Spike Jones: The Legend

Infinity Entertainment
Available Oct. 30; List Price $49.98

The official musical iconoclasts of the '40s and '50s, Spike Jones and the City Slickers had a bunch of hit 78s — "Cocktails for Two," "Laura," "Chloe" — that would subject some sonorous ballad to a double-time assault of cowbells, washboards and braying brass. Or they'd ride a novelty number like "Der Feuhrer's Face" or "All I Want for Christmas (My Two Front Teeth)" to million-selling records. Or they'd take the work of semi-classical composers and decompose them. Spike and his comic-kazies stormed the country in the Musical Depreciation Revue, and appeared frequently on radio. But their musical slapstick, as much visual as aural, was made for TV. This four-disc set offers remastered kinescopes of four hour-long variety shows from 1951-52. It's tonic sonic mayhem.

Spike, a skinny gum-chewer with a Dead End Kid's sense of mischief and a suit of plaids that clashed as loud as his cymbals, pretended he and his gang were musical ignoramuses. On one show he's handed a sheaf of sheet music and deadpans, "I often wondered what this stuff looked like." But parody requires precision, not passion, and these guys were expert song-wreckers. As he tells Charles Collingwood on a 1960 Person to Person: "If you could plan musical mistakes — possibly sound effects in the place of notes to musical arrangements — you might be able to get some laughs out of people." Every goof was minutely calibrated; most of the band's ad libs had been perfected in rehearsal. On live TV, of course, things could go genuinely wrong: a prop doesn't work or, in a Snow Crop commercial, the waffles don't toast and Spike has to eat them frozen. (The announcer for commercials on another show is the young Mike Wallace.)

Spike's orchestrated chaos was a video-ready mix of Olden & Johnson vaudeville and the surreal sort of gags that Ernie Kovacs was perfecting on a local station in Philadelphia. One band member slaps his bass fiddle, spins it around and a dwarf jumps out of the back. As anarchy descends, a lady harpist in an evening gown placidly sits and knits. Spike shoots a cap pistol in the air, and a dozen rubber chickens fall from the flies. The ensemble shows up in drag to sing, "It's tough to be a girl musician, especially if ya happen to be a man." The set (which includes two 1945 radio shows and some reminiscences by surviving band members) is both a document of early TV and the best extant distillation of the band's lovely lunacy.