Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones (December 14, 1911 – May 1, 1965) was a popular musician and bandleader specializing in performing satirical arrangements of popular songs. Ballads and classical works receiving the Jones treatment would be punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, and ridiculous vocals. Through the 1940s and early 1950s, the band recorded under the title
Spike Jones and his City Slickers and toured the
United States and
Canada under the title
The Musical Depreciation Revue.
Biography
Jones's father was a
Southern Pacific railroad agent. Young Lindley got his nickname by being so thin that he was compared to a
railroad spike. At the age of 11 he got his first set of
drums. As a teenager he played in bands that he formed himself. A railroad restaurant chef taught him how to use pots and pans, forks, knives and spoons as musical instruments. He frequently played in theater
pit orchestras. In the 1930s he joined the
Victor Young orchestra and thereby got many offers to appear on radio shows, including
Al Jolson's
Lifebuoy Program,
Burns and Allen, and
Bing Crosby's
Kraft Music Hall.
From 1937 to 1942, he was the percussionist for the John Scott Trotter Orchestra, which played on Bing Crosby's first recording of White Christmas. Spike Jones was part of a backing band for songwriter Cindy Walker during her early recording career with Decca and Standard Transcriptions. Her song "We're Gonna Stomp Them City Slickers Down" provided the inspiration for the name of Jones’ future band, the City Slickers.
The City Slickers evolved out of the Feather Merchants, a band led by vocalist-clarinetist Del Porter, who took a back seat to Jones during the embryonic years of the group. They made experimental records for the Cinematone Corporation and performed publicly in Los Angeles, gaining a small following. The original members included vocalist-violinist Carl Grayson, banjoist Perry Botkin, trombonist King Jackson and pianist Stan Wrightsman.
The band signed a recording contract with
RCA Victor in 1941 and recorded extensively for the company until 1955. They also starred in various radio programs (1945–1949) and television shows (1954–61) on both
NBC and
CBS.
During the 1940s, other prominent band members included:
's Dick Tracy]]
George Rock (trumpet, and vocals from 1944 to 1960)
Mickey Katz (clarinet and vocals)
Doodles Weaver (vocals - specialised in playing sports commentators and absent-minded singers who persistently scrambled their lyrics into malapropisms and digressed into stand-up comedy)
Red Ingle (sax and vocals)
Carl Grayson (violin and vocals)
Country Washburne (tuba)
Earl Bennett (aka Sir Frederick Gas, vocals)
Joe Siracusa (drums)
Joe Colvin (trombone)
Roger Donley (tuba)
Dick Gardner (sax and violin)
Paul Leu (piano)
Jack Golly (trumpet and clarinet)
John Stanley (trombone)
Don Anderson (trumpet)
Eddie Metcalfe (saxophone)
Dick Morgan (banjo)
George Lescher (piano)
Freddy Morgan (banjo and vocals)
A. Purvis Pullen (aka Dr. Horatio Q. Birdbath, vocals)
The band's 1950s personnel included:
*Billy Barty (vocals)
Gil Bernal (sax and vocals)
Mousie Garner (vocals)
Bernie Jones (sax and vocals)
Phil Gray (trombone)
Jad Paul (banjo)
Peter James (vocals).
Marilyn Olson Oliveri (vocals & stand up bass)
The liner notes for at least two RCA compilation albums claimed that the two Morgans were brothers (the 1949 radio shows actually billed them as "Dick and Freddy Morgan"), but this is not true; Freddy's real name was Morgenstern. Peter James (who was sometimes billed as Bobby Pinkus) and Dick Garner were former members of Ted Healy's vaudeville act and had replaced Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard as Healy's "stooges" in the 1930s.
Spike Jones's second wife, singer Helen Grayco, performed in his stage and TV shows. Jones had four children: Linda (by his first wife, Patricia), Spike Jr., Leslie Ann and Gina. Spike Jr. is a producer of live events and TV broadcasts. Leslie Ann is the Director of Music and Film Scoring at George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in Marin County.
Record hits
Der Fuehrer's Face
In 1942, a strike by the
American Federation of Musicians prevented Jones from making commercial recordings for over two years. He could, however, make records for radio broadcasts. These were released on the Standard Transcriptions label (1941–46) and have been reissued on a CD compilation called
(Not) Your Standard Spike Jones Collection.
