Spike Jones was quite an
interesting figure, a musical comedian working in the vein of the Big Band sound in the
30s and 40s. Assembling a group of top notch musicians who were never averse to wearing
wigs, playing toilet seats, or tuning gunshots to C-sharp, Spike Jones and his band mixed
the high and the lowbrow, the serious and the comic, instrumental virtuosity and sonic
hijinks into a blend that startled and delighted audiences in a much more innocent time.
Perhaps it was in this fellow jocoserious spirit that Thomas Pynchon was moved to write
the liner notes to Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones, a wonderful collection of
talented mayhem that spans Jones' career. Indeed, according to Pynchon in Slow Learner,
Jones' "orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child."
Pynchon's
Liner Notes
Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones
Welcome, music
lovers, to the cheerfully deranged world of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. There's
gunshots and cowbells aplenty, not to mention class hostility, first-rate musicianship,
subverted expectations, hair-trigger timing, and more than enough material for that
interesting subset of folks looking to be offended, who might like to begin, actually,
with the lyrics to the recitative or lead-in to the "Chinese Dance" in Spike's Nutcracker
Suite -- although mild compared to, oh say your average Chinese celebrity roast, this
will require the sort of listener who either wants to wince with embarrassment or can find
in vintage bigotry quaint refuge from the more virulent forms encountered in our own era.
There is certainly lots of it here to go around. The "Russian Dance" makes fun
of Russians. "Granny Speaks" is an insult to older people. Elsewhere,
"Pal-Yat-Chee" manages to offend country people and Italians, "Deep
Purple," featuring Paul Frees's impression of Billy Eckstine, will offend
Afro-Americans because the singer keeps nodding off, implying narcolepsy not in the public
interest, and so forth. What today we would unquestioningly call acts of racism seemed,
for Spike and the Slickers and indeed postwar America, as pure and unpremeditated as the
breathing of a Zen monk. It was the Golden Age of Radio, and dialect humor, a legacy from
vaudeville and minstrel shows before it, was part of the comedy environment -- shows like
"Amos 'n' Andy," "Life with Luigi" and "The Goldbergs" aired
week after week, available for free to listeners not always analytical about what they
were hearing. (Additionally, for musicians of the swing era, "Chinese"
references in song lyrics had long been code for opium, its derivatives, and their
recreational use -- so there's maybe that subtext here as well.) All through this Nutcracker,
in fact, runs a strange uneasy mixture of jaded musicians' sarcasm and honest
straight-world sentimentality. Nowadays, when everybody knows everything and nobody takes
any text seriously, it's hard to remember how it felt once to share a public world not as
contaminated by the terminology wised-up irony that has come to pervade our own lives.
People were still running on a residue of belief in movies, and radio, and pop music -- as
if there were an unspoken deal still in effect, despite the war, despite everything.When
the Nutcracker album was released in November 1945, the war had just ended, and
Christmas was around the corner, the first Christmas of peace. How could folks not be
running on emotions, many of them even unknown to us today? Slicker irreverence here is so
smoothed and controlled, it's as if Spike considered the full-scale insanity of the band
too intense, too adult, for the kid audience he wanted. Of course it wasn't. Kids admired
his records for nearly the same set of reasons grownups did -- the rudeness, the grace of
execution, the sheer percussive dementia.Yet there remains about Spike's work what is
sometimes almost an uncomfortable complexity. We'd like him to be simpler -- how much can
a purveyor of impolite sound effects comfortably be allowed in the way of depths?
