[Dixielandjazz] "Spike Jones: The Legend" - New DVD Collection

[Steve Barbone]

This is a must read for Don Ingle, whose dad Red played with Spike Jones and
other Spike Jones Fans. Love the description of the band as sounding like
Salvatore Dali's idea of Dixieland. From the NY Sun Online. Don, would Red
be on these clips?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

A Flicker of Spike on the Small Screen
Jazz - By WILL FRIEDWALD - December 10, 2007

It is hard to think of a performer whose music changed as radically from one
medium to another as did that of the great Spike Jones. Call him the
Marshall McLuhan of American popular culture. During his glory years in the
1940s, Jones was constantly on the road with his Musical Depreciation Revue,
training from town to town with his merry band of musical comics and
sound-effects specialists.

Nearly all the writing about Jones recounts his extravagant, almost
indescribable stage shows. Even though he had several million-selling
records and at least one No. 1 hit, very little attention was paid to his
records when they were new on the shelves. Since his death in 1965 at age
53, his live shows have largely been forgotten, though his recordings have
inspired several generations of comic musicians, from Esquivel to P.D.Q.
Bach, Frank Zappa, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Jones, who is the subject of a new DVD collection from Infinity
Entertainment, "Spike Jones: The Legend," brought two major innovations to
American pop. The first was the idea that sound effects used on radio and
film soundtracks, when used in tempo and rhythm, could become an essential
part of the music; instead of building to a rim shot or a clarinet break,
Jones would punctuate a melody with a gunshot, a cowbell, a car backfiring,
or a woman screaming. Ornette Coleman once expressed admiration for this
element of Jones's performance ‹ the idea of dissolving the barrier between
noise and music ‹ and one can imagine John Cage or the avant-gardists of any
other musical epoch feeling the same way.

Before Jones, nearly every bandleader played novelty songs, but they were
considered the low-slung end of the music business: Jones discovered that it
was possible to extract great comedy from great music, from Tchaikovsky (as
in "The Nutcracker") to Johnny Mercer ("That Old Black Magic" and "Laura").
Jones also played silly songs, but he was funniest when he took a piece of
real music and relentlessly gagged it up ‹ not just with garbage cans,
barking dogs, bird calls, and falling anvils, but with a band that sounded
like Salvador Dalí's idea of Dixieland. Owing to the extremely visual nature
of Jones's touring act, one might think that the band would have been a
major hit on television. He eventually had a show that ran for 20 episodes
in 1957, but Jones's TV shows somehow lacked the panache and punch of his
classic recordings. Blame it on McLuhan: Jones was brilliant in the hot,
audio-only media, but not nearly as effective in the cool medium of the
small screen. Part of it is just the economics of the era, in that TV
producers and sponsors reduced Jones's inspired lunacy to mere grist for the
variety-show mill, with guest stars and sketches that were almost never as
funny as we'd have liked them to be.

Yet this new release provides the missing link in Jones's evolution. The gem
of the four-disc package, which collects four hours of his 1951 and 1952
television specials, is his first major TV appearance, telecast live on
February 11, 1951, as part of the "Colgate Comedy Hour" series. This
hour-long show is easily the most entertaining piece of visual footage that
Jones and his band, the City Slickers, left us. As time passed and he did
more television, the more like everyone else Jones became, but this first
show is more or less a camera pointed in the direction of Jones's legendary
touring stage show.

All the bits that you've heard about are here: the bass saxophonist who
sends a frog flying out of the bell of his instrument; trombonists whose
trousers fall and rise according to the pitch of the note they play; two
headless dudes enjoying a pantomime conversation; the bass fiddle that gives
birth to a midget; two chickens serenading each other to the tune of
"Holiday for Strings," as if to illustrate that hope is the thing with
feathers or that they know why the guy in the bird suit sings; the harpist
on the sidelines of the action who spends most of the show knitting and
puffing on a nasty-looking stogie during her own solo. You can't trust any
instrument: Everything from the piano to the violin is liable to explode at
any moment.

Then there's the ringleader himself, who, when he isn't conducting a
classical piece with a toilet plunger for a baton, chasing a chorus girl
with a giant sword, or parading in mermaid drag, is a remarkably understated
presence, looking on from the side with a David Letterman-like smirk.

Ironically, Jones began to run out of steam in the mid-1950s, just as
television and rock 'n' roll were getting to know each other. He said that
it was impossible to parody the new pop music since it was so ludicrous to
begin with, which proved untrue ‹ there would be plenty of City
Slicker-inspired satirists in the rock era. But he was correct in that there
had been a sea change in the culture, which, retroactively, makes Jones's TV
shows harder to appreciate. Viewed by 21st-century sensibilities, the
"straight" portions of his shows look no less surreal. There's the
appearance of a busty female acrobat, built rather like Jayne Mansfield,
wearing a low-cut French maid outfit and enormous high heels, bouncing up
and down on a trampoline; somehow it seems more contemporary than anything
else on the discs, like something Howard Stern would stage.

The first show, which begins with the Slickers' rendition of the
Middle-Eastern-flavored favorites "In a Persian Market" and "The Sheik of
Araby," also includes a rare TV appearance by the spastic spoonerist Doodles
Weaver, as well as a full-dress treatment of "Glow Worm," delivered by a
stout soprano whose giggling and jiggling midriff are the funniest parts of
the piece. The later shows include some wonderful guest stars, such as the
great Billy Eckstine (whose numbers are unforgivably deleted) and the
Liberace Brothers, as well as Jones's talented chanteuse wife, Helen Grayco
(who sings an Argentine tango in Gypsy get-up). But as early as the second
show, a lot of time is wasted on a long Foreign Legion sketch, which is
redeemed only by a villain named "El Schlemiel."

This is as close as anyone ever came to staging a Tex Avery cartoon, not
just in live action, but live in person, before our very eyes. As Fats
Waller, Louis Armstrong, Betty Comden and Adolph Green (not to mention Mel
Brooks), and others have proved in other contexts, great comedy and great
music are flipsides of the same coin. As Jones says in a rare on-camera
interview on the third disc, "If it wasn't for good music, what would I have
to wreck?"

wfriedwald at nysun.com