With the advent of AI, now everyone thinks they’re moviemakers, authors, muscians and yes comedic parody song authors. Well for the last 27 years I have actually written produced and made, Old School, parody songs in the style of Dr. Dimento, Paul Silhan and Weird Al. To celebrate the re-release of “The Mike Church Show Band’s Anthology - The story of the most prolific parody artists in modern radio history”, we have produced this video that tells the story of our first big parody hit: “Right Wingers Get Stoned”! HINT: The song is at the end of this post.
"Now, in 1999, I am... I’m working at 770 WVNN in Huntsville, Alabama, the Rush Limbaugh station. Same station that Sean Hannity had worked at three years prior.
He’d gotten his start there. And I was doing the afternoon drive show. And one of the topics I did was, and this is before I got kind of southern conservative religion, a party was formed, and they called it the Southern Party. Political party. And they were going to take the South back.
And they were going to win elections. They’re basically the New Dixiecrats. And I did a whole hour and I made fun of them. And I was talking about the, you know, they’re going to have the Mennonite woman with, and the guy yelled, I can see her ankles.
I just, I totally just spoofed on this party for an hour. It started a huge controversy. A guy heard it who lived in Birmingham and then wrote a letter to the editor of the Birmingham newspaper calling me out.
COMING THIS FRIDAY! THE RE-RELEASE OF THE MIKE CHURCH SHOW BAND’S “ANTHOLOGY” EBOOK AND 66 TRACK ALBUM
And the national press picked up on it. And there were people that were calling the radio station, and they were after me, they wanted me fired. My boss at the time, Bill Dunnavant. He goes, let’s go listen to the record, Mike. I just want to make sure you make a compelling radio on my radio station.
So he listened to the tape. He listened to the tape and he goes, you got nothing to worry about. He even laughed and he goes, I think actually it’s funny. It’s in this environment, okay, where I started to think, maybe not all these conservatives may not actually be my, you know, like all “conservative. Maybe we’re not all one big giant tent. Maybe Reagan’s 11th commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican, doesn’t hold true. So I started thinking about – I think I want to lampoon these guys. And I hadn’t done any song save for the songs I did on On The Right With Santa. So I started thinking about, okay, well, what song could you do? And then that song came on the radio: Cover of The Rollin’ Stone.
And as I’m listening to it, I’m going, “if you see a right-winger get stoned”. And I’m thinking like, oh, yeah, right-wingers getting stoned. And I’m thinking of Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, because there’s a line in my song about it, and a “dude who’s never worn jeans”, which Limbaugh once bragged about that “I never owned a pair of jeans”. So I’m thinking, like, okay, how can I, for the maximum comedic effect, write a song that is funny and even right-wingers will listen to, but kind of drives the point home that, you know what, you guys got some things to be made fun of, too..
Well, the next part is how is Mike Church, who is not a musician, how am I going to make that song? Now, this is before you could go on the internet and probably find a karaoke track, and then you could take the karaoke track, right, and sing to it.
Now, I had been experimenting for years, and I had made some other songs. They just weren’t very good, so I didn’t play them publicly, but I was working on them. And I was working with these things called MIDI files, M-I-D-I. And at the time... Before you had all of the modern ability to digitize all this music and everything, MIDI tracks were very popular and MIDI stands for Musical instrument digital interface.
So, I found, there was a website that I was a paying member of, it was called Harmony. And I found a bunch of people would make MIDI tracks. And the thing about making a MIDI track is it also records how hard you hit the key, the velocity and all sorts of things.
So I found what I thought was the best MIDI track of a cover of the Rolling Stone. And then, of course, I wrote my lyrics, and I refined the lyrics, and then started practicing, which wasn’t hard because I knew the song when I was a kid. It was one of the songs that I grew up singing.
So I had an RE20 microphone and a four-track analog cassette recorder. with a Tascam mixing board. And so then I set to work. The hardest part was there’s a three-part harmony that they have in there. And I don’t remember how, but I attempted to do it and at this time I don’t even know who Jim Mosher is. This is 1999 in Huntsville, Alabama. Nonetheless, I somehow assembled that track and debuted it in late July of 1999 on 770 WVNN and guess what? Listeners LOVED It! Now I knew how musically awful it was but it was playing on AM in mono, which might actually have helped it.
And then Grossman says, because you hadn’t heard the song, Grossman says, play him your “right wingers get stoned song”. So I played you, we played it in your magnificent studio where you are right there on those big, beautiful Klipsch, Corner Horn Speakers and it sounded so terrible.
And I’m turning red going like, oh, God, this is embarrassing. This is awful. And about that time either Jimm or Alan said, you know what? Why don’t we just record it? So Alan goes and we find the original. This is before you would find it on iTunes. He had it on a CD and then Jimm imported it into Pro Tools and then playing with the Dr. Hook original track, they just knocked out all the instrument parts like they were sweeping sawdust off the floor then comes the realization that there’s a Lead Guitar on this and this is the funniest part. After all that incredible variety of instruments they played Alan says “Who are we going to get to play that lead guitar?” Because Alan was all those instruments but he wasn’t a lead guitar player.
After calling every guitarist they knew and none of them were available or could play that lick Alan says, “OK I’ll play it.” And he goes out into the studio and in two or three takes we have some semblance of that lead.
And then Jimm says, “okay, let’s go sing. Go cut your part, Mike”. And I’m like, what? Really? Really? You put me in front of a real, live, $5,000 Neumann mic with real headphones for my first time. So I sang those now memorable lines …
“Well we’re big right wingers and we’re gun right singers
and we think young ladies should wait.
We talk about values and we talk about truth,
at $10,000 a plate…”
So after how ever many takes my part is done until Jimm says “you know, there’s two voices on the second part of the verse, you’ll have to sing that too”.”Oh great…” I exclaimed something else I don’t know how to do!” But I actually figured out that second part in a few takes and, listen to the track, it’s there and done well enough.
And then I’m told to go do the three-part harmony backing vocal on the chorus, the part that goes in behind the Rick Sawyer lead.
“We get stoned…. stoned….STONED!”
Jimm and Alan tried to get me to do all three parts. And I could do the first part, but Alan’s like, no, no, no, no, no. It’s (Alan singing on key and note 1,000 times better than me)
“we get stone.stoned…STONED!”
And I couldn’t do it. It was horrible. So Jimmu did part B and Alan did part C. And we put the track together, we did all of the overdubs and spoken parts and by the time I left there that day I had a Nashville quality version of “Right Wingers Get Stoned” and I played it on the air that December, 1999 night on The Mike Church Show on 1110 WBT in Charlotte!
Now, if you’re not listening carefully, and if you hear our version playing in the other room, you might actually think that you’re listening to Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.
No AI.
No “AutoTune”.
Just love for the brilliant men & women who made the original music; comedy and the audiences who will enjoy them.
Together.
THAT’S the art of great parody song writing and producing.