Traditionally, the drummer is supposed to be the weird guy, the holy fool, the lowest
pulse, the one in touch with demonic forces and deep primitive brain levels -- but not
also, as in Spike's case, a conceptual artist with a head for business. Early on, in '43,
in a Radio Mirror interview, Spike described his band as "a subtle burlesque
of all corny, hill-billy bands." A great many of these City Slickers who were so hep
to the jive had in fact themselves come originally from out in the middle of America,
places like Thief River Falls and Oilton and Muncie -- the Nilsson Twins hailed from
Wichita, Sir Frederick Gas from Kansas City, George Rock from Farmer City, Illinois, and
Spike himself from the farm and railroad environment of California's Imperial Valley. They
had all left these places, come to L.A., joined the union and embarked on nights of
singular toil, playing live dates wherever Fate led and with luck now and then getting
some movie, recording or best of all a radio gig, radio in this era having displaced the
movies as the glamour medium, and L.A. throbbing along for those few hectic years as the
syncopated heart of radio nationwide. Local 47 developed its own widely respected style --
these were people who had to play things they had never seen before, and get it perfect
the first time, or go on live before audiences in the invisible millions, and perform
flawlessly. L.A. for a while was probably the center of the musical universe, Stravinsky
living just off Sunset, Schoenberg teaching at UCLA, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis
playing their historic gigs around South Central, nightclubs booming, radio stations
broadcasting from them live, Zeidler & Zeidler doing phenomenal business in bop
cardigans and porkpie hats, the whole town hopping, the pace swifter and louder than we
usually think of in connection with California. Spike turned out to be one of the bright
foci of all that energy, stepping, as a consummate and paid-up percussionist, into the
sudden worldwide lull that followed the years of explosive destruction, from whose audio
vernacular of course would be drawn the tuned gunshots, and Slickers screaming and running
around, destroying sets, appearing to thrust various props into or through their heads,
acting our the most lowbrow of musical impulses.But at the same time here was this strong
attraction to the more refined world of the classics. Spike told an often-reworked story
about going to hear Stravinsky conduct The Firebird at the Shrine Auditorium in
L.A. Stravinsky is wearing some new patent leather shoes, and Spike is sitting close
enough to notice that every time the composer-conductor goes up on his toes just before a
downbeat, the shoes squeak. "Here would go the violins," as he told it, "
and 'squeak squeak' would go his shoes. He should have worn a pair of sneakers. And the
pseudos who went down to see the ballet, they didn't know what they were looking at
anyway. They thought, Stravinsky's done it again. New percussive effects." But then
later, driving home, Spike gets to thinking -- " . . . if you made planned mistakes
in musical arrangements and took the place of regular notes in well-known tunes with sound
effects, there might be some fun in it." The Stravinsky story sheds light from a
couple of angles. Though the evidence suggests that the development of the Slicker concept
was a little less closely thought out than this, still, with Spike in control of the
rewrite, it was how the sound should have originated, how it will have to be shown in any
eventual movie of Spike's life -- rational planning plus painstaking execution equals the
raving musical insanity America came to love. Unable to respect highbrow audiences, Spike
nonetheless wanted to claim inspiration from highbrow music. Both wanting and rejecting
these connections at the same time seemed to generate a useful energy that's audible in
projects like the Nutcracker, and in what was perhaps Spike's best shot at a class
act, the Other Orchestra. Strings in those days meant not only Class, but also Cash, what
with catgut aggregations like Percy Faith and Hugo Winterhalter soon to be topping charts
week after week. But the Other Orchestra venture, by all accounts, was not a success. By
as early as 1943 Spike had already been trapped, typed as the "King of Corn,"
originally an insult title applied to Guy Lombardo. Announcing the O.O.'s formation,
"I am fed and gorged, stuffed and bloated," he told the press, sounding,
strangely, like snooty columnist Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1945) "with being
called the King of Corn. It takes crack musicianship to be a City Slicker. . . . Maybe my
new band will change the minds of a lot of morons who vote for us in DownBeat's
poll year after year." "Corn" by then had come to mean making fun of
hillbilly music, which was enjoying a sudden boom, as talents like Bob Burns, Judy Canova,
and Dorothy Shay, all of whom Spike worked with, took over a good part of the airwaves.
Hillbilly was an idiom asking to be satirized -- the regional accents alone beckoned to
vocal impressionists at all levels of ability. But it's not certain if Corn really ever
got to be a full-scale genre, even though there was an annual DownBeat award for
it, and serious magazine articles that tried to define it. Today, at a distance of nearly
50 years, it looks more like some labelling reflex -- Spike was successful, in all of the
established media plus early television, so somebody had to come up with a category that
could account for him. The excesses and longueurs of Corn, in any case, are more than
compensated for by the briefness of its existence as a trend. There's a photo of Spike
being crowned DownBeat's King of Corn for 1944, by the Nilsson twins, who were a
pleasant-looking young vocal act, regulars on Slicker tours. The coronet on Spike's head
is a standard costume-house model, featuring metallic points behind which are somehow
