LOS ANGELES - Listen closely, that's the sound of demented music dying that you're hearing on your radio.
After nearly 40 years of broadcasting catchy little tunes celebrating everything from dogs getting run over by lawnmowers to cockroaches devouring entire cities, Dr. Demento is discontinuing his syndicated radio show.
By summer's end, the good doctor's hyper-enthusiastic voice will be heard only on the Internet as it introduces oddball classics such as "There's a Fungus Among Us," "Fish Heads" and "Dead Puppies."
For decades Demento has been a Sunday-night fixture on radio stations across the country, keeping alive the music of political satirists like Tom Lehrer ("The Vatican Rag"), while making a star of "Weird Al" Yankovic, whose first hit, "My Bologna," debuted on the doctor's show.
"He kept my whole career alive by playing Freberg records constantly," says Stan Freberg, the Grammy-winning song satirist who, at 83, still writes and performs.
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Recently, the radio stations carrying Demento's show declined to fewer than a dozen.
Over the decades, Demento, who was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame last year, has kept his playlists contemporary. But it was changing radio formats that did in his syndicated show, said Demento, 69, who in a parallel life is Barret Hansen, music writer and ethnomusicologist. His college master's thesis was on the evolution of rhythm and blues.
"With the increasingly 'narrowcasting,' as they call it, of radio, where stations will pick one relatively restricted format and stick with it 24 hours a day … my show just got perhaps a little too odd of a duck to fit in," he said.
The program has always been built on Demento's personal music collection, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands and includes every recording format from antique wax cylinders to modern-day digital downloads. He says he's long since lost count of how many recordings he keeps in the Southern California home he shares with his wife, Sue, but puts the number somewhere north of 300,000.
"I prefer to think of it as just transitioning to a new medium rather than it coming to an end," he says of the show, which will mark its 40th anniversary in October.
Dr. Demento online:
