RIP Mojo Nixon

Back in junior high and high school, I hung around with a group of guys who listened to the syndicated Dr. Demento show on radio each Sunday night and then talked about the show all the next week at school.

Dr. Demento’s radio shows specializes in novelty and comedy songs, but he also turned me on to blues musician Blind Willie Johnson so he appreciate all types of music. Demento abandoned traditional radio in about 2007, and now does his thing online because of course everything needs to be on the internet now. Dr Demento is probably most famous for brining Weird Al to wider attention back in the early 1980s when Al was just a weirdo with an accordion and funny songs.

We were the kids who’d sing goofy songs like “Fish Heads“, proudly memorizing that part where the lyrics get fast at the end (“Roly-poly fish heads are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women…”). And then we’d insist on explaining how the song was written and performed by the guy who played the kid on the old TV show Lost In Space, even if you had no interest in novelty songs, fish heads or old science fiction shows.

Here’s how you had to listen to Dr. Demento back in the day: You had to have tape player with two cassette decks:

You needed two tape decks, because iTunes and Spotify didn’t exist yet and making playlists of custom songs was a pain in the ass process which required dedication.

(a) You’d tape the entire Dr. Demento show as it played live on air.

(b) You’d put the freshly recorded tape in one side of the tape deck, and a blank cassette tape in the other tape deck.

(c) You’d pick the songs you like the most, and record them from the old tape to the new tape, because you didn’t want to listen to the crap songs and have to fast-forward or re-wind endlessly to get to the good stuff.

(d) You’d listen to the tapes with friends in the back of class on your Walkman portable cassette player and the teacher would get upset because you were laughing about funny songs rather than learning about the Golgi Apparatus.

Anyway, one of the songs I heard on Dr. Demento was “Elvis is Everywhere” by a guy named Mojo Nixon, who performed with another guy named Skid Roper. I can safely assume those were not the names on their birth certificates, but frankly I don’t care what their legal names were.

Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper had a few minor hit songs, including “Elvis is Everywhere.” The song is sort of old-style rockabilly with goofy lyrics about the omnipresence and omnipotence of Elvis Presley who is so amazing he built Stonehenge.