As music educations go, Barret Hansen has compiled an impressive scholarly background. He holds a BA and MA in classical and folk music from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and the University of California, Los Angeles, respectively. In high school, he was a disc jockey for dances like sock hops. In Portland, he was station manager for the campus FM channel. His UCLA thesis was on the growth of rhythm and blues music from 1945 to 1953. Out of college, he took a job reissuing vintage blues, gospel, and rock songs.

All of this experience has perhaps made Hansen uniquely overqualified to assume the radio persona of Dr. Demento.

Getting Demented
From 1970 to 2010, Hansen’s aural alter ego spent between one and four hours on Sunday nights curating a selection of comedy and novelty song tracks, from the holiday classic “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” by Elmo and Patsy to the work of a teenager named Alfred Yankovic, who wrote a song about his family’s Plymouth Belvedere titled “Belvedere Cruising.”

While other disc jockeys were spinning hit records and adopting cool personas, Dr. Demento seemed content to fill the niche of the weird. In addition to well-known parody or satirical songs, he solicited submissions from listeners like Yankovic, who composed several originals before he began doing parodies. “My Bologna,” set to the tune of The Knacks’s “My Sharona,” was an early Demento favorite, and it helped “Weird” Al get a record deal.

This peculiar bent on novelty music began, according to Hansen, at age 4 in Minneapolis, when his father brought home records by humorist Spike Jones. The musician’s “Cocktails for Two” employs numerous sound effects and people screaming “Whoopee!” The contrast of music and comedy made an impression on Hansen, who grew to appreciate all kinds of music—his collection eventually grew to more than 300,000 records in varying formats—but he was particularly fond of the hybrid of humor and singing that came to dominate his radio program.

After college, Hansen moved to Los Angeles, where he found work at burgeoning FM station KPPC (later KROQ). Producers there wanted him to spin oldies excavated from his already-sizable record collection.