wedged four erect, slightly oversize corncobs. Around his neck is a crude garland of even
more corncobs. Spike is glaring, his legs tightly crossed, his mouth in an O. his eyes
focused far, far away. The Twins are smiling and wearing these really cute checkered,
maybe even gingham outfits, coded to suggest rural America. Here are all the outward and
visible signs of the identity problem Spike seemed to be having right then. Still thinking
of the Slickers as a novelty act destined only for some brief moment of fame, "We'll
just keep going," he told Radio Mirror in 1943, "until people get sick to
death of us and then it'll be over." He knew who he was, where he thought he wanted
to go musically, and yet here was this ghostly teeming population of listeners who kept
forcing upon him a kind of clown role he wanted to get beyond. Some king! So to augment
the Slickers he went out and hired ten string players, plus about 20 other assorted reeds
and brass, putting in $30,000 of his own money, and they opened at the Trocadero, a big
nitery on the Sunset Strip, on 21 March 1946, as the Other Orchestra. In his autobiography
Papa Play for Me, klezmer clarinetist and Slicker glug specialist Mickey Katz
recalled Spike wanting "a symphonic jazz orchestra like Paul Whiteman. . . . No funny
stuff, just beautiful music. And do you know what the crowds who came in said? 'What kind
of crap is this? If we want a symphony, we'll go to the Holly wood Bowl. We came to hear
Spike Jones, not Stokowski.'" The public thought they knew who he should be. It must
have felt strange in that room through the spring of '46, up every night in front of
people one could not entirely relate to, even if it was a dream gig, with exactly the kind
of material, white society-band pop music, that the Slickers had already made wicked
brilliant fun of in "Cocktails for Two" and a little later, about six weeks into
the Troc engagement, in "Laura." The song had been featured the 1945 movie of
the same name, supposed to evoke this hotsy-totsy social life where all these
sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not
to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors, witty repartee -- a world of pseudos as
inviting to Slicker class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience
fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was
already too late for that, Tin Pan Alley wisdom about life had not stood a chance under
the realities of global war, too many people by then knew better. "The people want to
laugh in war time," Spike said. "Soldiers just don't go for stuff like 'Over
There.' They want sentimental stuff or strictly comic. We give 'em the comedy, and it's
what the public goes for, too." As this apparent
postwar loss of faith in the pop-lyric consensus deepened, along came a surge of music
about music, the genre in which Spike was to become a master. This impulse to kid has of
course been around a good while, at least as long as Mozart's Ein Musikalischer Spass
(A Musical Joke), K. 522, of which one Mozart biographer, in a line which could have
applied equally to Spike, says, "Seldom in music has one mind exerted itself so much
to seem so mindless." Besides the kind of
intertextual hijinks represented perhaps at their most relentless here by
"Pal-Yat-Chee," there also appeared about then an epidemic of songs referring to
themselves, as if direct emotional experience could not longer be trusted -- again and
again, like "Begin the Beguine," "Stardust," or closer to Spike's
area, "San Antonio Rose," some piece of melody, presumably the very melody the
lyric is at the moment being sung to, evokes a night of tropical splendor, a garden wall
where stars are bright, a moonlight trail by the Alamo, and all at once, it seems, the
lyric is about the melody. Spike's preferred
structure was first to state the theme in as respectably mainstream a manner as possible,
then subversively descend into restatement by way of sound effects, crude remarks, and hot
jazz, the very idiom Spikes Jones and his Five Tacks had begun with back in high school,
to the great displeasure of their parents. But used this way, dropped into like a lower
gear, with antiquated licks and growls and semi-liquid vulgarities in the lower brass, not
even the music of Spike's own apprenticeship was to escape Slicker disrespect, having come
to be code for, "Vulgar, ain't it, compared to that society stuff," at the risk
of de-emphasizing what were brilliant ensemble performances. So it should come as no
surprise to find among the Slicker oeuvre yet another form that refers to itself -- the
Knock-Knock joke, part of whose appeal lies in the metacomical point that somebody is
being silly enough to tell it in the first place. "Knock-Knock (Who's There),"
may be the first surfacing into recorded form of this message from the underworld of child
wit. Though few of its punch lines surprise as much now, back in 1949 they were sweeping
playgrounds and candystore lounging areas like major low-pressure troughs. It is only a
short sideways step from here to other Slicker performances that make simultaneous
commentary on themselves -- the addled lounge comedy of Doodles Weaver, the piping child's
voice issuing from oversized adult George Rock, the digestive punctuations of Sir
Frederick Gas. For these and other Slicker virtuosi, "Knock-Knock" serves as a
sample showcase.Weaver is also featured vocalist on "The Man on the Flying
Trapeze," where he exhibits much of the antic appeal that led to groups of Weaver
cultists showing up on the nationwide "Musical Depreciation Revue" tour
itinerary, places like Hutchinson, Kansas, travelling miles to greet him, barking like
seals, from the front rows. The barking routine had been part of Weaver's kit since his
undergraduate days at Stanford, where he became legendary, once being unveiled in front of
distinguished alumnus Herbert Hoover at the official campus dedication of a statue,
cradled in the statue's arms and doing his seal impression. This "Trapeze" cut,
