Spike Jones - Later Years

Later Years

The rise of rock-'n'-roll and the decline of big bands hurt Spike Jones' repertoire. The new rock songs were already novelties, and Jones could not decimate them the way he had lampooned "Cocktails for Two" or "Laura." He played rock-'n'-roll for laughs when he presented "for the first time on television, the bottom half of Elvis Presley!" This was the cue for a pair of pants — inhabited by dwarf actor Billy Barty -- to scamper across the stage.

Jones was always prepared to adapt to changing tastes. In 1950, when America was nostalgically looking back at the 1920s, Jones recorded an album of Charleston arrangements. In 1953 he responded to the growing market for children's records, with tunes aimed directly at kids (like "Socko, the Smallest Snowball"). Jones had long been unhappy at RCA Victor and left the label in 1955. His later recordings were issued by Verve, Liberty and Warner Bros. In 1956 Jones supervised an album of Christmas songs, many of which were performed seriously. In 1957, noting the television success of Lawrence Welk and his dance band, he revamped his own act for television. Gone was the old City Slickers mayhem, replaced by a more straightforward big-band sound, with tongue-in-cheek comic moments. The new band was known as Spike Jones and the Band that Plays for Fun.The last City Slickers record was the LP Dinner Music for People Who Aren't Very Hungry. The whole field of comedy records changed from musical satires to spoken-word comedy (Tom Lehrer, Bob Newhart, Mort Sahl, Stan Freberg). Spike Jones adapted to this, too; most of his later albums are spoken-word comedy, including the horror-genre sendup Spike Jones in Stereo (1959) and Omnibust (1960). Jones remained topical to the last: his final group, Spike Jones's New Band, recorded four LPs of brassy renditions of pop-folk tunes of the 1960s (including "Washington Square" and "The Ballad of Jed Clampett"). One of his New Band tracks in 1964 was a cover of "Dominique", a hit by The Singing Nun, in which he not only plays part of the melody on a banjo but melds the melody successfully with "When the Saints Go Marching In!"