Spike Jones is this week’s Phantom Dancer feature artist. He was a US drummer, percussionist and bandleader specializing in spoof arrangements of popular songs and classical music. Ballads receiving the Jones treatment were punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, burps and outlandish and comedic vocals. He toured the United States and Canada as “The Musical Depreciation Revue”.

The Phantom Dancer is your weekly non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV every week.

LISTEN to this week’s Phantom Dancer mix (online after 2pm AEST, Tuesday 15 November) and two years of Phantom Dancer mixes online at, at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

POTS, PANS & DRUMS

At the age of 11 Spike Jones got his first set of drums. As a teenager he played in bands that he formed himself. His first band was called Spike Jones and his Five Tacks. A railroad restaurant chef taught him how to use pots and pans, forks, knives and spoons as musical instruments. Jones frequently played in theater pit orchestras. In the 1930s, he joined the Victor Young orchestra and got many offers to appear on radio shows, including Al Jolson’s Lifebuoy Program, Burns and Allen and Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall.

From 1937 to 1942, Jones was the percussionist for the John Scott Trotter Orchestra,which played on Bing Crosby’s first recording of “White Christmas”.

He was part of a backing band for songwriter Cindy Walker during her early recording career with Decca Records and Standard Transcriptions. Her song “We’re Gonna Stomp Them City Slickers Down” provided the inspiration for the name of Jones’s future band.

PARODIES

Jones became bored playing the same music each night with the orchestras. Spike Jones found other like-minded musicians and they began playing parodies of standard songs for their own entertainment.

The musicians wanted their wives to share their enjoyment, so they recorded their weekly performances. One of the recordings made its way into the hands of an RCA Victor executive, who offered the musicians a recording contract.

One of the City Slickers’ early recordings for the label was a Del Porter arrangement of “Der Fuehrer’s Face”. The record’s success inspired Jones to become the band’s leader. He initially thought the popularity the record brought them would fade. However, audiences kept asking for more, so Jones started working on more comic arrangements.

RADIO

After appearing as the house band on The Bob Burns Show, Spike got his own radio show on NBC, The Chase and Sanborn Program, as Edgar Bergen’s summer replacement in 1945.

The guest list for Jones’s 1947–49 CBS program for Coca-Cola (originally The Spotlight Revue, retitled The Spike Jones Show for its final season) included Frankie Laine, Mel Torme, Peter Lorre, Don Ameche and Burl Ives.

Frank Sinatra appeared on the show in October 1948, and Lassie in May 1949. You’ll hear Lassie’s appearance on this week’s Phantom Dancer singing ‘El Barkio’.

In 1942, the Jones gang worked on numerous Soundies, musical shorts similar to later music videos which were shown on coin-operated projectors in small nightclubs, arcades, malt shops, and taverns.

The band appeared on camera under their own name in four Soundies.

TV & MOVIES

Jones saw the potential of television and filmed two half-hour pilot films, Foreign Legion and Wild Bill Hiccup, in the summer of 1950. Veteran comedy director Eddie Cline worked on both, but neither was successful.

The band fared much better on live television, where their spontaneous antics and crazy visual gags guaranteed the viewers a good time. Spike usually dressed in a suit with an enormous check pattern and was seen leaping around playing a washboard, cowbells, a suite of klaxons and foghorns, then xylophone, then shooting a pistol.

The band starred in variety shows, such as The Colgate Comedy Hour (1951, 1955) and their All Star Revue (1952) before being given his own slot by NBC, The Spike Jones Show, which aired early in 1954, and Club Oasis on NBC, in the summer of 1958; and by CBS, as The Spike Jones Show, in the summers of 1957, 1960, and 1961.

Spike Jones and his City Slickers also appeared on NBC’s The Ford Show, Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford in the episode which aired on November 15, 1956.

In 1940, Spike Jones had an uncredited bandleading part in the Dead End Kids film Give Us Wings, appearing on camera for about four seconds.

As the band’s fame grew, Hollywood producers hired the Slickers as a specialty act for feature films, including Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943), Meet the People (1944), Bring on the Girls (1945), Breakfast in Hollywood (1946) and Variety Girl (1947). Jones was set to team with Abbott and Costello for a 1954 Universal Pictures comedy, but when Lou Costello withdrew for medical reasons, Universal replaced the comedy team with look-alikes Hugh O’Brian and Buddy Hackett, and promoted Jones to the leading role. The finished film, Fireman Save My Child, turned out to be Spike Jones’s only top-billed theatrical movie

15 NOVEMBER PLAY LIST