If you’re into outsider music, this holiday season is historic: it’s the first one in my lifetime without The Dr. Demento Show on the air! The doctor decided that 55 years was a good time to call it a show, and hopefully Barret Hansen is enjoying his retirement. But the end of the show does leave a big void for those of us who keep an ear out for outsider musicians. (It certainly means we’ll hear “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes less often.)
Fortunately, there’s a huge online archive we can revisit anytime we like. Not only are there plenty of oddball holiday songs in that archive, there’s this one, which Dr. Demento performed along with the one and only Wild Man Fischer.
Where do I even start with the story of Lawrence Wayne Fischer? People have written it into books and added it to documentary films, and there are still so many questions about this man and his music. We know the answer to one of those questions: they say that none other than Solomon Burke dubbed his onetime opening act “Wild Man,” for his uninhibited performance style and seemingly stream of consciousness songs that had won him a small but dedicated following in southern California.
Now, being freaky in the Hollywood music scene of that time almost guaranteed a musician a few fans. But Fischer came by his freakiness extremely honestly; “the pep” that he said fueled his music was likely a byproduct of what doctors labeled schizophrenia and manic depression. Before he ever started offering “new kinds of songs for sale” on the street for a nickel, he’d been committed to a mental hospital for rushing at his mother with a knife.
And those ups and downs continued throughout his life and colored his entire experience on the outskirts of the music business. Frank Zappa signed Fischer to a record contract and produced his debut album, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer, but the two eventually fell out. You could say it was over money, since Fischer claimed FZ didn’t pay him the royalties he was owed, but there was more to the story: when Fischer showed up at the Zappa house to talk money, he threw a glass bottle near little Moon Unit Zappa. The baby was ok (and, years later, her song “Valley Girl” would show up on lots of radio shows, including Dr. Demento’s), but the professional damage had been done. Gail Zappa, who took over the family business after Frank died, pointedly refused to re-release An Evening With Wild Man Fischer on CD. The adult Zappa children had to do it after Gail’s passing.
Still, Fischer kept at his music, all made his way and often with personal demons getting in the way. Rhino Records became a record label to release a Fischer album; it was their first-ever release. Rhino also threw the guy out of its flagship record store because he kept wresting albums out of customers’ hands and replacing them with his own works. But he always had believers, too. At one point the Wild Man became telephone pals with Rosemary Clooney. If that’s not the name you expected to find at the end of that last sentence, keep in mind that she, like Fischer, was a singer who’d faced her share of mental health struggles. The two even recorded a duet in 1986, a song called “It’s a Hard Business.” Their producer was another musician with a taste for the bizarre, Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO.
Which brings me to today’s song choice. As long as there’s been music, and in particular recorded music, there have been weirdos and oddities and crackpots adding their voices to the mix. But their music rarely traveled far, because there wasn’t a lot of room for it in mass media. (Case in point: Wild Man Fischer once performed on “Laugh-In,” and he left the audience for this way-out, allegedly counterculture-adjacent network TV show thoroughly baffled.) Long before the internet let us all find our people, Dr. Demento’s show put what Irwin Chusid would later call “incorrect music” in the ears of the other weirdos and oddities and crackpots who were at the other end of the broadcast. The outsiders stayed outside – we didn’t replace our pop stars with Wild Men Fischers, who still sounded to a lot of people like yellers on street corners – but they had a spot in the culture. And as Mark Motherbaugh once said of the Wild Man, from there they occasionally “mainlined into the creative subconscious.”
So what better way to pay tribute to Dr. Demento than by playing some of the music he helped spread? And so much the better that it’s a song he helps perform!
