Yankovic, 10, holds the accordion he learned to play as a youth, and poses with his parents, Mary and Nick, as a toddler. (Family photos)

In lessons, he learned classical and polka, and to read music. In his free time, Yankovic figured out how to play the songs he loved by ear, whether it was Mason Williams’s “Classical Gas” or Elton John’s entire “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” album.

Yankovic was more than a good boy. He skipped second grade, got straight A’s and was Lynwood High’s valedictorian. As an only child, he was loved and sheltered. Church was every Sunday and sleepovers were forbidden, as was anything even remotely risque. Yankovic remembers an issue of TV Guide arriving at the house that contained a photograph of an actress in a bikini. Mary took out a felt pen to fill out the suit. Did he ever do drugs? No. Because his parents told him not to.

Did he ever consider ditching an instrument that only Lawrence Welk’s mother could love? Never.

“It’s not like, ‘If I only got rid of the accordion, things would be perfect,’ ” Yankovic says. “I was two years younger than everybody in my school. I didn’t go through puberty at the same time. I didn’t learn to drive at the same time. I was a straight-A student, a high school valedictorian. I was always the nerdy kid.”

If he found an escape, it was through the satirical humor of Mad Magazine and novelty songs on the Dr. Demento radio show. Hansen, with a master’s in musicology from UCLA and an expansive record collection, exposed listeners not just to Spike Jones and Allan “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” Sherman but to more-obscure one-goof wonders such as Nervous Norvus. Hansen also gave Yankovic his first break. On March 14, 1976, he introduced “Alfred Yankovic” to his audience by playing a tape made by the 16-year-old high school senior. “Belvedere Cruising” centered on the family’s Plymouth. Yankovic accompanied himself on accordion.

“When he sang the line, ‘There’s something about a Comet that makes me want to vomit,’ that kind of perked up my ears,” Hansen remembers. “He would do far better songs after that and he’s a little embarrassed about ‘Belvedere Cruising’ today, but I thought, as soon as I heard it, ‘That guy has some talent.’ ”

Becoming ‘Weird Al’

He arrived at California Polytechnic State University in the fall of 1976 and immediately made an impression. The mismatched clothes. The flip-flops. The accordion. One kid in the dorm derisively named him “Weird Al.” Another stumbled into his room.

“It looked like a homeless encampment,” his friend Joel Miller remembers. “There were just little paths. One was to his desk, one was to his bed, and one was to this accordion in the corner of the room. And I had never seen an accordion before, I mean in real life. So I asked him, ‘Can you play that thing?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah. What do you want to hear?’ ”

Elton John. Which song? And within minutes, Yankovic launched into “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.”

“We were just blown away,” Miller says. “People started coming out of their dorm rooms to see what was going on. My friends knew I played percussion. So I ran and got my bongos and we started playing, and we had so much fun.”

They began appearing on Thursdays, amateur night, at the student union. Others would bring their acoustic guitars and do Dan Fogelberg songs.

“And we’d be playing, like, Tom Lehrer covers, and we’d do a medley of every song written in the world, or we’d segue from ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ into the theme from ‘The Odd Couple,’ ” Yankovic says. “Just random and stupid, and people were looking at us like we were from outer space. And that was the first time I felt that kind of wave of acceptance and appreciation from an audience. And it was kind of addicting, I have to say.”