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...