Not More of that Crap...

Shut up, It's more Spike Jones...

Bottoms Up (1952)

Two seven inch elongated players of songs about drinking done in the Spike Jones style.

Skol!

Carmen Murdered! (1953)

Spike and his gang take on the Bizet operetta and it goes a little something like this.

Brava!

And his City Slickers

Because I'm feeling like I haven't alienated anybody in a while I'm going to load up a three record set of Spike Jones and his City Slickers live on the radio for you fine people.

3Lp set (1977)




I can probably trace a straight line for my love and tolerance of strange musical ventures to my earliest memory of a particular record. It was a copy of a cheap 1971 compilation of Spike Jones performing his musical mayhem to the stuff of Best Loved Melody compilations everywhere entitled "Spike Jones is Murdering the Classics"

I won't waste too much time and typing with his story. You can just google that shit.

The main thing is to remember that this is something that arose out of vaudeville and was finely honed in front of a live audience before making the transition to records and eventually television.

So here we have a cheap and dirty three record set taken from Spike's popular 1940's radio program performed in front of a live audience which just adds to the experience. It has that charge of performance that none of the studio recordings could match without an audience laughing along.

It's also really fucking funny and very very silly.

If you're so inclined, I'd also recommend looking up some of the originals that they're parodying so you can fully appreciate how far they took some of this material.

For an example: Here's the original version of "Holiday for Strings" by David Rose and Orchestra from 1942. Compare and contrast.

Definitely needs some clucking to really sell that tune...

I've been looking for this stuff for years.

Once again stepping outside of the usual musical posting parameters here because this is the good shit and I want to share it and make more people aware of the awesomeness that is Harry "the Hipster" Gibson who was hipster before all you mustachioed wannabes came along and ruined it with your fixed wheel bicycles, tiny houses, tattoos and pumpkin spice chai lattes. 

Be forewarned this is the heppest of hip jazz from the 40's with a driving boogie woogie piano and a patois that sounds like gibberish to any square cats who aren't clued into the jive.

Boogie Woogie in Blue

Kids who's musical views were irrevocably warped at an early age by weekly listens to the Dr Demento Show may already be somewhat familiar with Gibson's song "Who Put the Benzadrine in  Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine". (If it weren't for Dr Demento I'd probably have ended up a in a comfortable middle management position with a fondness for White Snake and Canadian Club.)

IF you're slightly more intrigued, you could do worse than spend an interesting half an hour and watch this documentary short put together by Gibson's daughter about her father called "Boogie in Blue" which would save me a lot of typing.

Or if you are still on the fence I can just point to one of the Soundies he made in the 40's to give you a taste of what to expect. Here he is doing "Handsome Harry the Hipster" Looks like somebody's been sipping out of Mrs. Murphy's cocoa mug. Seriously, some of the most enjoyably unhinged keyboard work since that guy in the Hocus Pocus by Focus live video.
 

All that said, he was also an incredibly good barrelhouse boogie woogie piano player which gets kind of buried under the hipster jive schtick. But unfortunately he's gotten kind of lost and forgotten over the years as a pure novelty act and there are almost no reissues to be found. Trust me, I've looked.

So here is a nice 70's semi-legit Lp of two recording sessions from the Mid-1940's. Make some Ovaltine and let it warm the cockles of your cold dead heart.

And for a complete change of pace....Some Jazz

I really love 20's and 30's Jazz along with the other fucking millions of things that float my personal sonic boat. I like sounds and different things for different times of day/year/states of mind/etc...

Thesaurus of Classic Jazz (1959)

So there's this 4 lp set of recordings from NYC done between 1926 & 1928 featuring a whole host of folks who have been more or less forgotten and left by the wayside. The most famous of which are perhaps the Dorsey Brothers who went onto some renown later on with their big bands and discovered a singer named Frank Sinatra. But for the most part Jazz recording in New York seemed to be based around different combos of the same 15 or so main guys. The Discogs listing gives the player breakdown track by track for anybody who's actually interested.

For my money the player that appears most frequently here and who gets just about zero credit for his contribution to the history of early Jazz is Miff Mole. He played on shit tons of dates and pretty much invented jazz trombone and was a fucking killer player, but time hasn't been kind to his legacy.

But for most people these days, this kind of stuff is really specialized listening. Few people have much interest in 90 year old recordings of music that was almost already old fashioned before the decade that spawned was over. But it's still some killer shit. 

These recordings were done live. There were no overdubs. Not nets. You had three minutes to get your glory onto the wax and you'd better be ready the first time. This was what you'd hear when you went out to a club and what you'd dance and drink to in whatever dingy speakeasy you managed to find your way into for a some hootch during Prohibition. This is the real deal red hot jazz.

Another reason that I wanted to post this is that the transfers here are actually really pretty fucking good. The recordings sound better than you'd expect. Sure they've filtered a bunch of high end noise off and added a shit ton of reverb to help fill things out, but they did manage to make the music sound much more present than a lot of other versions of these recordings I've heard. Maybe it's that in 1959 when they made their transfers the source material was only 20 or so years old. I don't know. I'm pleased with it.

I also don't expect that this will be a popular post amongst the folks who frequent this little corner of the internet, but I'm posting it mostly for myself.  You can choose or not choose to see what all the hubbub is about.