with its frantic Spoonerizing, self-interrupting to retune, laughing at his own jokes, is
a classic Doodles Weaver performance. George Rock usually did child characters, his most
famous being the one that sings "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front
Teeth," which has continued every year to get some seasonal airplay around the
nation. But now and then, like some musical Larry Talbot, he was able to assume his other
persona with the Slickers, that of an adult trumpet virtuoso. His reliable showstopper was
always "Minka," which Jones's bio-discographer Jack Mirtle estimates Rock played
an average of once daily for ten years with the Slickers, though he had been playing it
earlier with Freddie Fisher's "Schnicklefritz" band. When he changed bands, he
evidently brought "Minka" with him, a romantic set which, if anybody tried it
today, would draw the immediate and avid attention of all lawyers within scenting
distance. Sir Frederick Gas's first appearance was a purely fictitious name that Spike,
just for fun, thought would look interesting on the label of the already very strange
"Our Hour," (which depending on brain pathways, chemical permutations, and so
forth can elicit a broad range of reactions. The dogsounds are by Dr. Horatio Q. Birdbath,
alias A. Purves Pullen, another star Slicker, who specialized in animals and had the
distinction of doing the voices for what are arguably the two greatest chimp characters in
film, Cheetah in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies, and Bonzo in Bedtime for Bonzo,
opposite former president Ronald Reagan.) It wasn't until later that Earl Bennett was
hired and gradually came to occupy, like helium in a Macy balloon, the full volume of Sir
Frederick Gas. He also appears here on "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You," Tommy
Dorsey's theme song with trombone work, both Dorsey-style and otherwise, by Joe Colvin,
whose pants in the Musical Depreciation Revue used to go up and down in rhythm to his
playing. The Revue, like the later television shows, was always as much a visual as an
audio act, with Spike running around deploying his pistol shots like a symphony conductor
waving a baton, giants, midgets, animals, and tapdancers chasing on and off the stage,
Slickers in fright wigs, chicken outfits and suits of reckless plaid that did not come
cheap, and the lady harpist on "Holiday for Strings" smoking a cigar. If this
collection were the soundtrack from the film biography, what kind of an arc could we find
between "Red Wing" (1940) -- the City Slickers first recording -- and
"Frantic Freeway" (1961)? Hayseed comes to the big metropolis, starts out making
fun of easy targets like Indian lovesongs ("Red Wing" was a brand of chewing
tobacco), is presently going after other hayseeds, pseudos, society music, the classics,
becoming with the years more and more wised up until the last we see of him he's not there
like the Flying Dutchman on the great urban ultimate -- the freeway, cruising nowhere
special, reluctant to come to any rest or closure, out there among the mobility.
"Frantic Freeway," like Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse," is part of an
album project left unfinished -- vocals and additional layers of sound were still to be
added. But in the spareness of what we do have, with fewer distractions, we can hear at
last how lucidly tuned the sound effects are, with car horns and screeching brakes each
assigned a pitch and included in a melody, as if vehicular unpleasantness, the soul of the
City, could be somehow redeemed by song. We can feel the old gang-of-idiots amiability
still shining through. This is the way characters end up in Zen stories illustrating deep
lessons, though as in Zen, wisdom cannot always be separated from a peculiar sense of
humor. "My band's got rhythm," Spike said once, "and to it we add a guffaw.
We get along by not taking anything serious." Which, if not heavy duty prophecy,
turns out at least to be his maniac's blessing and gift, finally, to us, adrift in our own
difficult time, with moments of true innocence, like good cowbell solos, few and far
between.
Welcome, music
lovers, to the cheerfully deranged world of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. There's
gunshots and cowbells aplenty, not to mention class hostility, first-rate musicianship,
subverted expectations, hair-trigger timing, and more than enough material for that
interesting subset of folks looking to be offended, who might like to begin, actually,
with the lyrics to the recitative or lead-in to the "Chinese Dance" in Spike's Nutcracker
Suite -- although mild compared to, oh say your average Chinese celebrity roast, this
will require the sort of listener who either wants to wince with embarrassment or can find
in vintage bigotry quaint refuge from the more virulent forms encountered in our own era.
There is certainly lots of it here to go around. The "Russian Dance" makes fun
of Russians. "Granny Speaks" is an insult to older people. Elsewhere,
"Pal-Yat-Chee" manages to offend country people and Italians, "Deep
Purple," featuring Paul Frees's impression of Billy Eckstine, will offend
Afro-Americans because the singer keeps nodding off, implying narcolepsy not in the public
interest, and so forth. What today we would unquestioningly call acts of racism seemed,
for Spike and the Slickers and indeed postwar America, as pure and unpremeditated as the
breathing of a Zen monk. It was the Golden Age of Radio, and dialect humor, a legacy from
vaudeville and minstrel shows before it, was part of the comedy environment -- shows like
"Amos 'n' Andy," "Life with Luigi" and "The Goldbergs" aired
week after week, available for free to listeners not always analytical about what they
were hearing. (Additionally, for musicians of the swing era, "Chinese"
references in song lyrics had long been code for opium, its derivatives, and their
recreational use -- so there's maybe that subtext here as well.)