Spike Jones - Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones

Spike Jones & His City Slickers were accomplished musicians who could incorporate sneezes, belches, and all kinds of oddball percussion such as gunshots and bells into their arrangements of all kinds of music; "Dark Eyes" and "Holiday for Strings" with its cackle chorus are two of the best examples within this anthology. The musical comedy duo Homer & Jethro sing a zany lyric to the opera Pagliacci, retitled "Pal-YatChee," while Paul Frees (the man of a thousand voices, best known as the original voice of the Pillsbury Doughboy) spoofs the popular baritones of the 1940s in "Dark Eyes." Two previously unreleased tracks from 1961, including Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" and the rumba "Frantic Freeway," sound over-produced to the point where they would have been difficult to perform on-stage, unlike most of the material that Spike Jones recorded earlier in his career. Read More