Music: Spike Jones, Primitive

A staid, steady seller at Christmas time is Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. This Christmas, buyers had better beware. Victor last week marketed a new recording of Nutcracker—done by Spike Jones and his City Slickers. It was the musical mayhem of 1945.

The Sugar Plum Fairy danced to a set of camel bells, the Arabs to an accompaniment of carefully modulated burps. Tchaikovsky’s flutes, piccolos and muted strings were drowned out by washboards, police sirens, breaking glass.

Flit Guns and Shotguns. Such nonsense is the highly profitable stock-in-trade of a professional primitive named Lindley Armstrong (“Spike”) Jones. For five years he beat the drums in John Scott Trotter’s slick sweet band, accompanying Bing Crosby’s radio show. It bored him. One day he decided “to louse up some old cornplasters like Chloe.” During rehearsals he began to experiment in sound effects as a substitute for music.

Soon his men were synchronizing cowbells chromatically arranged like a xylophone; a klaxon, a popgun, a saw, a fire-bell, an octave of Flit guns (tuned to the key of E flat), two octaves of tuned doorbells, an auto pump, a car motor, a Smith & Wesson .22 pistol. His ten players—nine men and a girl harpist—are proficient at making every conceivable noise capable of emerging from a human larynx.

Spike also invented an “anvilphone,” a “crashophone” (to break glass), a “poon-tangophone” (a cigar box and a lathe) and a “latrinophone” (a toilet seat strung with catgut, which went over big on a European U.S.O. tour). To record his Hotchi Cornia, Spike rented a goat that “naa-a-a-ed” when he twisted its tail. In Little Bo Peep Has Lost Her Jeep, the Slickers ripped apart an old auto. When these musical effects proved inadequate to Spike’s demands, the band members crunched English walnuts in their teeth, ripped mustard plasters off each other’s chests. They did it with considerable and conscious musicianship. Says Spike: “They’re like comedy acrobats. They have to be twice as good to take the pratfalls.”

Belched Danube. Their first big seller, in 1942, was the Hitler lampoon, Der Führer’s Face. When it sold a phenomenal 1,500,000 records, Spike took the City Slickers on a road tour. Recalls Spike: “We were too corny for sophisticated people, and too sophisticated for corny people.” But by the end of the tour, collectors and radio disc-jockeys were calling for more. He set about deflating some of Tin Pan Alley’s more pretentious tunes. The City Slickers played Chloe straight, with all the tom-toms and jungle mating cries that everybody else affects, then gave it the business (“Chloe — where are you, you old bat you?”). They caught the nagging, namby-pamby nonsense of Glow-Worm. Their Cocktails for Two, to a 1934 sob ballad, was such a jukebox favorite that Victor made 150,000 pressings with it on both sides — so that as soon as one side wore out the other side could be played to death.

In Spike’s rendition of the Ink Spots’ hit, You Always Hurt the One You Love, the “beloved” is shot, hung and poisoned. His Blue Danube is Wayne King schmalz — plus four strategically placed belches. On the Jones agenda are a poke at Polonaise, called Chopin’s Mayonnaise; a lampoon of Xavier Cugat called Benzedrine Beguine, and a new version of Carmen. Spike is eager to try his most ambitious experiment: a section of cellos playing under water. He hasn’t yet figured how.