Spike Jones

My father saw them at the Michigan Theater in Detroit back in 1943. "They were crazy, he started off the show with his regular big band, you know, just playing straight stuff. Then, after intermission, the stage went black and all these sirens and gun shots started going off. Then the stage lit up and it was Spike Jones and his City Slickers, the same band only dressed up crazy. They had a guy playing a toilet seat with strings on it, people on stage wearing wigs and crazy outfits, oh geez, they were nuts. Nobody was doing anything like that back in those days." I remember seeing them on television back in the early '50s, on my grandmother's 8" round screen Zenith. The noise and visual mayhem spilling out of that dinky speaker and tiny screen seemed barely containable as I sat on the floor, absolutely mesmerized. Guns being fired, bicycle horns honking like crazy, midgets and people with no heads running all over the place, while the bandleader nonchalantly chewed gum seemingly quite content with all this dementia going on around him. They were the loudest band I had ever heard up to that time, and they were playing in such a fast and reckless manner, I could barely keep up with what they were doing. I had always been fascinated by music and show business, but this was a different ballgame altogether. This was my introduction to a world of insanity and noise in the name of entertainment and when rock & roll came along a few years later, it made perfect sense to me. But even Presley's gyrations and Little Richard's screams seemed like pretty tame stuff compared to these kind of monkey shines. Lindley Armstrong Jones was a musical genius. In the wild and woolly days before MTV, digital tape and multi-track recording, Spike Jones put together a top-flight musical...