Search - Spike Jones :: Wacky World of Spike Jones

As good of a one album collection of Spike Jones as you can

Lawrance M. Bernabo | The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota | 01/24/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"When I was in grade school I had a teacher who would play his Spike Jones records for us from time to time. I clearly remembering listening to "Cocktails for Two," "Der Fuehrer's Face," "You Always Hurt the One You Love," and, of course, "The William Tell Overture," from which comes my strong affection for a race horse named Beetlebum. Of course as youngsters we were enthralled by the idea of a band playing music and using sirens, bells, whistles, and apparently anything they could get their hands on as instruments. So what if we had never had a cocktail, were at a loss for who der Fuehrer might be (okay, I admit it, I knew it was Hitler and explained it to my classmates), and associated "The William Tell Overture" with the Lone Ranger. This was good stuff.



"The Wacky World of Spike Jones" is a solid sampling of that good stuff from Spike and his City Slickers. Since it has all four of the songs that I remember when I was a mere lad, so it meets my minimum requirement. Actually the only thing that is really missing, assuming you do not have a personal favorite, is what is clearly his most famous novelty song, "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth." But even without that one (aptly covered by the Chipmunks) there are still plenty of first-rate Spike Jones songs here, what with "The Blue Danube," "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," "Chloe" and "Hawaiian War Chant." There are only sixteen tracks, but that is certainly a really decent number for a collection like this one and a bigger Spike Jones fan can certainly skip this one and go right for one of the bigger collections



You can certainly see how Spike Jones sent the stage for those who would follow. He does his own twisted versions of classical songs like "Liebestraum" and "Rhapsody from Hunger" by Lizst, and turns the works of Saint-Saens and Tchaikovsky into "None But the Lonely Heart (A Soaperetta)," which foreshadows the work of P.D.Q. Bach. Of course, that is highbrow musical satire when the more obvious descendants of Spike Jones would be Alan Sherman and "Weird" Al Yankovic. But Spike Jones is to them as Woody Guthrie is to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, and on that off-the-wall musical analogy I will take my leave of you."