Music: Schnickelfritz

Some little bands should be seen but not heard. At the top of this category perch Perch Leroy (“Stuff”) Smith, a colored show-off who composed I’se A-muggin’, a song whose lyrics consist of counting and grunting; and the clowning Riley-Farley Band which caused a minor musical epidemic in 1936 with The Music Goes Round & Around. Well on their way toward the same sort of eminence last week were six droll musicians of St. Paul, Minn., who play under the name of the Schnickelfritz Band and whose chief assets are two trunkfuls of funny hats and a large supply of wigs, beards and spectacles. Night after night people lined up to pay 25¢ and crowd the Midway Club beyond its capacity (250) just to watch Leader Freddie Fisher & colleagues do their odd stuff. On the strength of their antics their Decca records, without any special promotion, were selling well throughout the U. S. The first four had sold out entirely in Chicago. And as they perspired through their nightly routine of horseplay. Freddie Fisher and his boys began getting radio and cinema offers, while taking well-paid jobs at afternoon and early-evening parties around St. Paul.

Ferdinand (“Freddie”) Fisher, 34, was born and reared on a farm near Garnavillo, Iowa. His father, whom he still calls “the best butter maker in Iowa,” wanted him to play the piano, compromised on a clarinet, but Freddie says he always broke the reed just before school band practice. When he was 21 and able to keep a reed intact, Freddie bought a dinner jacket and got a job in an Orpheum Circuit band. Later Freddie Fisher thought up the name “Schnickelfritz” (German slang for silly fellow), and assembled five men to play a permanent date in a tavern in Winona, Minn. Frankly out to build up a novelty band rather than one which would be noted for its music, Freddie signed up two cards like himself for the front row— Stanley Fritts, who could play the trombone and drums and specialized in getting tunes out of a jug and a washboard, and Nels Laakso. who triple-tongued and hit easy high C’s on the cornet, but also did not disdain making noise simply by sucking the mouthpiece. For the back row Freddie Fisher got Pianist-Arranger Paul Cooper, Drummer Kenneth Trisko, Bull Fiddler Charles Koenig. The Schnickel-fritz Band did not cause much stir in Winona until a Decca representative named Elvin T. Christman heard the boys last January. He took them to Chicago to make their first four recordings, became their manager and sold them to the St. Paul tavern for $155 a week (union scale) and 40% of the gross. By last week. Winona people were motoring 103 miles to St. Paul to see what they had missed at home. With the 25¢ admission to the Midway newly in effect, the band grossed $1,675 in July.

What brought Pillsburys, Crosbys and other moneyed and fun-loving local folk to hear Freddie Fisher and his boys was mainly a display of great physical activity reminiscent of the frenzied antics of the old vaudeville team of Clayton, Jackson & Durante. As in the case of “The Ex-Lax Program” and Little Nell, the Schnickelfritz numbers do not always say scat to the scatological. In all their numbers the Schnickelfritzers make faces, move from chair to chair, change hats rapidly, tumble about, make boyish gestures at one another with their instruments. In Looking For the Mocking Bird they perform an elaborate pantomime of hunting, while Fritts plays a solo on the washboard. In The Wreck of the Old 97 (see cut, p. 45) they bong bells, shuffle with their feet until black smoke pours from Freddie Fisher’s tin stove pipe hat, is quenched from a jug. How the humor of these japes is to be communicated over the radio, and how it is to be toned down in the film they will make in Hollywood next November, are problems Freddie Fisher and his manager will presently have to solve. Having already turned down an offer from local station WMIN, they were signed up last week for a Manhattan engagement after they leave Hollywood.