Accordions and the King of Pop

Once upon a time there was an accordion player who happened into a recording career, part of which included parodies. He ended up doing a few parodies of songs from a really really popular artist...an artist who liked him. While the accordion player branched into other areas, his relationship with this artist was obviously significant. This is what Al Yankovic said:

The first time I met him in person was long after I had gotten permission to do "Eat It" back in 1984....The first time I actually ran into him was backstage at one of his concerts, this was maybe four years later, when Even Worse came out with my second parody, "Fat." I went backstage, and he was seeing a lot of people, but I brought along a gold record of Even Worse to present to him, and he was very gracious and thanked me for it and said some nice things. After the fact, I thought, "That's probably the last thing Michael Jackson needs, another gold record for his storage locker." Seeing him in person was amazing, it was otherworldly. He was and continues to be so iconic, it's hard to even conceive of him as a human being. He always was bigger than life.

Yankovic also discussed the Michael Jackson song that he didn't parody:

I considered parodying "Black or White" around that time. Michael wasn't quite so into it, because he thought "Black or White" was more of a message song, and he didn't feel as comfortable with a parody of that one, which I completely understood, and in a way, he did me a huge favor, because I was already getting pegged as the guy who did Michael Jackson parodies, and because he wasn't so into it, I decided to go with Nirvana, which wound up revitalizing my career.

More here.