Recorded days before the record ban, Jones scored a huge broadcast hit late in 1942 with "Der Fuehrer's Face", a song ridiculing Adolf Hitler that followed every use of the word "Heil" with a derisive razzberry sound, as in the repeated phrase "...Heil, (razzberry), Heil (razzberry), right in Der Fuehrer's face!".
The song was originally written for Walt Disney's 1943 Oscar-winning propaganda cartoon, first titled Donald Duck in Nutzi Land according to the Disney Archives. The success of the record prompted Disney to re-title the animated cartoon after the song.
More satirical songs
Mel Blanc, the voice of
Bugs Bunny and other
Warner Brothers cartoon characters, performed a drunken, hiccuping verse for 1942's "Clink! Clink! Another Drink" (reissued in 1949 as "The Clink! Clink! Polka"). The romantic ballad "
Cocktails for Two", originally written to evoke an intimate romantic rendezvous, was re-recorded by Spike Jones in 1944 as a raucous, horn-honking, voice-gurgling, hiccuping hymn to the cocktail hour. The Jones version was a huge hit, much to the resentment of composer
Sam Coslow. Other Jones satires followed: "Hawaiian War Chant," "Chloe," "Holiday for Strings," "You Always Hurt the One You Love," "My Old Flame," (referring to
Peter Lorre's voice [impersonated on the recording by
Paul Frees] and eerie scenes in contemporary movies) and many more.
Ghost Riders
Spike's parody of
Vaughn Monroe's "
Ghost Riders in the Sky" was performed as if sung by a drunkard and ridiculed Monroe by name in its final stanza:
CHORUS: 'Cause all we hear is "Ghost Riders" sung by Vaughn Monroe
DRUNK: I can do without his singing.
FRIEND: But I wish I had his dough!
The original version was pressed for the European market in 1949. Furthermore, a few pressings containing the first ending were mistakenly pressed on the West Coast and are a prized rarity. The official (and more common) American release used an alternative take, minus the dig at Monroe, because Monroe, an RCA recording artist and also a major RCA stockholder, demanded it.
All I Want for Christmas
Jones's recording, "
All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth", with a piping vocal by
George Rock, was a number-one hit in 1948. (
Dora Bryan recorded a 1963 variation, "All I Want For Christmas is a
Beatle".)
Murdering the Classics
Jones was a sort of precursor to
PDQ Bach. Among the series of recordings in the 1940s were humorous takes on the classics such as the adaptation of
Liszt's
Liebesträume, played at a breakneck pace on unusual instruments. Others followed:
Rossini's
William Tell Overture was rendered on kitchen implements using a
horse race as a backdrop, with one of the "horses" in the "race" likely to have inspired the nickname of the lone
SNJ aircraft flown by the US Navy's
Blue Angels aerobatic team's shows in the late 1940s, "Beetle Bomb". In live shows Spike would acknowledge the applause with complete solemnity, saying "Thank you, music lovers." This collection of these 12 "homicides" was released by RCA (on its prestigious Red Seal label) in 1971 as
Spike Jones Is Murdering the Classics. They include such
tours de force as Pal-Yat-Chee (
I Pagliacci), Ponchielli's
Dance of the Hours, Tchaikovsky's
None but the Lonely Heart, and Bizet's
Carmen, besides the two above.
In December 1945 Spike released his version of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, arranged by Joe "Country" Washburne with lyrics by Foster Carling. An abridged version is also included in the aforementioned album, with a complete version available in Spiked: The Music of Spike Jones.
Radio
After appearing as the house band on
The Bob Burns Show, Spike got his own radio show on
NBC,
The Chase and Sanborn Program, as
Edgar Bergen's summer replacement in 1945.
Frances Langford was co-host and
Groucho Marx was among the guests. The guest list for Jones' 1947-49 CBS program for
Coca-Cola (originally
The Spotlight Revue, retitled
The Spike Jones Show for its final season) included
Frankie Laine,
Mel Torme,
Peter Lorre,
Don Ameche and
Burl Ives.
Frank Sinatra appeared on the show in October 1948, and
Lassie in May 1949.
