The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 15/10/25
On Being Senselessly Joyful
Last weekend saw the end of an era in US music radio.
(I use the word 'radio' in its traditional sense; you'll see why it may no longer fit further along).
October 11 2025 marked the final edition of The Dr Demento Show - a programme which had run in various forms via various outlets for 55 years - upon the retirement of its presenter and progenitor Barry Hansen.
Hansen's broadcasting career began at KRRC in Portland, Oregon, where Hansen was a student, but - after doing various music-related things such as a roadie, an A&R man and a compiler of compilation LPs for Specialty and Warner Brothers - he found his niche at KPPC in Pasadena, California in 1970, where he gradually turned his rock oldies show into a showcase for novelty recordings of past and present. This format he took on to various stations in the Los Angeles area.
The show had two different formats during the subsequent two decades: a four-hour show for local audiences; and a two-hour version for national and international syndication.
Changes in demographics and in media-ownership rules from the late 1980s onwards meant that - far from enhancing 'consumer choice' - the radio landscape became much narrower, and there was no longer space for the more outré programmes such as Dr Demento's. Syndication opportunities shrank almost to nothing, and the broadcast version of the show ended in 2010. The show continued online until this year, with the last all-new edition bing released at the end of May 2025, with the final few months consisting of retrospectives.
And in such ways are all the joys and varieties sucked out of the world. Another triumph for the Great God Market!
But, I hear you ask (yes I do; I can hear you from here), where does Yer Judge™ come into all this? How could he know about a radio show which was obscure enough even in its own land?
Well, as with my love of baseball I owe it to the US' Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. On one of those late nights when there was no sport of any kind being broadcast, I tuned in to find a programme playing odd songs. I stayed to hear more, and found that The Dr Demento Show (for it was it) was broadcast on AFN every Sunday night. It became a regular listen for as long as I could (reception conditions permitting). As I wasn't working at that time, staying awake until two in the morning was no great issue, although it may have cost me a job when I went into an interview one Monday morning somewhat sleep-deprived and with John Prine's Let's Talk Dirty In Hawaiian going round and round in my head.
Eventually, slightly gainful employment greatly reduced my opportunities to hear the Good Doctor, along with the end of the Cold War reducing (and then eliminating altogether) the medium-wave service of AFN out of Germany.
And that, I thought, was that.
Until I finally got online in the summer of 2001 and, as part of my exploration of this whole new dimension, I found references to the show and duly followed them up. I discovered that there were some radio stations in the US which broadcast the show and streamed it (although by rights they shouldn't have been doing); and that there were also repositories of audio files of the programme. Each week thereafter, I would listen or download (not easy when, for at least the first couple of years, I was on 56k dial-up) and enjoy a wide variety of 'novelty' music from all eras, be it the innuendo-laden songs of Ruth Wallis or the contemporary cultural and political satires of 'Weird Al' Yankovic and Roy Zimmerman.
But once syndication stopped and, perforce, all streaming ceased, that appeared to be it. But during the eight years or so that I was able to catch the show again, I amassed a collection of tracks which - somewhat on the lines of my Caught On The Net series of home-made compilations - I curated a number of compilations under the rubric of Demented Discs.
As a farewell to the Doc, I will now give you no fewer than twelve examples of what has amused - and continues to amuse - me from Barry Hansen's half-century-plus of giving us a damn good laugh; tracks I would almost certainly never had heard but for his weekly prescriptions.
(If the Doc had his Funny Five, I suppose that what follows could be called the Daft Dozen.)
The oldest track dates from 1948, and comes from Ruth Wallis, doyenne of post-war near-the-knuckle performers:
To the mid-1960s now and - from the comedy LP When You're In Love, The Whole World Is Jewish - Frank Gallop gives us The Ballad Of Irving:
1974 saw the release of the live album "Good Though! by the American folk-singer, raconteur and political activist Bruce 'Utah' Phillips. From it comes this shaggy-dog tale of what happened in one of the jobs he took whilst living the hobo life. Warning! This starts with one of the most wonderfully groansome puns you could ever expect to hear:
On a completely different track (sorry!), we go to 1984 and Julie Brown's most famous song, one which would almost certainly never get airplay anywhere nowadays:
1994 brought us the Georgia stand-up Jeff Foxworthy's definitions of what defines a 'redneck', here with musical accompaniment:
Staying with Americana of the off-kilter kind, in 1996 Dana Lyons gave us an inspiring tale of the Great Bovine Uprising:
I've referred you to the work of the Anglo-Canadian duo George Bowser and Ricky Blue before, but here's another favourite, reminding us of something of fundamental importance in the medical world:
Of course, this wouldn't be a proper list without including Dr Demento's most famous discovery, 'Weird Al' Yankovic. Here he is in 1999 with his take on one of the most famous American songs and one of the world's most famous movies at one and the same time:
(It's worth noting that both George Lucas and Don McLean were delighted by this track; I suppose that when you've been parodied by 'Weird Al', you've had confirmation that you have finally made it.)
Into the twenty-first century now, and Eric 'Red' Schwartz with an updating of another American cultural icon:
In 2002, the (mostly) a cappella group Da Vinci's Notebook provided us with a reminder - just as with Irving - of how cultural stereotypes play a big part in comedy (although some of accents essayed here sound nearer to Bengaluru than Ballybofey):
A rather bitter-sweet number now, as the late Logan Whitehurst and his Junior Science Club give us a track which combines the slightly wacky with a wonderful musicality which is reminiscent of the best of late sixties pop. It's bitter-sweet because brain and spinal cancer carried Logan out of the world in 2006 at the age of just twenty-nine:
And finally from 2008, here is Roy Zimmerman - the natural heir to Tom Lehrer in musical-political satire - trying to be up-beat about his homeland:
Thanks for all the fun, Doc. Have a long and happy retirement in the shade of the smogberry trees and - as you used to enjoin us to do at the end of every show - "Stay deeee-MENT-ed!"
