“Der Fuehrer’s Face” – The Best of Spike Jones And His City Slickers

 “When der Führer says we is de master race/We heil (*fart noise*) heil (*fart noise*) right in der Fuehrer's face/Not to love der Führer is a great disgrace/So we heil (*fart noise*) heil (*fart noise*) right in der Fuehrer's face”

The Best of Spike Jones And His City Slickers

There’s a well-worn joke that by the age of 40 American men must start accumulating books about either the Civil War or World War Two. Grandpa might have been the poster boy for that.

He was born in 1928, graduating high school in 1946 just after the war ended; he joined the Navy in the Korean War but was only at sea 1 day (on Lake Michigan) and spent the war in Kansas. His older brother went to Europe as a USAAF ground crewman in 1945 but saw no combat. Nonetheless, everyone in his small Iowa town knew someone who had made the ultimate sacrifice.

He grew up in a generation defined by the war but was not directly touched by it. Perhaps this is why he became so deeply interested in every aspect of it, and in particular why it took so long for Hitler to be stopped. I suspect he sought a sense of meaning in the fact that so many others sacrificed so much and he, by chance of birth, was left unscathed. A similar feeling led me to dive into genealogy in 2020 as I searched for meaning in time of disaster.

Along with music and baseball, I learned a love of history from him. We spent a lot of time talking about the war itself, its origins, and his own memories. It started with planes; he taped episodes of “Wings” on his VCR and we would watch them together while I drew planes and pretended to fly them. Eventually we moved into movies; The Longest Day and Patton were favorites, along with the topical comedies The Great Dictator and The Three Stooges in You Nazty Spy. He recognized that the best way to stop fascism is early, and by making fun of them, "They've got no sense of humor." Soon I was reading his history books, and then we really started to talk.

He told me about Versailles, the Depression, the Beer Hall Putsch, and Appeasement. He marveled at how many times Hitler could have been stopped when he was weak, but people rolled over or compromised instead only to pay for it later. He told me about all of the tiny steps over 30 years that snowballed and accelerated inexorably from 1933 to 1945. He lamented the shame felt by his German grandparents at what had happened to their country, and how his town abandoned its German-ness. He was angry at the opportunities missed to stop it, able to see it clearly, helpless to change it.

His key point was that these things did not just “happen”. People made choices at every step, whether to ignore, to go along, or to jump on board for power. In 1924, 1930, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1938, choices were made in delusional hope that there was an easy way out if he could have just one more thing, that he had learned his lesson. There wasn’t, and isn't.

His philosophy was that most people couldn’t see past their own nose. They responded to immediate risk or reward, thinking of what they viewed as their own immediate best interest. He felt it took either a special person or extreme circumstances to look further. That was why history was important, because it could teach you the patterns to look for. But you had to want to look. It was why he considered President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill his personal heroes.

I once closed a conversation by saying “Well, at least it’ll never happen again” and he immediately said “Oh, it’ll happen again.” Because people were people: imperfect, corruptible, able to deflect, compartmentalize, and self-deceive. Sinful and failing to put others in front of ourselves (did I mention he was Lutheran?).

I can’t and won’t claim to speak for his politics were he still around. He was a Republican, but not of the modern variety. His views were complex and didn’t conform to a rigid set of standards; he could see good in people he disagreed with. His faith demanded it of him.

But I know one thing: he new a Nazi salute when he saw one. He wouldn’t equivocate or deflect or defend it. If he had lived to see Elon Musk give the Sieg Heil at a Presidential Inauguration he would have been outraged. I am confident he would have seen Elon Musk for what he is: a self-interested power monger willing to tear the walls down around him for his own benefit. He wouldn't care whether it was a troll or a genuinely held belief; he knew that either way, it opens the door for evil and stains our Republic.

Today, there is a coup happening in own government, right out in the open, led by a man with either genuine or ironic fascist sympathies who was not elected nor holding a position approved by Congress, and has no oversight. He is functionally a co-president, working around the clock with a small team of Silicon Valley techbros to tear out the walls and wiring of the carefully woven structures of American power that brought stability to the post-war order and helped usher in one of the longest periods of peace in European history. For our many faults, we have at least achieved this, and always striven to be better.

While slightly more than one half of Congress ignores the problem and the minority party tries to figure out what to do, while frightened civil servants stand down in the face of illegal threats, he and his cronies are tearing apart the structures of the Federal government to ensure that nothing will stand in the way of them lining their pockets at the expense of unenlightened “citizens” like you and me. He cares about the Constitution and Bill of Rights only insofar as they can benefit him personally; they don't apply to you and me.

