Doctor Demento Covered in Punk
Demented Punk Records
Wow! This package has everything! Two full-length CD’s, a booklet, trading cards, and a lapel pin of a Rolly-Polly Fish Head! Unless you’ve been living in our Mars colony, you know Dr Demento is the king of novelty records. He began in 1970 Los Angeles and eventually went national. He took novelty records and made them sort of respectable, and he compiled requests to create a Top 10. He brought new songs and classic silliness dating back to WW2 to the airwaves, and while the material is comic, its often packed with social commentary or at least a skewed self-reflexive look at the music industry.
Here we find many of his show favorites reinterpreted by a wide range of punkers. Joan Jett covers the Rocky Horror opener “Science Fiction / Double Feature,” we hear Weird Al Yankovic make fun of Michael Jackson with “Eat It”, and “Fluffy” gets a fresh treatment by Fred Schneider of the B-52’s. The Vandals, William Shatner, and Adam West (the original TV Batman) bow in for various songs, and the pick of the litter is Weird Al coming back to cover the Ramones “Beat on the Brat” There’s two hours of material, with the Doctor talking about the bands and their history between tracks. A colorful and informative booklet adds detail and pictures, and some trading cards were tucked in my copy. If you want to get together a swap, drop me a note. The audio is clear and only needs a little static and fading to bring us all back to the days of tuning a real radio late at night, hoping for cool music form a distant radio tower. This is what I want for Christmas…Oh wait, I already have mine.
