SLSL Intro "Dad's Kind of Music"

[Dave Monroe]

"What I had to learn later on was the necessity of
managing this procedure with some degree of care and
skill: any old combination of details will not do. 
Spike Jones, Jr., whose father's orchestral recordings
had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said
once in an interview, 'One of the things that people
don't realize about Dad's kind of music is, when you
replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a
C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.'" (SL, "Intro," p.
20)

>From Thomas Pynchon, Liner notes to Spiked! The Music
of Spike Jones (Catalyst/BMG 09026-61982-2, 1994) ...

   "Welcome, music lovers, to the cheerfully deranged
world of Spike Jones and his City Slickers. There's
gunshots and cowbells aplenty, not to mention class
hostility, first-rate musicianship, subverted
expectations, hair-trigger timing, and more than
enough material for that interesting subset of folks
looking to be offended, who might like to begin,
actually, with the lyrics to the recitative or lead-in
to the 'Chinese Dance' in Spike's Nutcracker Suite --
although mild compared to, oh say your average Chinese
celebrity roast, this will require the sort of
listener who either wants to wince with embarrassment
or can find in vintage bigotry quaint refuge from the
more virulent forms encountered in our own era. There
is certainly lots of it here to go around.... What
today we would unquestioningly call acts of racism
seemed, for Spike and the Slickers and indeed postwar
America, as pure and unpremeditated as the breathing
of a Zen monk. It was the Golden Age of Radio, and
dialect humor, a legacy from vaudeville and minstrel
shows before it, was part of the comedy environment
.... (Additionally, for musicians of the swing era,
"Chinese" references in song lyrics had long been code
for opium, its derivatives, and their recreational use
-- so there's maybe that subtext here as well.)
   "All through this Nutcracker, in fact, runs a
strange uneasy mixture of jaded musicians' sarcasm and
honest straight-world sentimentality. Nowadays, when
everybody knows everything and nobody takes any text
seriously, it's hard to remember how it felt once to
share a public world not as contaminated by the
terminology wised-up irony that has come to pervade
our own lives. People were still running on a residue
of belief in movies, and radio, and pop music -- as if
there were an unspoken deal still in effect, despite
the war, despite everything.... Kids admired his
records for nearly the same set of reasons grownups
did -- the rudeness, the grace of execution, the sheer
percussive dementia. Yet there remains about Spike's
work what is sometimes almost an uncomfortable
complexity. We'd like him to be simpler -- how much
can a purveyor of impolite sound effects comfortably
be allowed in the way of depths? .... Spike described
his band as "a subtle burlesque of all corny,
hill-billy bands." A great many of these City Slickers
who were so hep to the jive had in fact themselves
come originally from out in the middle of America ....
They had all left these places, come to L.A.... L.A.
for a while was probably the center of the musical
universe, Stravinsky living just off Sunset,
Schoenberg teaching at UCLA, Charlie Parker and Miles
Davis playing their historic gigs around South
Central, nightclubs booming, radio stations
broadcasting from them live, Zeidler & Zeidler doing
phenomenal business in bop cardigans and porkpie hats,
the whole town hopping, the pace swifter and louder
than we usually think of in connection with
California. Spike turned out to be one of the bright
foci of all that energy.... But at the same time here
was this strong attraction to the more refined world
of the classics. Spike told an often-reworked story
about going to hear Stravinsky conduct The Firebird at
the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. Stravinsky is wearing
some new patent leather shoes, and Spike is sitting
close enough to notice that every time the
composer-conductor goes up on his toes just before a
downbeat, the shoes squeak. "Here would go the
violins," as he told it, " and 'squeak squeak' would
go his shoes. He should have worn a pair of sneakers.
And the pseudos who went down to see the ballet, they
didn't know what they were looking at anyway. They
thought, Stravinsky's done it again. New percussive
effects." But then later, driving home, Spike gets to
thinking -- "... if you made planned mistakes in
musical arrangements and took the place of regular
notes in well-known tunes with sound effects, there
might be some fun in it." The Stravinsky story sheds
light from a couple of angles. Though the evidence
suggests that the development of the Slicker concept
was a little less closely thought out than this,
still, with Spike in control of the rewrite, it was
how the sound should have originated, how it will have
to be shown in any eventual movie of Spike's life --
rational planning plus painstaking execution equals
the raving musical insanity America came to love.
Unable to respect highbrow audiences, Spike
nonetheless wanted to claim inspiration from highbrow
music. Both wanting and rejecting these connections at
the same time seemed to generate a useful energy
that's audible in projects like the Nutcracker.... By
as early as 1943 Spike had already been trapped, typed
as the "King of Corn" .... Tin Pan Alley wisdom about
life had not stood a chance under the realities of
global war, too many people by then knew better. "The
people want to laugh in war time," Spike said.
"Soldiers just don't go for stuff like 'Over There.'
They want sentimental stuff or strictly comic. We give
'em the comedy, and it's what the public goes for,
too."
   "As this apparent postwar loss of faith in the
pop-lyric consensus deepened, along came a surge of
music about music, the genre in which Spike was to
become a master. This impulse to kid has of course
been around a good while, at least as long as Mozart's
Ein Musikalischer Spass (A Musical Joke), K. 522, of
which one Mozart biographer, in a line which could
have applied equally to Spike, says, 'Seldom in music
has one mind exerted itself so much to seem so
mindless.'
Besides ... intertextual hijinks ... there also
appeared about then an epidemic of songs referring to
themselves, as if direct emotional experience could
not longer be trusted ....
   "Spike's preferred structure was first to state the
theme in as respectably mainstream a manner as
possible, then subversively descend into restatement
by way of sound effects, crude remarks, and hot jazz,
the very idiom Spikes Jones and his Five Tacks had
begun with back in high school, to the great
displeasure of their parents. But used this way,
dropped into like a lower gear, with antiquated licks
and growls and semi-liquid vulgarities in the lower
brass, not even the music of Spike's own
apprenticeship was to escape Slicker disrespect,
having come to be code for, "Vulgar, ain't it,
compared to that society stuff," at the risk of
de-emphasizing what were brilliant ensemble
performances. So it should come as no surprise to find
among the Slicker oeuvre yet another form that refers
to itself--the Knock-Knock joke, part of whose appeal
lies in the metacomical point that somebody is being
silly enough to tell it in the first place.... It is
only a short sideways step from here to other Slicker
performances that make simultaneous commentary on
themselves ....
We can feel the old gang-of-idiots amiability still
shining through. This is the way characters end up in
Zen stories illustrating deep lessons, though as in
Zen, wisdom cannot always be separated from a peculiar
sense of humor. "My band's got rhythm," Spike said
once, "and to it we add a guffaw. We get along by not
taking anything serious." Which, if not heavy duty
prophecy, turns out at least to be his maniac's
blessing and gift, finally, to us, adrift in our own
difficult time, with moments of true innocence, like
good cowbell solos, few and far between.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_spiked.html

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_music_jones.html

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/spiked.html

And see as well ...

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/1440/

Ocker, David. "Spike Jones and Lotion: Connected
   by a Fragile Pynchon Thread."  Pynchon Notes
   36-39 (1995-1996): 184-88.

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