One of the announcers on Jones's CBS show was the young Mike Wallace. Writers included Eddie Maxwell, Eddie Brandt and Jay Sommers. The final program in the series was broadcast in June 1949.
Spike Jones and His Other Orchestra
The very name of Spike Jones became synonymous with crazy music. While he enjoyed the fame and prosperity, he was annoyed that nobody seemed to see beyond the craziness. Determined to show the world that he was capable of producing legitimate "pretty" music, he formed a second group in 1946. Spike Jones and His Other Orchestra played lush arrangements of dance hits. This alternative group played nightclub engagements and was an artistic success, but the paying public preferred the City Slickers and stayed away. Jones wound up paying some of the band's expenses out of his own pocket.
The one outstanding recording by the Other Orchestra is "Laura," which features a serious first half (played exquisitely by the Other Orchestra) and a manic second half (played hilariously by the City Slickers).
Note that technically there never was an "Other Orchestra". The Other Orchestra musicians augmented the same players as the City Slickers.
Movies
In 1940, Jones had an uncredited bandleading part in the
Dead End Kids film
Give Us Wings, appearing on camera for about four seconds.
In 1942 the Jones gang worked on numerous Soundies musical shorts seen on coin-operated projectors in arcades, malt shops and bars. The band appeared on camera under their own name in four of the Soundies, and provided background music for at least 13 others, according to musicologist Mark Cantor.
As the band's fame grew, Hollywood producers hired the Slickers as a specialty act for feature films, including Thank Your Lucky Stars and Variety Girl. Jones was set to team with Abbott and Costello for a 1954 Universal Pictures comedy, but when Lou Costello withdrew for medical reasons, Universal replaced the comedy team with look-alikes Hugh O'Brian and Buddy Hackett, and promoted Jones to the leading role. The finished film, Fireman, Save My Child, is a juvenile comedy that turned out to be Spike Jones's only top-billed theatrical movie.
Television
As a shrewd businessman, Jones saw the potential of television and filmed two half-hour pilot films,
Foreign Legion and
Wild Bill Hiccup, in the summer of 1950. Veteran comedy director
Eddie Cline worked on both, but neither was successful. The band fared much better on live television, where their spontaneous antics and crazy visual gags guaranteed the viewers a good time. Spike usually dressed in a suit with an enormous check pattern and was seen leaping around playing a washboard, cowbells, a suite of klaxons and foghorns, then xylophone, then shooting a pistol. The band starred in variety shows such as
The Colgate Comedy Hour (1951, 1955) and their
All Star Revue (1952) before being given his own slot by
NBC,
The Spike Jones Show, which aired early in 1954, and
Club Oasis on NBC, in 1957 and the summer of 1958; and by CBS, as
The Spike Jones Show, in the summers of 1957, 1960, and 1961. Jones and his City Slickers also appeared on
NBC's
The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford in the episode which aired on November 15, 1956. In 1990,
BBC2 screened six compilation shows from these broadcasts; they were subsequently aired on
PBS stations.
Later years
The rise of rock-'n'-roll and the decline of big bands hurt Spike Jones's repertoire. The new rock songs were already novelties, and Jones could not decimate them the way he had lampooned "Cocktails for Two" or "Laura." He played rock-'n'-roll for laughs when he presented "for the first time on television, the bottom half of
Elvis Presley!" This was the cue for a pair of pants -- inhabited by dwarf actor
Billy Barty -- to scamper across the stage.
Jones was always prepared to adapt to changing tastes. In 1950, when America was nostalgically looking back at the 1920s, Jones recorded an album of Charleston arrangements. In 1953 he responded to the growing market for children's records, with tunes aimed directly at kids (like "Socko, the Smallest Snowball"). In 1956 Jones supervised an album of Christmas songs, many of which were performed seriously. In 1957, noting the TV success of Lawrence Welk and his dance band, he revamped his own act for television. Gone was the old City Slickers mayhem, replaced by a more straightforward big-band sound, with tongue-in-cheek comic moments. The new band was known as Spike Jones and the Band that Plays for Fun. He also recorded a cover of "Dominique" with Spike Jones' New Band in 1964, a hit by The Singing Nun, in which he not only plays part of the melody on a banjo but melds the melody successfully with "When the Saints Go Marching In!"
