It's Life Jim, But Not As We Know It

Doctor Demento ends his 40 year old radio show. But you can still hear his weekly podcast, provided that you sign up for his online website club.

Money squabbles aside, it's interesting what they seem to say that novelty records don't really exist anymore, or at least not in the way that they once did even as recently as twenty years ago. Is it that there is so much irony in modern pop these days that novelty songs no longer even function as a specific genre anymore? Nonetheless, Doctor Demento was how I often spent many of my Saturday nights back in high school when WNOR ran it around midnight-ish or so and I would I would set my tape deck on record to tape the show to pick out songs that I wanted to keep. One of the biggest chills I ever received involved a show back in the early 90's where he paid tribute to Spike Jones and I had taped the whole show while I was out that night, and the next evening I drove out to North Carolina listening listening to the tape in my car while he played the rarest Spike Jones record out there -- "Running Wild", a song so rare that he could only play half of it because it was the flipside to another more popular hit and it used to be in a jukebox which made half the disk too scratched. Hearing rare music has always has always cast a strange, pagan magick over my body and that one absolutely terrified me, shaking alone in a car out on a lonely country road at night. Even if it was Spike Jones. Maybe, especially because it was Spike Jones. And you'd only hear something like that on Doctor Demento's show, who possesses one of the largest record collections in the entire world.

And although none of my local affiliates have carried his program in ages, it still breaks my heart knowing that he's not out there on free radio anymore. But hey, 40 years is a long run. And the man introduced us to Weird Al Yankovic, which I suppose is a mixed blessing depending on how you look at it.

So in honor of the good doctor, here's "Star Trekkin". Years ago some friends of mine used to sit around in the living room doing whippits while listening to Doctor Demento on the radio and singing along to this song and rolling on the floor laughing their asses off, and ever since then that's all I can picture them doing every time I hear this. Bon voyage, Barret.