Twisted Mister : For Nearly a Quarter-Century, Barry Hansen (Alias Dr. Demento) Has Been the Last Defender of Weird and Quirky Radio Songs

Dressed in a top hat and tux, Barry Hansen sits in his Lakewood back yard with a crushingly heavy stack of old records sitting on his knees. Mugging for a photographer, the bewhiskered 52-year-old huffs, puffs and growls like a werewolf, grabs a black vinyl 45 off the top of the stack and takes a splintery bite out of it.

Hansen has dreams of finding records--bizarre, unimaginably weird records he’s never heard of before. That’s a tall order even for a dream, since he already has well more than 200,000 discs, including titles by such diverse recording artists as Lee Harvey Oswald and Elmo Madwell, the Singing Mayor of Muskogee.

He has several albums, such as “Silence in Stereo,� that have absolutely nothing in their grooves. Then there’s “The Best of Marcel Marceau,� which is also silent except for a burst of applause at the end.

If Alfred E. Neuman burps, a lunatic raves or a Martian sings, Hansen is likely to have it in his shelves, which also house 1920s exercise records and a section devoted to songs about the Mt. St. Helens eruption. As if all this weren’t enough, there is a legion of cottage industry Carusos who routinely send him their homemade cassettes of oddball songs.

His mail averages some 15 tune-packed tapes a week, along with letters from fans, such as the fellow in Boston who writes four missives a week, replete with his lengthy ruminations on episodes from “The Brady Bunch,� or the fan who will hand-print 10 identical letters and mail them separately.

Hansen is the subject of such warped attentions because, when mild-mannered musicologist Barry Hansen sits in front of a radio microphone, he transforms into Dr. Demento. For nearly a quarter-century on his weekly radio show, Hansen’s alter ego has been the last defender of the novelty song, playing quirky tunes about fish heads, dead puppies and monster eggplants that ate Chicago. These songs have all but disappeared from the slick radio formats of today, but they still thrive on his show, which is syndicated in 150 cities.

One place where he isn’t heard is his hometown. Classic rock station KLSX-FM (97.1), which had carried his show since the station’s inception in 1986, recently dropped it. Hansen said the station’s new general manager had decided to discontinue most of its syndicated programming. After receiving hundreds of letters asking for the show’s return, Hansen and station programming director Andy Blume say negotiations are under way to possibly bring it back.

When he’s on the air, Hansen says his job is to chiefly play straight man to the records he spins, not that his quavery voice doesn’t comically break into an adenoidal falsetto with every other word. At stage or TV appearances, he has been known to caper about in his tux a bit, doffing his top hat to applauding fans.

They may regard him as the satrap of the odd, but at home, he’d just as soon curl up with a symphony and a railroading magazine.

He felt the contrasting pulls of the studious and the anarchic even when he was a child growing up in 1940s Minneapolis. Hansen said, “My dad played piano, mostly classical, and had a phonograph and records, so I was exposed to classics from babyhood. By the age of 4, I pestered the family so much about wanting to hear the phonograph that they taught me how to run it. Those were still the days of 78s, so their friends were amazed that they’d let a 4-year-old handle these breakable records, but I was careful and had very few accidents.�

But he found more than enough mishaps in the grooves when he played a 78 of Spike Jones doing “Cocktails for Two,� a staid ballad punctuated with crazed outbursts of four-alarm musical mayhem. Listening to the radio while his mother ironed, he was similarly attracted to goofy items such as Arthur Godfrey’s “Too Fat Polka.�

His record collecting started in earnest in the sixth grade, when he had to take a trolley car across town to his school.

“It passed some of the less genteel parts of town,� Hansen said, “and on one shabby corner there was a store with a sign in a window that said, ‘Used records, 19 cents.’ That meant I could afford them on my leftover lunch money. They were records off jukeboxes, and they had a continuous supply.�

It was then that his musical interests broadened to include R&B; and blues music.

“I remember seeing a Chess record by Muddy Waters. ‘Gee, what a funny name. I’ll see what that sounds like.’ And gradually I got hooked on that kind of music. It was more forceful, and I was fascinated by the sounds.�

Foreshadowing his deejay days, “I’d bring these records to my sixth-grade class, and we’d play them at lunch, so I became quite popular,� Hansen said. “I had something to talk about with the other kids, especially the girls.�

Years of piano lessons, meanwhile, hadn’t produced such enjoyable results.

“By the time I was in junior high, this dilemma had been presented to me that I really wanted to make my life have something to do with music, but the chances were I would never be a world-class musician,� he said. “My fingers would never do what my brain wanted them to, and playing little pieces that Mozart wrote when he was 7 was a terrible chore for me. I was spoiled: I’d bang away for hours and not produce anything that I was happy with on the piano, but the phonograph would produce perfection .�

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Hansen compromised on a career in music education and pursued that goal through college. He got a degree in classical theory from Reed College in Portland, while also haunting the local thrift shops to add to his record collection. Then he moved to Los Angeles in the early ‘60s to be one of the three founding students (another was guitarist John Fahey) in UCLA’s folk music studies program. While not quite a doctor, Hansen did earn his master’s degree in the program.

