The Legend of Dickie Goodman

From BIUL III.

Luckily, I was a kid when radio personalities like Don Imus and Dickie Goodman had (what could charitably be called) their “heyday”. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be an adult and hear this stupid, juvenile shit coming out of the radio.

As a boy, I fake-prayed while in church, but I really prayed that Don Imus’ “Moby Worm” would attack and destroy my elementary school building. I never considered that it was just a dumb bit. I truly believed that Imus took calls from callers my age, and subsequently ordered a gargantuan worm to crush a school in suburban New Jersey.

JACK MOTHERFUCKING DAVIS. (That’s Moby Worm at top.)

I also thought the song parodies were funny. Song parodies are never funny. Never.

I learned this lesson after discovering the Dr. Demento Show. That’s where “Weird” Al Yankovic was discovered; he is literally the only person who can make a song parody funny or good, because he was grandfathered in at the right time. Everything else is Gong Show material.

“Weird” Al Yankovic shares the same innocent love for Phantom Menace as I do. Here’s your proof. He made Don MacLean’s “American Pie” actually listenable and poignant.

That’s as good as it gets for song parodies. Yankovic works magic with both the lyrics and his singing; he matches or exceeds MacLean’s emotional beats. He sings with the joy and affection I also felt regarding that day in 1999. He gives a detailed account of the movie’s plot, wittily, in the cadence of the original song. If there exists a hierarchy of musical parodists, “Weird” Al Yankovic is surely its Mozart.

Back to “morning zoo” radio.

In the industry, disc jockeys classify radio bits as a “shoot” or a “work”. If the bit is successfully executed, it’s a “work”. If it falls apart and the deejay needs to abort, it’s a “shoot”. Generally, radio professionals can salvage a shoot without the listeners realizing something’s wrong. It’s similar to “kayfabe” in wrestling; everything’s fine, so long as you don’t break character. 

Something else I did in my teens; make tape recordings that no one would ever want to hear. Filthy rhymes, unfunny jokes, an uninformed sense of schoolyard sexual knowledge… and song parodies. Before I hit twenty, I had seen the inherent shittiness of the entire concept for myself. I never gave a thought to making a career of it.

Dickie Goodman was this guy who snuck in during radio’s Golden Age (the 1950’s), who figured out how to dub recordings together. This way, he would take the form of the classic interviewer, and his subject could be anything from aliens, to Richard Nixon, to the shark from Jaws. Basically, anything that was news at the time.

The voice of the subject would be hacked-out snippets of Top 40 hits. I’m not even joking. It’s like Bumblebee from Transformers, but way, way worse.

Dickie Goodman’s works aren’t just unfunny- they’re anti-funny. They eradicate any traces of actual humor and fill the void with anti-humor foam. To write the “jokes” that Goodman wrote, you have to nurse a hatred in your heart for the sound of laughter, for years. Any person that finds Dickie Goodman funny is a reptoid.

But here’s the thing. Like reptoids, Dickie Goodman serves a purpose. If you squint, you could almost see him as a forerunner to Internet dada phenomena like “YouTube Poop”. It’s a stretch, but like vaporwave, Goodman inadvertently provides a glimpse into the everyday culture of decades past.

Sometimes a song that set the world on fire forty years ago slips through the cracks of corporate ownership, and never exists on any medium after vinyl. Here’s where Dickie comes in, and reminds us that pop music stinks on hot ice in any decade, because it’s defined by how much money it makes, which is a poor way to judge anything creative. There are always more stupid people than smart ones. Enough people bought Mr. Jaws to make it go gold, and convince Dickie Goodman to stretch a joke miles beyond its breaking point.

(I know, right? Can you believe your eyes? A Star Wars parody– in 1977?!?)

Last night, as I lay awake in bed, eyes wide open, I thought, “What if I suddenly died, would my consciousness simply end? Would that not be the same as the ‘end of the world’?” Then, I ponder the inexplicable rage I feel after even moments of a Dickie Goodman track. Did he experience that rancor, in person, from others? Like, “Holy shit Dickie, you’re still doing this? It’s 19-eighty-fucking-5, for Christ’s sake! Get a grip! And why do your kids’ names all start with ‘J’? What does that mean?” 

Dickie Goodman effectively ended his own unique world in 1989. No one has attempted to fill his shoes. I have faint memories of his LPs on the wooden prize racks of county fair tents, next to the Def Leppard wallets and the stretched-out Pepsi bottles.

Historians ponder why Goodman felt the need to alter “Watergate” and not “Superfly”. Just kidding, historians ponder no such thing.

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