Spike Jones & His City Slickers - Besame Mucho
From Album: "The Essential Spike Jones & His City Slickers, Vol 2".
Lindley Armstrong "Spike" Jones (December 14, 1911 – May 1, 1965) was a popular musician and bandleader specializing in performing satirical arrangements of popular songs. Ballads and classical works receiving the Jones treatment would be punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells and ridiculous vocals. Through the 1940s and early 1950s, the band recorded under the title Spike Jones and his City Slickers and toured the USA and Canada under the title The Musical Depreciation Revue.
Lindley Armstrong Jones was a musical genius. In the wild and woolly days before MTV, digital tape and multi-track recording, Spike Jones put together a top-flight musical organization that the world has not seen the likes of since. Known as the City Slickers, the emphasis was on comedy, primarily doing dead-on satires of popular songs on the hit parade and taking the air out of pompous classical selections as well. Not merely content to do cornball renderings of standard material or trite novelty tunes for comedic effect, Jones' musical vision encompassed utilizing whistles, bells, gargling, broken glass, and gunshots perfectly timed and wedded to the most musical and unmusical of source points. His stage show was no less mind boggling, needing a full railroad car just to carry the props alone, all presented without electronic gimmickry of any kind, with visuals that would make your eyes pop out of your head. Though he often downplayed his musical achievements (all part of the master plan of selling the idea to the general public), the fact remains that Spike was a strict bandleader and taskmaker, making sure his musicians were precision tight, adept in a variety of musical styles from dixieland to classical, with a caliber of musicianship several notches higher than most big bands of the day who played so-called 'straight' music.
In other words, Spike was no dummy, he knew what he was doing when he put the whole concept together, checkerboard suits and all. It gave him top 10 hits on phonograph records (it became a badge of honor with pop musicians that you really hadn't tasted true success until Spike Jones & The City Slickers destroyed your song) and proved immensely popular as a stage show, in movies, and on television. A definite precursor to the video age, Jones didn't merely play the songs funny, he illustrated them as well, a total audio and visual assault to the senses. ~ Read more from Wiki
