The Quiet Majesty of Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz's Black & White & Weird All Over
Melancholy man with an accordion
When I had the honor and the pleasure of working on 2012’s Weird Al: The Book part of my job involved selecting images for the coffee table book. So over the course of several months I probably looked at about ten thousand photographs of Al onstage and off, many nearly identical.
I spent a lot of time in drummer, archivist, photographer and all-around renaissance man Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz’s home and garage going through the images, artifacts and memorabilia that individually and collectively told the story of Al and his band’s unlike ascent to glory and astonishing staying power.
It’s hard to overstate Jon’s contributions to Weird Al: The Book, which I see as his book as much as it is mine or Al’s, or to Al’s career.
I consequently became not only a student of Al’s music but also a student of his facial expressions, body language, poses and assorted physical shtick. Certain looks became as familiar to me as the opening notes of “White and Nerdy” or “Dare to be Stupid.”
Al is good at everything. That includes posing for photographs both individually and with people, which is way more of a skillset and a talent than you might imagine. A whole lot of thought and work and effort and trial and error goes into looking casual and spontaneous.
So part of the enormous pleasure of Black & White & Weird All Over: The Lost Photographs of “Weird Al” Yankovic 83-86, a brand spanking new coffee table book of black and white photographs Jon took during Al’s mid-1980s heyday lie in seeing expressions I’d never seen before in any of those ten thousand photos I looked at for the book.
Black & White & Weird All Over captures Al and his band in action during the music video shoots for “Ricky”, “I Love Rocky Road”, “Eat It” and “Living With a Hernia” and at various dubbing sessions but it also chronicles for posterity what Carol Channing in Skidoo refers to as “the groovy little in-between.”
a time-traveling Al copy-edits The Weird Accordion to Al
Jon’s book offers a fascinating glimpse at Al when he’s not “on” as well as when he is. We see a different side of Al here, one that’s quieter and more serious and intense even in the wackiest of contexts.
For all of the enormous craft and artistry Al put into his music videos from the very beginning, and getting the details exactly right has always been a huge part of his aesthetic, and a huge part of his success, there’s something ingratiatingly homemade about these productions, a joyous, “Let’s put on a show!” vibe.
If Weird Al: The Book is one of those biopics that covers an artist’s entire life, simplifying it in the process so that it fits the easy contours of formula then Black & White & Weird All Over is a movie that says something profound and important about the entirety of a real-life figure’s life by chronicling a period of particular importance, the way Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy told the story of Gilbert and Sullivan through the making of The Mikado rather than attempting to dramatize their entire lives.
I have an unmistakable fondness for these types of films. They’re inherently less cliched and more emotionally truthful. Sometimes casual snapshots can tell you much more than an elegantly composed photograph.
In my mind Al has been thirty-five years old for the past thirty years. He hit thirty-five and stopped aging altogether, or began aging in reverse, Benjamin Button-style. But Black & White & Weird All Over World indelibly establishes that Al and his band were, at one point shockingly young, with all the beauty and purity and freshness that entails.
Al is professionally goofy-looking, particularly at the very beginning of his recording career, but Jon’s book reveals Al to be a strikingly handsome young man who could be downright suave in Ricky Ricardo mode.
Al wasn’t just young when the photographs that comprise Black & White & Weird were taken: seemingly the whole world was young as well. MTV was young. Al’s band was young. I was young. Al’s life as an album artist was young. The world radiated infinite possibilities.
What the hell happened?
Black & White & Weird All Over captures the essential essence of Al at a pivotal moment in his life and career in a manner I was not able to in either Weird Al: The Book or The Weird Accordion to Al. The book’s quiet power serves as a testament to just how much you can say without words.
Of course I am not an impartial observer. I am deeply invested in this world as a fan as well as a “Weird Al” Yankovic historian. Part of the reason I love Jon’s book is because it feels like a sequel to Weird Al: The Book the same way The Weird Accordion to Al does.
Despite my enormous fondness for the coffee table book I wrote with Al, with Jon’s invaluable assistance, Black & White & Weird All Over andThe Weird Accordion to Al are the rare sequels that are better than the original.
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Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here