"PARODY SONGS FOR A BETTER TOMORROW" from IceMark Industries, featuring 15 classic parody songs and comedy bits by Mark Jonathan Davis and Rob "Iceman" Izenberg!

Download now for just $4.44!

Released April 9, 2021

Also includes a 21-page digital booklet with liner notes, lyrics, credits, and embarrassing photos!


-----


I first met Rob “Iceman” Izenberg in the halls of KASR-AM, the campus radio station at Arizona State University. It was 1984, and I recall that he and I were wearing the exact same color gray pants.

Iceman was doing movie reviews at the station, and two years later, when I landed a job as morning show producer at Top 40 FM powerhouse KZZP in Phoenix, I got Iceman hired as a comedy writer and morning show sidekick. When we found out that he could sing and play piano, not necessarily in that order, a star was born.

Iceman would write and perform kooky Paul Shaffer-esque songs about local current events, station contests, holidays, and celebrity guests (i.e. when Weird Al Yankovic visited KZZP, Iceman sang a Paul Simon spoof “You Can Call Him Al”). Soon Iceman and I were tasked with writing comedy skits, fake commercials, theme jingles, and fully produced parody songs for the Kelly & Co. morning show, often several per week.

After the show ended at 10:00AM, and we were finished being yelled at by the morning show guy, we’d go to a local sandwich shop named Eegee’s and write our scripts and lyrics. Then we’d come back at 6:00PM to record, sing, and mix until midnight. We’d spend hours and hours in the production room at KZZP, with me behind the mixing board and reel-to-reel tape decks, and Iceman at his Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer keyboard.

Over the next four years, we slapped together parodies about rush hour traffic, snowbird tourists, state politics, local celebs, movies, sports, and Arizona’s scorching summers, writing funny new lyrics to whichever songs were in heavy rotation on the KZZP playlist.

Iceman’s first hit was a parody of George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex.” “I Want Your Sox” aired on KZZP around the clock, got picked up by a few other radio stations, and became a #1 request on the nationally syndicated “Dr. Demento Show.”

When Bob Denver came to Phoenix to make an appearance at a KZZP “Gilligan’s Island”-themed summer event, we wrote a Madonna “La Isla Bonita” parody titled “La Isla Gilligan,” with Iceman singing the lead vocal and me manually editing in layers of sitcom sound bites. (The version on this album is our re-recorded 1997 version with a Madonna sound-alike singer, actress Melissa Fahn.) I mailed our parody to “Gilligan’s Island” creator Sherwood Schwartz, and he called it “by far the best Gilligan parody I have ever received.”

We also, inexplicably, did an entire parody about Johnny Carson sidekick Ed McMahon called “Hey-O” to the tune of “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” with Phoenix TV newsman Bill Andres as the second banana. Yes!

One of our zaniest comedy sketches was “The Twitties,” a mock soap opera lampooning local grocery store Smitty’s and their insipid TV spokescouple Hal & Joni. This recording hasn’t been heard since it aired on KZZP 35 years ago.

We cranked out comedy bits for every occasion. U2 came to Arizona to film their “Rattle & Hum” movie, and we responded with a wacky “skitcom” called “Leave It To Bono,” with me as Wally and Bono, and Iceman as June. Pope John Paul II did a mass at ASU’s Sun Devil Stadium, so we did a monster truck rally spoof, “Pope Bog ‘87.” And the Phoenix Suns reached the NBA playoffs, boosted by our hit parody “Suns, Suns, Suns.” Thanks in part to our popular parodies and skits, KZZP achieved its highest audience ratings ever.

In 1990, KZZP’s management changed, and Iceman and I decided to leave, because we were fired. Twice. But with dozens of parodies under our belts, we thought we should try to syndicate our songs to other radio stations around the country. We were also hired to work freelance as comedy writers for Pirate Radio in Los Angeles. We launched our own comedy service, Screwball Productions, and before we figured out that radio morning shows had no intention of ever paying us, we produced a slew of new parodies aimed at a national audience.

We wrote a takeoff of Janet Jackson’s “Miss You Much” called “Eat Too Much,” and celebrated “The Brady Bunch” with a Fine Young Cannibals spoof titled “They Drive Me Brady.”

But our biggest hit was “We Love Barney Fife,” a parody of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” about “The Andy Griffith Show.” It remains one of Dr. Demento’s all-time most requested songs, and it’s been newly remixed for this 2021 album.

Despite these successes, Screwball Productions tanked, so we had to get radio jobs again. Iceman went to work at Phoenix’s Y95-FM, and I moved to Los Angeles to produce parody songs for the Premiere Radio Networks.

In 1992, I hired Iceman to join me at Premiere in L.A., and for the next year we collaborated on scores more parodies which aired on stations across the nation. We wrote parody songs about anything and everything: Chinese food (“Order The Egg Foo Yung”), Easter (“I Paint The Eggs”), and even male pattern baldness (“Rogaine”).

And we also did more of our trademark TV show tributes, including a “Star Trek” opus titled “Let’s Get Spocked,” sung by voice actor extraordinaire James Arnold Taylor. All of the music, dialogue, and SFX were edited by yours truly on ancient 1/4” tape machines. These songs are re-released here for the first time since the 1990s.

In 1993, I took a job at KROQ-FM, and handed the Premiere parody producing reins to Iceman. He stayed on at Premiere for the next 20 years, where he recorded more than 7,000 parodies. Iceman hired me to sing on his projects every now and then, and one of those, the Sinatra sendup “Bedrock, Bedrock,” is included here.

Creating parodies is nice work if you can get it, and thanks to the magic of radio, our “IceMark” comedy stuff got transmitted into the ears of millions of unsuspecting listeners. To this day, we remain astonished that the silly songs we recorded in a tiny production studio in Mesa, Arizona three decades ago are still beloved on the “Dr. Demento Show,” YouTube, and radio stations around the world. While the sound quality may be meh, and a few of the lyrics cringey, we are grateful that our parody songs live on. Thank you for listening and laughing, not necessarily in that order.

—Mark Jonathan Davis, April 9, 2021



I would have written some liner notes but I’m still high from breathing in Bob Denver’s reefer smoke.

—Rob Izenberg, April 9, 2021


--

More info:

www.markjonathandavis.com