The last City Slickers record was the LP Dinner Music For People Who Aren't Very Hungry. The whole field of comedy records changed from musical satires to spoken-word comedy (Tom Lehrer, Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, Stan Freberg). Spike Jones adapted to this, too; most of his later albums are spoken-word comedy, including the horror-genre sendup Spike Jones in Stereo (1959) and Omnibust (1960). Jones remained topical to the last: his final group, Spike Jones' New Band, recorded four LPs of brassy renditions of pop-folk tunes of the 1960s (including "Washington Square" and "The Ballad of Jed Clampett").
Death
Jones was a lifelong smoker. He was once said to have gotten through the average workday on coffee and cigarettes. Smoking may have contributed to his developing
emphysema. His already thin frame deteriorated, to the point where he used an oxygen tank offstage, and onstage he was confined to a seat behind his drum set. He died at the age of 53, and is buried in
Holy Cross Cemetery,
Culver City, California.
Influence
There is a clear line of influence from the
Hoosier Hot Shots,
Freddie Fisher and his
Schnickelfritzers and the
Marx Brothers to Spike Jones—and to
Stan Freberg,
Gerard Hoffnung,
Peter Schickele's
P.D.Q. Bach,
The Goons,
The Beatles,
Frank Zappa,
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band,
The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and
"Weird Al" Yankovic.
Billy Barty appeared in Yankovic's film
UHF and a video based on the movie.
Syndicated radio personality Dr. Demento regularly features Jones's music on his program of comedy and novelty tracks. Jones is mentioned in The Band's song, "Up on Cripple Creek". (The song's protagonist's paramour states of Jones: "I can't take the way he sings, but I love to hear him talk.") Novelist Thomas Pynchon is an admirer and wrote the liner notes for a 1994 reissue, Spiked! (BMG Catalyst). A scene in the romantic comedy I.Q. shows a man demonstrating the sound of his new stereo to Meg Ryan's character by playing a record of Jones's music.
Popular recordings
"All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth"
"Black Bottom"
"The Blue Danube"
"Bottom's Up"
"By the Beautiful Sea"
"Chloe"
"Cocktails for Two"
"Dance of the Hours" (Ponchielli)
"Der Fuehrer's Face"
"Down In Jungle Town"
"Flight of the Bumblebee" (Laughing Record)"
"Hawaiian War Chant"
"Holiday For Strings"
"Hotcha Cornia"
"The Hut-Sut Song"
"I Want Eddie Fisher For Christmas"
"I Went to Your Wedding"
"Mairzy Doats"
"The Man on the Flying Trapeze"
"Never Hit Your Grandma With A Shovel"
"Old MacDonald Had a Farm"
"Omnibust, (LP Album of spoken-word comedy)"
"Powerhouse" by Raymond Scott (Recognizable as the 'industrial factory' music from cartoons.)
"The Sailor With The Navy Blue Eyes"
"The Sheik of Araby"
"The Sound Effects Man"
"Spike Jones in Stereo (A Spooktacular in Screaming Sound, LP album)"
""
"That Old Black Magic"
"Pal-Yat-Chee"
"
William Tell Overture"
"Yes, We Have No Bananas"
"You Always Hurt the One You Love"
References
Sources
Notes by Peter Gamble from
Clink Clink Another Drink CD by Audio Book & Music Company, ABMMCD 1158.
Further reading
Corbett, Scott C. (1989) An Illustrated Guide to the Recordings of Spike Jones. Monrovia: Corbett. No ISBN.
Mirtle, Jack. (1986) Thank You Music Lovers: A Bio-discography of Spike Jones. Westport; Greenwood Press ISBN 0-313-24814-1
Young, Jordan R. (2005). Spike Jones Off the Record: The Man Who Murdered Music. Albany: BearManor Media ISBN 1-59393-012-7 3rd edition.
External links
Red Hot Jazz
[ Allmusic]
Phillywire article with added links
Category:1911 births
Category:1940s American radio programs
Category:1965 deaths
Category:American bandleaders
Category:American comedy musicians
Category:American novelty song performers
Category:RCA Victor artists
Category:Liberty Records artists
Category:Burials at Holy Cross Cemetery
Category:Deaths from emphysema
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