Spike Jones
Spike Jones (14 December 1911 - 1 May 1965) was an American bandleader and comedian. During the 1940s and 1950s he became notorious for his numerous parodies of popular songs. Jones and his band, Spike Jones and the City Slickers, didn't change lyrics, but rearranged the melodies by adding funny lines, loud and unexpected sound effects, comedy sketches and/or musical changes.[1] He was the first musician to build a career on making comedy music and therefore a large influence on The Goon Show, Stan Freberg, The Bonzo Dog Band, Monty Python's Flying Circus and "Weird Al" Yankovic.
Yet Jones was never recognized as a real musician. His arrangements were extraordinarily complex and his band members very skilled, but critics and audiences saw him as nothing more than some kind of clown. Only after his death Jones was revalued.
Zappa about Spike Jones
Spike Jones was one of Zappa's earliest musical influences:
"Yeah, I was a massive Spike Jones fan, and ah when I was I guess about six or seven years old he had a hit record called "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth". And I sent him a fan letter because of that, and … hem … I was expecting a photograph of Spike Jones in the mail, but instead I got a photograph of a man named George Rock who was the actual vocalist on that … hem … tune. And he looked like a master criminal. It was like a frightening thing to receive in a mail. (...) And the, ah … the guy he looked, ah … if you remember the old Untouchables television series, there was a guy named Bruce Gordon who played Frank Nitti? Yeah. Well, that's what this guy looked like. And he was a trumpet player." - Frank Zappa in Ode To Gravity - Frank Zappa: World Affairs Commentator.
"During the pretour rehearsals, the band members pencil in these 'extras' in next to 'the real notes', so when they originally have the show learned, they know not only the 'song as originally-written' but also, superimposed on it, a flexible grid which will support a constantly mutating collage of low-rent Americana. I owe this part of my creative existence to Spike Jones"- FZ, The Real Frank Zappa Book.
Zappa once considered buying Spike Jones' collection of instruments and gadgets once it became available after Jones' death in 1965, but couldn't raise enough money.
"I used to really enjoy Spike Jones and Leiber and Stoller. America should give them an award for what they did to make rock 'n' roll happen." - Frank Zappa, American Songwriter, 11 November 1983. [2]
The influence of Jones on Zappa's music is not only evident in his use of humor, but also in Zappa's more narrative songs, where characters' quotes and deeds are emphasized with musical cues and sound effects, like Billy The Mountain, Titties 'n Beer, Honey Don't You Want A Man Like Me and The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary.
In Andreas Rausch' online documentary series The Dog & Frank Zappa in the episode Time, Rausch notices a few similarities between Spike Jones' musical parody Portia and the Hollywood Wolf (a pastiche of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf) and Zappa's own musical fairy tale The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary.
