‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Recalls How He Quit His Mailroom Job When He Saw His Song on the Billboard Hot 100 After ‘Nobody Wanted to Sign Me’

Stars! They’re just like us… until they reach the kind of breakthrough “Weird Al” Yankovic experienced in 1983.

During his appearance on Thursday night’s episode (Dec. 4) of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Yankovich recalled his earliest experiences in the music industry, and how record labels didn’t know what to do with him in the late ’70s and early ’80s when parody records didn’t seem like the most obvious path to chart success. “Nobody wanted to sign me. They said, ‘Oh, you’re very funny, this is amusing, you’re a genius,’” he said. “It was considered ‘novelty music,’ because anything humorous in rock and roll is considered a novelty, and novelty is sort of the domain of one-hit wonders.”

Eventually, Yankovic got his record deal and started releasing singles off of what would become his debut, self-titled album. But, as the singer revealed, he was still working a 9-to-5 when he saw his first major success happen. “I was still working in a mailroom, literally for like $5 an hour, which I think was minimum wage back then. I picked up the mail from the post office one morning, and sticking out of the sack was the new Billboard magazine,” he said. “And I opened it up to the Hot 100 chart, and I was on the Hot 100 chart. And that was the day I gave notice!”

While Yankovic didn’t make specific mention of the song, he was referring to “Ricky,” his 1983 duet parody of Toni Basil’s “Mickey” with Tress MacNeille. The song saw Yankovich taking the power-pop track and translating it into a sendup of I Love Lucy stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

Since his big break, Yankovich hasn’t had to subsidize his music career with part-time work — in fact, earlier this year, Yankovich rolled out a whopping 90 new dates for his ongoing Bigger and Weirder tour, which previously led to him selling out Madison Square Garden for the first time, 46 years into his career.

“Even before I played, I walked around the Garden, and there’s posters all over the place of Elton John and Taylor Swift and all of these people — it’s the greatest venue in the world!” he told Colbert. “There’s one from Eddie Vedder saing, ‘You’re nothing until you’ve played Madison Square Garden’ … but now Eddie Vedder thinks I’m something, so I’m very happy about that.”

Yankovic also did Colbert a solid by appearing in a cold open bit, “A Holiday Message From ‘Weird Al’,” in which the perennially positive, joyful singer got his accordion in a twist over people mispronouncing his name. “My last name is pronounced Yankovic, not Yanko-vich!” he raged. “The Yankovics didn’t come to this country with just an accordion on their backs and the wrong words to other people’s songs in their hearts just to have their names mangled and butchered!”

Watch Weird Al’s full interview with Stephen Colbert below: