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Date Posted: 18:25:02 10/24/04 Sun
Author: perezoso
Author Host/IP: 4.27.250.92
Subject: Pynchon's liner notes for Spiked!

from the enigmatic Tommy P.'s liner notes to
Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones

" 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, stepping, as a consummate and paid-up percussionist, into the sudden worldwide lull that followed the years of explosive destruction, from whose audio vernacular of course would be drawn the tuned gunshots, and Slickers screaming and running around, destroying sets, appearing to thrust various props into or through their heads, acting our the most lowbrow of musical impulses.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, and in what was perhaps Spike's best shot at a class act, the Other Orchestra. Strings in those days meant not only Class, but also Cash, what with catgut aggregations like Percy Faith and Hugo Winterhalter soon to be topping charts week after week. But the Other Orchestra venture, by all accounts, was not a success. By as early as 1943 Spike had already been trapped, typed as the "King of Corn," originally an insult title applied to Guy Lombardo. Announcing the O.O.'s formation, "I am fed and gorged, stuffed and bloated," he told the press, sounding, strangely, like snooty columnist Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1945) "with being called the King of Corn. It takes crack musicianship to be a City Slicker. . . . Maybe my new band will change the minds of a lot of morons who vote for us in DownBeat's poll year after year." "Corn" by then had come to mean making fun of hillbilly music, which was enjoying a sudden boom, as talents like Bob Burns, Judy Canova, and Dorothy Shay, all of whom Spike worked with, took over a good part of the airwaves. Hillbilly was an idiom asking to be satirized -- the regional accents alone beckoned to vocal impressionists at all levels of ability. But it's not certain if Corn really ever got to be a full-scale genre, even though there was an annual DownBeat award for it, and serious magazine articles that tried to define it. Today, at a distance of nearly 50 years, it looks more like some labelling reflex -- Spike was successful, in all of the established media plus early television, so somebody had to come up with a category that could account for him. The excesses and longueurs of Corn, in any case, are more than compensated for by the briefness of its existence as a trend.There's a photo of Spike being crowned DownBeat's King of Corn for 1944, by the Nilsson twins, who were a pleasant-looking young vocal act, regulars on Slicker tours. The coronet on Spike's head is a standard costume-house model, featuring metallic points behind which are somehow wedged four erect, slightly oversize corncobs. Around his neck is a crude garland of even more corncobs. Spike is glaring, his legs tightly crossed, his mouth in an O. his eyes focused far, far away. The Twins are smiling and wearing these really cute checkered, maybe even gingham outfits, coded to suggest rural America. Here are all the outward and visible signs of the identity problem Spike seemed to be having right then. Still thinking of the Slickers as a novelty act destined only for some brief moment of fame, "We'll just keep going," he told Radio Mirror in 1943, "until people get sick to death of us and then it'll be over." He knew who he was, where he thought he wanted to go musically, and yet here was this ghostly teeming population of listeners who kept forcing upon him a kind of clown role he wanted to get beyond. Some king! So to augment the Slickers he went out and hired ten string players, plus about 20 other assorted reeds and brass, putting in $30,000 of his own money, and they opened at the Trocadero, a big nitery on the Sunset Strip, on 21 March 1946, as the Other Orchestra. In his autobiography Papa Play for Me, klezmer clarinetist and Slicker glug specialist Mickey Katz recalled Spike wanting "a symphonic jazz orchestra like Paul Whiteman. . . . No funny stuff, just beautiful music. And do you know what the crowds who came in said? 'What kind of crap is this? If we want a symphony, we'll go to the Holly wood Bowl. We came to hear Spike Jones, not Stokowski.'" The public thought they knew who he should be. It must have felt strange in that room through the spring of '46, up every night in front of people one could not entirely relate to, even if it was a dream gig, with exactly the kind of material, white society-band pop music, that the Slickers had already made wicked brilliant fun of in "Cocktails for Two" and a little later, about six weeks into the Troc engagement, in "Laura." The song had been featured the 1945 movie of the same name, supposed to evoke this hotsy-totsy social life where all these sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors, witty repartee -- a world of pseudos as inviting to Slicker class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was already too late for that, 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............"

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