October 2007
The Spike Jones Story includes interviews with members of Jones’s bands, cast members of his television shows, and his family. In addition, Milton Berle and Danny Thomas, friends and contemporaries of Jones, share their memories. Everyone remembers him as a driven, hard-working performer and perfectionist. The arrangements he and his band played demanded precision -- those burps, gun shots, hiccups, oddball percussion, and other noises required split-second timing. As The Spike Jones Story demonstrates, Jones was as skilled at visual comedy as he was at musical parody. The documentary includes many clips of Jones and his band in performance. His experiments with the comic possibilities of television match those of Ernie Kovacs, another pioneer of the time. Jones himself was almost a living caricature whose loud, checked suits emphasized his ice-pick thinness. Many of his cast members, especially Freddie Morgan and Billy Batty, were obviously chosen as much for their humorous appearance as for their musical skills. The performance footage also shows Jones to be a percussionist of extraordinary abilities. Jazz critic Gary Giddins called Jones "a free-ranging parodist who took no prisoners." The Spike Jones Story contains plenty of reminiscence, but its most stirring and convincing moments are of the man himself, practicing his craft. GO BACK TO: |
The Spike Jones Story
