Misplaced Pages

"Albuquerque" is the last song of "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1999 album Running with Scissors. At 11 minutes and 23 seconds, it is the longest song Yankovic has ever recorded, surpassing Trapped in the Drive-Thru.

With the exception of the choruses and occasional bridges, the track is mostly a spoken word narration about a made-up person's life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after winning a first-class one-way airplane ticket to the city. According to Yankovic, the song is in the style of the "hard-driving rock narrative" of artists like The Rugburns, Mojo Nixon and George Thorogood.

Writing

In a video on GQ where he broke down his most iconic songs, Yankovic said he had finished writing the song and needed to cut it down to song length, but then he decided "No! I'm not going to cut it down, I'm just going to do the whole thing!"

Yankovic set off to write the lengthy song, considering it as a final track for Running with Scissors. The long, meandering story was not expected to be popular and instead Yankovic wanted to compose a song "that's just going to annoy people for 12 minutes", making it feel like an "odyssey" for the listener after making it through to the end. Yankovic described writing the song as "free flowing," writing down a great deal of material he thought would be funny including previous anecdotes he had recorded, and trimming it down to form a lengthy "semi-cohesive story." The lyrics were too long to include in the liner notes for the album (it ends mid-sentence and goes into a written apology by Yankovic), saying that the listener will have to figure them out for themselves. The full lyrics were posted to Yankovic's website.

Plot

The song begins with Al talking about his childhood; how he lived in a box under the stairs in the corner of the basement of a house half a block down the street from a place called Jerry's Bait Shop, and how he was only served sauerkraut for breakfast every morning. When Al asks his mother about this, she yells at him, stating it's healthy for him, before proceeding to tie him to a wall to force-feed him sauerkraut as he grows older. As Al reaches 26½ years old, he swears that one day he'll leave his mother's house for a better place; one day, he hears of a contest from a radio broadcast which consists of “guessing the number of molecules on Leonard Nimoy's butt”; despite being off by three, he wins the grand prize: a first-class one-way ticket to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

During the flight, Al is seated between two large Albanian women with severe body odor, along with a child behind him who vomits repeatedly, The flight attendant ran out of snacks to give to the passengers, and he watches Bio-Dome starring Pauly Shore as the inflight movie. While this is happening, three of the engines burn out, causing the plane to crash and explode, killing everyone on board except Al, because he had his tray table up and his seat back in the full upright position. He then finds himself crawling to his destination over three straight days while carrying his belongings, which include a big leather suitcase, a garment bag, a tenor saxophone, a twelve-pound bowling ball and his autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel.

He checks into a Holiday Inn where the people in the Holiday Inn can eat their soup out of the ashtrays. When he checks into his room he starts taking his time to relax and eat a piece of chocolate on his pillow until someone knocks. Although he asks multiple times who's at the door, no answer is received. When he finally goes and opens the door himself, he's greeted by "a big, fat hermaphrodite with a Flock of Seagulls haircut and only one nostril", who rushes into his room and steals his snorkel. The two fight for the snorkel, and end up knocking the phone off the wall. They keep fighting while the phone goes "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator" but Al fails to retrieve it, and the man escapes. Al vows to stop at nothing until the mysterious man is "brought to justice", but first decides to buy donuts.

Upon driving to a local donut shop, he asks for many types of donuts and pastries, one at a time, only to be told each one is sold out. Finally, the shopkeeper admits that all they have is a box of crazed weasels. He purchases the box, but, after opening it, the weasels bite and latch onto his face. As he runs around town screaming for help, he runs into a woman named Zelda, who points out the weasels on his face. The two fall in love, marry, buy a house, and have two children: Nathaniel and Superfly. One night, after Zelda asks him about joining the Columbia Record Club, he freaks out, stating he's "just not ready for that kind of commitment", leading to the couple's breakup.

Shortly afterward, he "achieve his lifelong dream": getting a part-time job at the Sizzler, where he becomes employee of the month for extinguishing a grease fire using his own face. He then tells about an anecdote about a time he spotted a man named Marty trying to carry a large sofa up a flight of stairs. He asks Marty if he needs help, to which Marty replies sarcastically, "No, I want you to cut off my arms and legs with a chainsaw!" Taking Marty literally, Al complies. Marty then remarks he was being sarcastic, to which Al questions how he was supposed to know. Marty then proceeds to earn the nickname "Torso Boy", as he no longer has any limbs.

This anecdote reminds Al of yet another incident in which a homeless man tells him he "hasn't had a bite in 3 days". Al responds by biting the man's jugular vein, thinking it would be funny, causing the man to start screaming and bleeding all over the place. Al dismisses the severity of the situation, believing some people "just can't take a joke".

At this point, Al loses his train of thought and reveals that the point he was attempting to make was his hatred for sauerkraut. He ends the song by giving advice to the listener, claiming that no matter how hard life is, there's "still a little place called Albuquerque".

Recording and performance

At the end of the song (around 11:20, after the music ends), faint laughter can be heard in the background. As Yankovic says, "That's Jim West laughing - I thought it would be a good way to end the album. He's cracking up because of the stupid chord he played at the end of the song."

Reception

Contrary to Yankovic's belief that the song would not be popular, it was one of the best-received songs from the album, and Yankovic incorporated the song as an encore to his tours. When performing this song live, Yankovic has been known to extend the song, by listing off more types of donuts, listing more names "Zelda" calls Yankovic, not telling the "amusing anecdote" at first, and even starting the song over completely after he "loses his train of thought." When performing this song live in Canada, Al is known to replace the dream job at Sizzler with one at Tim Hortons, a Canadian doughnut shop. During the guitar solo of the third chorus, Yankovic sometimes introduces West eagerly, but West plays "Mary Had a Little Lamb" instead of the real solo. Yankovic acts disappointed, and West walks away acting ashamed. As of his 2022 tour, Yankovic stops the song after using the word "hermaphrodite" to acknowledge that the word was now considered a slur and that the song was a product of an earlier, more ignorant time.

The 2004 video game Doom 3 contains a thin reference to the song - an email in one of the in-game PDAs mentions a character whose arms and legs were dismembered by the "Albuquerck Capacitor", therefore giving him the nickname "Torso Boy".

See also

• List of songs by "Weird Al" Yankovic
• Shaggy dog story
• The King of Rock 'n' Roll, another song sometimes sought by this name.

References

1. ^ Rabin, Nathan (2011-06-29). ""Weird Al" Yankovic". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 2011-06-29.
2. "Weird Al" Yankovic Breaks Down His Most Iconic Tracks | GQ, retrieved 2023-11-28
3. ""Ask Al" Q&As for April, 2000". Zomba Recordings LLC. Archived from the original on 2007-01-13. Retrieved 2011-11-04.
4. ""Weird Al" Yankovic: The Ask Al Archive".
5. ""Weird Al" Yankovic - Need I Say More?". Archived from the original on 2007-11-03.
6. Greene, Andy (October 30, 2022). "'Weird Al' Yankovic Wraps Up 'Ill-Advised Vanity Tour' With Epic Carnegie Hall Concert". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on October 31, 2022. Retrieved December 8, 2024.
7. "Doom 3 Easter Egg - Weird Al Reference in E-Mail". The Easter Egg Archive. 2004-08-23. Retrieved 2022-12-28.

• "Weird Al" Yankovic songs
• 1999 songs
• Songs written by "Weird Al" Yankovic
• American hard rock songs
• Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Songs about cities in the United States
• Songs about New Mexico
• Compositions with a narrator
• Internet memes introduced in 2024