But in Los Angeles, he again found himself torn between the academic and the visceral. He got a job working at the legendary folk music club the Ash Grove, which at the time was presenting artists like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bill Monroe.

“I got to meet these creators and hear this great music, which all the while I was studying more theoretically over at UCLA. And when I was working there, the whole folk-rock and blues-rock phenomenons started coming into being, and that distracted my attention away from the ancient ballads, the narrative folk songs of the 18th Century and all that.

“I began to think maybe it would be more exciting to be involved in the pop music business than to be a professor,� he said. “I was getting tired of libraries and the realization of what the life of a professor was: teaching the indifferent, publishing arcane things in little journals. I started thinking maybe I’d rather produce records, like Phil Spector.�

Hansen did indeed produce the first sessions of the seminal L.A. folk-blues-jazz-rock band Spirit, and worked as a roadie for Canned Heat, having the not-altogether-desirable honor of lugging their amps up the stairs of the Fillmore. He also worked as a music critic for Hit Parader, Rolling Stone and other publications.

Introduced to disc jockey Steven Siegal (later known as the Obscene Stephen Clean) of KPPC-FM, the grand L.A. underground station of the late ‘60s, Hansen was invited to bring some of his musical rarities down to the station in October of 1970. On his second visit, his playing of Nervous Norvus’ grisly auto wreck tune “Transfusion� prompted a secretary at the station to declare, “You’ve got to be demented to play that!� This inspired Siegal to dub Hansen Dr. Demento.

He was given his own show (which later moved to KMET-FM), where audience response prompted his initial mix of oldies and twisted novelty songs soon gave way to a steady diet of the latter. It took a while longer for his own on-the-air comportment to follow suit. Just being titled Dr. Demento wasn’t enough to inspire dementia, since, he says, nearly everyone at the station had a warped nickname. Instead, as Danny Kaye once declared in song, it took work to be a jester.

“I got a manager who looked for ways to flesh out the character,� Hansen recalled, “and he encouraged me to be a little zanier, bought me a tux and a top hat. Then, when I started making more public appearances and people expected me to be crazy, I started acting the part a little more.�

When not wearing the top hat, Hansen can seem a shy, reserved character.

“Well, I am ,� he said. “It took work, and coaching. That manager had me take acting lessons with an improv acting teacher. That helped. Though I never have really become a comedian--I am just more of a straight man to the records--but still it would give me a rush if I would wave my hat and people would applaud and cheer, so I began tossing the top hat in the air and jumping around a little bit, and trying generally to be a little more animated.�

He recommends having an alter ego.

“I guess it’s helped me,� he said. “I was pretty shy and withdrawn, a bookworm and record worm, and I’m a bit less of that now.�

He used to get recognized more on the street when he lived in Sherman Oaks. He and his wife of 10 years, Sue, have lived in Lakewood for the last three years, a town not known for its celebrities, “except for the Spur Posse,� Hansen notes.

Before Hansen entered into married life, the floor of his previous residence had sagged under the weight of his collection, and the kitchen was full of records.

“When I was a bachelor, all my food came from cans or boxes, so what did I need the kitchen shelves for except records?� he said. “When Sue first saw all the records in there, she said, ‘If you expect me to cook for you, you’ve got to do something about this.’ �

Their present abode looks remarkably normal, with most of the vinyl consigned to a cottage behind the main house and to two rented storage units. The only evidence of Dementia in the living room are the Weird Al Yankovic gold records on the wall: Yankovic, the sole musical novelty star of the ‘80s and ‘90s, got sidetracked from his intended architectural career after Hansen began airing an early effort Yankovic had recorded in a college restroom.

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The biggest chore of Hansen’s job is sifting through the hundreds of home-recorded tapes sent to him, in hopes of discovering the next Yankovic.

“The most time-consuming tapes are ones where the songs are almost good enough, so you keep listening all the way through,� Hansen said.

He also still finds time to frequent local thrift stores looking for rare blues 78s by Skip James and Robert Johnson, or for the few oddball recordings that may have escaped his notice. His obsession has turned into a pretty good living: Along with the radio show, he frequently serves as a consultant for record labels in compiling reissues, such as the Rhino Blues Masters series. The Rhino label will also release a Dr. Demento 25th anniversary CD next year.

On radio, Hansen pretty much has the novelty field to himself, noting that he started at the time when Top 40 radio began omitting novelty records from their playlists. Though he would be content doing “The Dr. Demento Show� for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t mind some similarly crazed company on the airwaves.

“When radio stations shut out this kind of music, it says that instead of giving a well-rounded selection of music, they concentrate on a narrow range of sound, making it boring for someone like me. Up until the ‘70s, Top 40 stations played whatever was selling, so you’d hear Doris Day segue into Little Richard or Streisand played next to Jimmy Reed, and novelty records were a normal part of that.

“You’d never hear that today, and that certainly can’t be inspiring for listeners,� he said. “I think one reason why British musicians are always one step ahead of their American counterparts is that they listen to the BBC, which plays all kinds of music. We’re a very funny country, but you’d never know it by listening to the radio.