Anthology Musical Depreciation Revue

If timing is everything, then it was doubly so in the music of Spike Jones. Whoopee-cushion horns, gunshots, belches, malapropisms--each element of Jones's parodies fell just right, which is amazing considering that his peak came before the advent of tape allowed for careful editing. Jones and his City Slickers--a group that included the likes of Doodles Weaver and Sir Frederic Gas--engaged themselves in at least as much rebellion against "good" music as did the rock & rollers who followed. In the post-Prohibition love song "Cocktails for Two," for instance, the band is the bunch of drunken revelers a table away. Jones label mates Homer and Jethro deliver one of his most indelible screeds against the highbrow on "Pal-Yat-Chee," while all the most gruesome possibilities of "My Old Flame" are realized in a Peter Lorre impersonation by Paul Frees. The closest modern-day analog to this stuff is perhaps "Weird Al" Yankovic's work, but no one did more to depreciate notes, chords, and pretensions than Jones. --Rickey Wright