Spike Jones and His City Slickers - musical satirists
Created | Updated Mar 14, 2005
As the Sun pulls away from the shore,
And our boat sinks slowly in the west...
Spike Jones was called many things in his career, a number of which of which are unprintable here. However, he was also known by more friendly nicknames included 'The King of Corn'1, 'King of the Cowbells', and 'The Man Who Murdered Music'. During the 1940s and 1950s he led a band called The City Slickers who parodied and satirised just about any type of music they could lay their hands on. Their two trademarks were Dixieland/trad jazz played at breakneck speed, and the silly noise, which came in two forms:
- Animate - gurgles; glugs; hiccups; rasberries; laughs; sneezes; animal and bird impersonations.
- Inanimate - gunshots; pops; horns; glass crashes; swannee whistles; sirens; cowbells.
It's often said that to play music badly for comic effect yet make it sound good, you have to be an excellent musician, and The City Slickers were all first-rate. They all had the same sense of humour as Spike Jones, and were chosen for having a comic talent quite apart from their musicianship.
Spike Jones
Lindley Armstrong Jones was born on December 14th 1911, in Long Beach, California, and got the nickname 'Spike' from his father's employment as a railroad worker. At the age of 11 he began playing the drums, and in high school he formed his first band - The Five Tacks, a Dixieland jazz quintet. After leaving school and spending a short time at college, Spike decided to look for a career in music, and played drums for several bandleaders on the Southern California club circuit. By the mid thirties he had also established himself as a session drummer, performing on recordings for some of the biggest stars of the day including Bing Crosby, Lena Horne, Judy Garland2, and Fred Astaire. As the drummer in John Scott Trotter's band, Spike regularly played on Bing Crosby's radio show.
Spike wasn't content with being a part of someone else's organisation, and wanted to be a bandleader himself, so in the early 1940s he began putting together a group of musicians who had the same slapstick sense of humour as himself, and named them The City Slickers. As a drummer he was always interested in the rhythm of a piece of music, and often told a story about seeing Stravinsky conduct a performance his Firebird Suite at The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The Maestro was wearing a new pair of shoes that evening, and every time he went up on his toes for a downbeat, the shoes would sqeak. Whilst many of the audience were in awe of Stravinsky, believing that he had invented a new percussive technique, Spike, on the way home, figured that "...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 City Slickers
Far from having a permanent lineup, The City Slickers tended to come and go, but there was a central core during their heyday.
George Rock - trumpet and baby voice.
Very few Dixieland jazz trumpeters could surpass George Rock in terms of talent, but it's doubtful if any of them could impersonate Shirley Temple as convincingly as he could. He was the featured vocalist on 'All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth'.
Earl Bennett - Trombone and silly giggle.
Earl Bennett - aka Sir Frederick Gas -
Joe Siracusa - Props and visual gags.
Del Porter - Clarinet.
Winstead 'Doodles' Weaver - Spoof commentaries and commercials.
Doodles Weaver was a stand up comic long before joining The City Slickers, and his surreal sense of humour plus his incredible versatility with the English language made him a natural for the band. Incidentally, if the family name 'Weaver' preceded by an unusual Christian name rings a bell, Winstead had a niece called Sigourney.
Billy Barty - Liberace impersonations.
The Musical Depreciation Revue
Why were they so darn funny?
Comedy can date and lose its appeal very quickly, and musical comedy more so. There are many reasons why Spike Jones and his comedy was so popular at the time, and has remained so ever since
Firstly, Spike himself was a perfectionist - it had to be done right or it wasn't done at all. If your talents didn't live up to the high levels he set, then you didn't stay around very long, and although he was never seen to get angry with anyone and chew them out, everyone knew that if you made a mistake once you never made it again. Unless of course it added to the comedy, as when...
As mentioned earlier, The City Slickers were all top-notch musicians. Anyone who has heard for instance, 'The Sneezin' Bee' - their rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov's 'The Flight of the Bumble Bee', not an easy piece to begin with, can only marvel at hearing it played on a trombone... at almost double speed.
