CD AJA 5189 [1] COCKTAILS FOR TWO [2] CHLOE (SONG OF THE SWAMP) [3] BEHIND THOSE SWINGIN' DOORS [4] REDWING [5] THE COVERED WAGON ROLLED [6] CLINK, CLINIC ANOTHER DRINK! [7] LITTLE BO PEEP HAS LOST [8] PASS THE BISCUITS, MIRANDY [9] DER FUEHRERS FACE [10] I WANNA GO BACK TO [11] HOTCHA CORNIA (BLACK EYES) [12] LEAVE THE DISHES IN THE [13] SERENADE TO A JERK [14] HOLIDAY FOR STRINGS [15] THE BLUE DANUBE [16] YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONE [17] HAWAIIAN WAR CHANT [18] LIEBESTRAUM [19] THAT OLD BLACKMAGIC THE NUTCRACKER SUITE [20] Part 1: "THE LITTLE GIRL'S DREAM" [21] Part 2: "LAND OF THE SUGAR- [22] Part 3: "THE FAIRY BALL" - The [23] Part 4: "THE MYSTERIOUS ROOM" [24] Part5:"BACK TO THE FAIRY BALL" [25] Part 6: "END OF THE LITTLE GIRLS All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting prohibited. Evolution played its part in the maturing of Spike Jones and his City Slickers but, having once found his unique comic formula, he was assured of success. An outgoing disposition and high musicality allied to an exemplary sense of comic timing enabled him to exploit his matchless gift for parody and mimicry. He knew, too, how to draw the best from others of similar talents and inclinations, sending up a wide variety of songs and dance-band playing styles and elevating tomfoolery to a level of artistic sophistication. Born Lindley Armstrong Jones in Long Beach, California, on 14th December 1911, Spike played drums and led a band even in his school-days. As a teenager at high school he played with his own band "Spike Jones and his Five Tacks" on local radio stations. Here the lunatic high spirits of the comedy-routines of Musical Depreciation Society were already embryonic and, when he played on radio with Ray West and in studio outfits backing shows featuring Crosby, Jolson, Bums and Allen and others, he had golden opportunities for in-depth studies of the traits and weaknesses of his future "victims". As a studio session-drummer, Spike recorded with bands backing Hoagy Carmichael (1937), Ella Logan (in Perry Botkin's outfit, 1938), Pinky Tomlin (1938), Crosby and Mercer (in Victor Young's ad hoc "Small Fryers" group, 1938) and in Young's larger-scale studio orchestra (1939), continuing until 1941 to regale his audiences on radio with a dazzling array of incongruous novelty instruments serving the satire in such early hits as the mock-C & W Behind Those Swingin' Doors and The Covered Wagon Rolled Right Along. Even here, the musical mastery and superb timing of what appears, at least superficially, to be just a well-honed trad-jazz band are partly obscured by so much hilarious clowning. Total, unbridled anarchy becomes fully-fledged with Spike's side-splittingly funny million-selling 1942 mockery of Adolf Hitler, Der Fuehrer's Face. Dating from 1936, its tune was originally written by the British (naturalized American) composer Oliver G. Wallace for Disney's Donald Duck cartoon Nutsy Land and, inspired by hearing the Slickers' send-up, Walt himself re-christened the best-selling wartime American anti-Nazi morale-booster. No.3 in the American charts, this Jones landmark was for 10 weeks a US best-seller. Cow-bells, washboards, pistols, saws, a live goat trained to bleat in time with the music, glass breaking at regular intervals and the Jones patent Latrinophone (a toilet-seat fitted with catgut strings!) very soon became the unmistakable, instantly recognizable hallmarks of the Slickers' musical (?) armoury on radio, on records, in overseas tours to entertain US servicemen (in USO), culminating in the sublime mayhem of Musical Depreciation, the highly successful revue which Jones toured from 1947. These, and many other effects, grace (or disgrace?) the majority of Slickers' discs, most memorably, perhaps, in their other big hit: the million-selling Cocktails For Two of 1944. Spike's second Golden Disc, it still probably rates as the finest of all City Slickers' demolitions of a sentimental love-sons. Originally the work of two New Yorkers - lyricist-composer Arthur J. Johnston (1898-1954) and composer-songwriter, pioneer crooner and popular music publisher Sam Coslow (b.1902), it was featured by the smooth Danish filmstar-crooner Carl Brisson (1895-1958) in the 1934 Paramount film Murder At The Vanities. Once heard "depreciated" by Jones, it can never again sound the same to a human ear. The same applies to Chloe (here inimitably apostrophised by Red Ingle as an "old bat"), a 1927 song of tender sentiment with words by emigre-Russian American Gus Kahn (1886-1941) and composer Neil Moret, as well as to such diverse standards as Red Wing (originally a 1907 ragtime hit by Massachusettian composer-lyricist Thurland Chattaway (1872-1947) and Philadelphia-born composer-lyricist, violinist and publisher Frederick Allen "Kerry" Mills (1869-1948), You Always Hurt The One You Love (in 1944 a million-selling number for the Mills Brothers and the work of New York-born Doris Fisher (b. 1915) and lyricist Allan Roberts (1905-1966)) and That Old Black Magic (a time-honored collaboration between Johnny Mercer (1909-1976) and Harold Arlen (1905-1986) made for the 1942 Paramount movie Star-Spangled Rhythm). Holiday For Strings, a parody of the 1944 million-seller by London-born American concert-pianist and composer David Rose (1910-1990), with its emphasis on bottles and tin-cans becomes an epic for percussion which, it must be said, is almost an improvement on its model. Nor, indeed, are the classics sacred, either. Black Eyes, Johann Strauss ll's The Blue Danube and Liszt's Liebestraum (No.3) are treated with all due irreverence, while Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite (with clever lyrics and effects by Foster Carling and Country Washburne), complete with a superb mockery by Susan Scott of Deanna Durbin (then at the height of her popularity), transforms ballet into pantomime in droll conclusion. Peter Dempsey (1996) Transfers ® © 1996 ASV LTD, 1 Beaumont Avenue, London W14 9LP COMPILED AND PRODUCED BY PETER DEMPSEY Photographs as black & white originals: Colin Williams Made and printed in England |
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