Road Trip Album Picks: "R.O. Magic: The Best of R.O. Manse"

WHAT: Comedy album with music and sketches
LABEL: A Special Thing Records, 2008
GOOD IF YOU LIKE: 80s music, novelty albums, fighting
WHERE TO FIND IT: Online or bust
LENGTH: 63 minutes

The novelty record is experiencing something of a revival. Every few years "Weird Al" Yankovic puts out something new that burns up the charts, and the Conchords had a great run on TV. Rather than go with parodies, R.O. Manse has some sketches, some faux interviews, some songs, and more to make what basically amounts to a pretty great CD of character development. We learn who this guy is, we hear some highlights from his career, we meet his ex-wife... this is a fleshed-out guy.

With numerous special guests and all sorts of gags, this album is pretty all over the place. With 26 tracks spanning a variety of styles, there are a surprising number of great gags here-- the suite of 1980s movie theme songs, for example, are pretty fantastic. The album has a couple of songs which qualify as "hit singles" of sorts, awesome little ditties that work really well outside the context of the album. "Ladyboy" and "I Have a Synthesizer" are clearly the two shining stars of the album, were you to play them for a friend, the former of which is a surprisingly catchy song that-- unlike many novelty songs-- manages to play it straight. (As it were.)

If you can pick up a few tracks odds are you'll enjoy this-- it's a few steps beyond the recordings from various tunesmiths you'd here on Dr. Demento, and while pretty goofy, tracks like "Ladyboy" take comedy songwriting in a direction where it's funny without being overtly jokey-- that's quite a challenge. Well done! Pick this up if you're looking for comedy mixed with 1980s synthesized new wave songs, because it manages to pull it off nicely.

Road Trip Album Picks: Dr. Demento's 20th Anniversary Collection

WHAT: Collection of some of the best-known comedy and novelty songs of all time
LABEL: Rhino Records
GOOD IF YOU LIKE: Dr. Demento, classic comedy, pop culture nuggets
WHERE TO FIND IT: Widely available at better record stores

The subtitle of this album is "The Greatest Novelty Records of All Time," which is a fair description for this double-disc collection. I've had this in my possession for years, and looking at it then, a lot of it wasn't too funny. On the other hand, some of it was pretty spectacular. The word "Records" is really telling, because pretty much everything here was released during the era of vinyl and this collection dates back to 1991, when CDs were just starting to really replace tapes and licorice pizzas.

"Novelty" is another key word, because a lot of this isn't particularly funny, just required listening for young pop culture fanatics. Regardless of your opinion of the cultural value of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, you can't say that it isn't important to hear "The Time Warp" so you know what it is. The same can be said of "Surfin' Bird," which isn't a comedy track so much as it is something of a garage song that is, to say the least, likely to invite smiles.

Since some of the tracks date back over 50 years, odds are modern ears aren't going to take much delight in Spike Jones and his City Slickers or Ray Stevens due to a lack of context or the fact that they did not age well. On the other hand, the great "Weird Al" Yankovic, Frank Zappa, Tom Lehrer, and Steve Martin appear here, as does Shel Silverstein. Novelty nuggets like "Star Trekkin'" work great as a way to infuriate your fellow passengers, while "Fish Heads" may well be the greatest novelty record ever made. Take that as you will. "Monster Mash" and "Purple People Eater" can be found here too, making this the ultimate snapshot of the best the Dr. Demento radio program had to offer.

Poison tracks include:

• Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!
• Witch Doctor
• Junk Food Junkie
• The Battle of Kookamonga

There's little in the way of sketches here, but you'll find a lot of songs you or your parents found amusing at some point in their lives. "Beep Beep," "King Tut," and "Eat It" are all cultural treasures, but I can't guarantee that this two-hour collection of 36 tracks is going to bring a smile to your face unless you enjoy watching others suffer. And really, isn't that the half of the fun when it comes to road trips?

Oh, and I would also give this album my highest possible rating as a gift to any comedy-inclined tweens you may know. They will enjoy parts of it now, infuriate their friends and family with it, and outgrow it before they turn 25 so they can move on to better music and comedy. Really, you're doing them a huge favor.

Road Trip Album Picks: Dr. Demento's Basement Tapes #1

WHAT: A collection of novelty songs originally released in 1992
LABEL: Demento Society
GOOD IF YOU LIKE: Things that weren't funny 17 years ago either
WHERE TO FIND IT: eBay, the places you get music and don't pay for it-- this is now an out-of-production collectible

Nothing says "fuck you" like picking an album for a long drive that even you won't like. If Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" is out of reach, and you're carting around a bunch of ingrates who didn't pitch in for gas, I suggest you track down the 26 tracks of misery collectively known as Dr. Demento's Basement Tapes #1. I owned this for several years because I listened to his show as a kid and joined the fan club, and then sold them all within the past year because there's nobody I associate with deserving of what can only be loosely termed "entertainment" of this nature.

Songs featured-- I hesitate to say "highlights"-- include:

"It's Alive", a failed sequel to Monster Mash involving rapping

"Ballad of Woody and Mia", needs no description but it dates the collection nicely

"They Don't Wear Pants in the Southern Part of France", also needs no description

"Baby I'm Dead", an Elvis style-parody with one joke spread over 3 minutes

"Take Me Out To The Ball Game", again, what more do you need to know?

While the "Basement Tapes" series would go on to be of interest to fans of "Weird Al" Yankovic for the inclusion of unreleased songs and demos-- which were actually "rare tracks" pre-Internet-- this album doesn't have any of that. The Dr. Demento Show mixed the world's most famous comedians alongside submissions he got in the mail to produce one of the most eclectic and popular syndicated radio programs of the late 20th Century. The Dr. Demento retail collections better reflect the mix you'd find on his shows. This is basically the mail stuff.

If you have a car full of picky comedy fans, nothing says pre-made torture mix tape like Dr. Demento's Basement Tapes #1. And for particularly long trips, there are severalvolumes from which to choose.