Ryan Polei
Click here to watch an audio slideshow of the KCPR dedication with Weird Al Yankovic
Barely a day goes by in the Mustang Daily newsroom without hearing a tour guide tell visitors the exploits of a certain curly-haired musician that recorded his first song in the men’s bathroom down the hall.
Weird Al Yankovic came back to his radio roots to dedicate the new KCPR station on Tuesday, so we finally had the real thing walking in the halls of the Graphic Arts building.
It was surreal.
“It’s a trip down memory lane,” he said of his return to building 26. “It still feels like home although (the studio) is like a carcass now.
“I’m glad I got to kind of say goodbye to it today.”
He paid a visit to the old KCPR station on the second floor and peeked into the bathroom that became a legend after he recorded “My Bologna” in it.
“It’s pretty similar,” he said of the bathroom, which he jokingly called “Studio 229.”
Upstairs, he admired the new studio and talked about his days as a student DJ.
“KCPR is where I first developed a personality,” he said. “Being on the air for three hours a week at KCPR prepared me for my career a lot more than all the time I spent with architecture.”
He insisted that the story of him flushing a toilet on the air was merely an urban legend but admitted that his weekly “Weird Al” show was pretty random and bizarre.
“We did character comedy and all sorts of bizarre music that wasn’t being played at KCPR or anywhere in San Luis Obispo,” he said. “The station kind of became a haven to play the records that no one else was playing.”
There were others at the dedication that remembered Yankovic’s college days as well.
Architecture professor Don Swearingen had him as a student and remembered one incident the night before a project was due. While most architecture students stay up in the lab, Yankovic wasn’t there when he went to check on his class’ progress.
The other students didn’t know where he went but thought he had mentioned playing some music.
“I walked out into the hallway and I can hear accordion music,” Swearingen said. “And I followed the hallway down to the men’s bathroom in the architecture building; I walked in and there’s Al, sitting there cross-legged, facing the wall, singing into the urinal.
“I said, ‘Al, what are you doing?’ He said, ‘I like the sound; it’s pear-shaped tones.’ I said ‘Al, we have to get out of here; this is really weird.’ So we left.”
Later he found out that Yankovic just had “fantastic time-management skills” – he had already finished his project and just went to the lab to add final touches.
Although Yankovic never used his architecture degree, Swearingen thinks the skills acquired during school – public speaking, work ethic and time management – were just applied in a different direction.
Yankovic has come a long way since singing in a bathroom and the time came for him to dedicate KCPR’s new station.
He read off a timeline of epic moments in the station’s existence, including a familiar one: “In 1979, a young architecture student and KCPR disc jockey named Albert Yankovic takes his accordion into the men’s bathroom across the hall from the station and changes the face of popular music forever,” he said dramatically.
What does he see for the future? An anti-gravity studio with jetpacks for all of the DJs. “And brain implants mandatory for all listeners,” he said.
The dedication was part of the journalism department’s first Journalism Week. Yankovic also performed at the Performing Arts Center Tuesday night.
Someone asked him if he was “on fire” since there was a fire near his Cleveland show and portions of the hill near campus were in flames Tuesday morning.
“I make sure there’s a fire somewhere nearby wherever we’re doing a concert,” he joked.