of later bands come from the blues.
Dr. D: Yes. One story I should have put in there is that I was present when two of those names were thought up -- one being Canned Heat. The other one was the Stone Ponys, which is the band that Linda Ronstadt become prominent in before she went out on her own. They had a hit called "Different Drum" that featured Linda, and they were named after a Charlie Patton song. I was sitting around with their first manager and the members of the band -- they all hung around the Ash Grove, where I worked -- and we were tossing names around of blues songs that had a good ring to them. I was not the one who came up with Stone Pony, but I did say, "Oh, that's great."

SJ: The other type of music you're heavily involved in is novelty music -- how did you get into that?
Dr. D: Well, I've been into that, actually, since I was four years old and my dad brought home some Spike Jones records, which were new at the time. My dad thought that the little boy would like all the excitement, and I certainly did. So that was a part of what I liked all along. In the 50s, when I was in junior high and high school, lots of novelty songs came out like "The Purple People Eater" and, a little later, "Monster Mash" -- but for years that was just another part of the universe of rock n' roll. In 1970 I got offered two hours a week to play "rock n' roll oddities" on the radio. It was supposed to be just an oldies show, but I was already known by that time as someone who had a big record collection and I'd done some writing for Rolling Stone and Hit Parader, as I mentioned. So I was known as somebody who knew a lot about the early days of rock n' roll and had lots of interesting records. Based on that, I was offered a two-hour-a-week show that actually started as a guest appearance on somebody else's show, and then they gave me my own two hours to play unusual oldies -- not necessarily funny stuff, but unusual oldies. That's how the Dr. Demento show started.

SJ: Where did you get the name Dr. Demento?
Dr D: I was given the name after a chance remark by one of the staffers at this radio station that I "had to be demented" to play some of the things that I played. At first maybe there were two, three funny songs per show, but I quickly found that the novelty songs got more requests than anything else. For some reason people had a hunger for hearing that sort of thing, so they took over the show. Then I gradually expanded the show so it wasn't just rock n' roll novelty songs. It was all kinds of funny music, and people seemed to welcome hearing it all. So in addition to novelties from the golden age of the 45 I expanded into older stuff like Spike Jones and newer things like what was coming out right then -- Frank Zappa, for example. It wasn't too long after that before some musicians sent in a tape of some funny songs they'd made up themselves. After consulting with the managers of the station, they gave me the okay to play it on the air. That inspired a good many other people to make up songs and send in tapes. A year later one of these was a sixteen-year-old kid named Alfred Yankovic and that led to...lots of things.
SJ: The rest is history.
Dr. D: Right.

SJ: How many tapes do you get in an average week?
Dr. D: Now it's mostly CDs that people send, we still get some tapes, but total it's around 15 or 20 a week on average.
SJ: And you go through those all yourself?
Dr. D: Yes -- that's a big part of the job description.

SJ: It seems like nowadays "funny songs" are almost a separate genre, where in the 50s and 60s they were just another part of the rock mainstream.
Dr. D: In the earlier times you had people who would specialize in funny stuff and other people who would do funny stuff as just part of a general musical career. Sheb Wooley, who did "The Purple People Eater," made a great many records of just sort of straightforward country songs. Then after "The Purple People Eater" he decided to adopt a separate alter ego for his funny stuff, which was the name Ben Colder. That name may be forgotten today, but there were a lot of Ben Colder albums sold in the 60s

SJ:I guess the big thing in the music industry now is Napster -- well maybe not Napster anymore, but online trading of music in general. How do you feel about that?
Dr. D: Well, to me it's just a more sophisticated variation on trading tapes, which people have been doing for years. When I was a kid I traded reel-to-reel tapes with my friends, then cassettes came in, and CD burners -- Napster's just another way of doing that. I feel the music business was perhaps overstating the threat of it. Of course, pre-recorded music sales have dropped a little bit in the last year but I tend to blame that on the economy. That and, perhaps, music not being quite as exciting as it was at certain other times -- though we can't go too far with that blanket statement -- there's music still today that excites people.

SJ: It seems like for a lot of types of music it [online trading] is really more helpful than harmful.
Dr. D: Yes, there've been a couple of songs that I've played on the show which make the point that Napster really exposes more people to music that they might not have heard otherwise. Certainly in my tape-trading days if there was something on a reel of tape that I really liked I would buy the record because I'd get tired of trying to find song 17 on the reel.

SJ: We [the Hex Games staff] originally met you at Marcon. Do you do a lot of science fiction conventions?
Dr. D: Oh, I do four or five a year.

SJ:How did you originally get hooked into that?
Dr. D: The first one I did was in Lansing, Michigan about five years ago -- '94 or '95, I guess it was. Somebody just thought it might be a good idea to bring me in and somebody from another convention saw me and invited me to come to that one. Eventually I got invited to Marcon for the first time, 3 years ago, and they've had me back every year since and have booked me for next year, too. It seems to be fun for all of us -- I'm doing a couple in Chicago over the winter.

SJ: I guess there's a lot of crossover -- a lot of gamers and comic book fans grew up on your show -- I know most of the Hex staff did. And there's the whole filking element as well.
Dr. D: Right, and I play filk songs on my show from time to time, of course. Though some people can't understand why I can't play something with seventeen verses and choruses about a book that only the devotees have read, recorded from the audience. Doesn't quite make good radio material. Some people don't understand that. But on the other hand there are some things from the filk world that I have played that seem to be very effective -- all the way from Leslie Fish to Ookla the Mok.

SJ: It's interesting that you mentioned the fact that a lot of filk songs aren't very accessible. I recently wrote an article about how I loved the kind of stuff you play on your show, but haven't ever really understood the appeal of filking. One of the things I mentioned was how you had to know such specific information to get the jokes of a lot of filk songs.
Dr. D: And some of the jokes are about other filk songs, too. But, you know, it's not meant to be for a mass audience, it's meant to be a gathering of friends. It really grows out of the hootenanny spirit of folk music. In fact there are filkers who learned their initial chops on banjo and guitar while listening to Pete Seeger back in the early 60s. Pete Seeger encouraged it as a social thing. Pete was certainly happy enough when he had a good selling record or would get 10,000 people come to a concert, but for him the heart of it was really friends getting together and sharing songs. That spirit lives on in the filk rooms.