He and his techbros are executing the biggest cybersecurity breach in American history. They have your Social Security number. They’re messing with your tax returns. They are accessing your Medicare and Medicaid records. He’s using his position inside the government to access confidential information that he doesn’t have security clearances for, and he’s taking it outside of government firewalls. He’s built a backdoor into the Treasury Department’s data systems. He’s wiping hundreds of websites that were paid for with your tax dollars because they have information he, personally, doesn’t want available, like critical healthcare data that is used everyday by physicians and nurses nationwide. He is trying to take over control of who and what the government pays, regardless of what Congress has approved. He’s decided Lutheran Social Services is a scam, at the urging of known foreign agent Mike Flynn. He’s publishing the names and addresses of government, and trying to expose law enforcement and justice officials for the whole world to see, while simultaneously threatening to jail anyone who reports on his own unelected wunderkinds.

Like Chamberlain, Daladier, and von Papen, many of our leaders are failing to look past their nose and face the challenge. They are allowing him to assume powers explicitly enumerated to Congress by the Constitution, for the specific reason of preventing someone like him from assuming power. A small handful of them acting together could stop this, could wrest control of the power of the purse back to Congress where the Constitution explicitly places it. Thus far, they have not. The Founding Fathers anticipated a man like Musk, but our institutions are not self-supporting: they require people to make choices. History has shown firmly that the storm will not pass on its own, and those who compromise their principles in the short-term to get by will pay in the long-term.

Call your Representatives and Senators. Tell them you didn't consent to this man having your personal data, information about your family, or acting like a president. Do it every day, regardless of party. Make sure they know that you expect Congress to abide by the Constitution, not a slash and grab by a rich kid from South Africa.

I’m confident grandpa would have seen this for what it was. He also saw the need for levity, even in the hardest of times. He could be serious, but he was also funny and goofy with a sense of humor bordering on absurd. It’s where I get mine from. And you can draw a direct-line backwards from my love of Weird Al Yankovic to grandpa’s love of Spike Jones and His City Slickers.

Spike Jones

Lindley Armstrong “Spike” Jones was born in 1911 in Long Beach, California. Son of a railroad agent, he was so skinny his father said he looked like a railroad spike. He started playing drums at age 11 and led bands throughout his school years. A railroad chef taught him how to use pots, pans, and utensils to make musical noises and he began to work this into his playing. His boredom at playing repetitive arrangements led him to start writing and performing parodies of popular songs with other musicians to amuse themselves.

By the late 1930s he was drumming for John Scott Trotter (Bing Crosby’s backing band) and Del Porter. Gradually, the Del Porter group became the Jones group and after the band’s novelty recordings began to gather a large popular following. This led RCA Victor to move the band from their low-budget Bluebird label up to the top tier RCA Victor label until 1955. They also had radio programs from 1945 to 1949 and NBC and CBS television shows from 1954 to 1961.

The band featured talented musicians as well as novelty and comedic performers, doing a variety of both direct and style parodies of the music of the day. They parodied classic music, Liberace, crooners, early soul, jazz, bop, and early rock and roll. Jones himself performed on a marimba made of cowbells, bike horns, and other noise makers.

Despite his novelty success, Jones was also a serious musician and led a second band called the “Other Spike Jones Orchestra” which played “legitimate” versions of dance hits. The Other Orchestra was built with some of the finest studio musicians LA had to offer, and was an artistic success but a commercial flop.

Jones’s unexpected precision was explained by his son:

“One of the things that people don’t realize about dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.”

Never in good health and smoking 4 to 5 packs of cigarettes a day, by the early 1960s he was suffering from serious emphysema and often performed while wearing an oxygen mask. He died in 1965 at the age of 53. In large part, Spike Jones was responsible for introducing novelty music to the mainstream, and many artists since have directly credited him as an inspiration or influence including Stan Freberg, Frank Zappa, Oingo Boingo, Elvis Costello, and most obviously, Weird Al.

The Album

Much of the early Spike Jones catalogue recorded for the budget Bluebird label was on 78 rpm shellac singles. Recording quality and fidelity was variable, and with his increased fame and development of the 33 1/3 rpm long-play record in 1948, many early recordings were re-recorded and re-released. Listening to this is like being in the back seat of grandpa’s Mercury again, on some lonely Iowa road as he admires the old red barns and whistles along, belly-laughing at things he finds particularly funny saying “Matt, isn’t that wild?!”

Side 1 begins with “Cocktails for Two”, featuring chorus, grand piano, and harp that is suddenly punctuated by banjo, breaking glass, coughing, fiddle, and gunshots that align with the serious vocals over it; the chorus returns at the end along with hiccups from the cocktails. This is followed by a manic “William Tell Overture” featuring Jones’s cowbell and bike horn marimba and the sounds go gargled water prior to Doodle Weaver narrating a horse race between puns. “Chloe” lampoons a famous 1928 recording by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra; “My Old Flame” features a Peter Lorre-styled horror show interlude that might be an inspiration for Young Frankenstein. The side ends with formulaic, unremarkable versions of “Glow Worm” and “None But the Lonely Heart”.

Side 2 kicks off with “Laura” (theme from the excellent classic film of the same name), the only hit that Spike Jones ever achieved with his Other Orchestra, with multiple clarinet voices and soaring french horns, but that tellingly morphs to a flatulent City Slickers finish underneath a serious vocal from budget crooner Jimmy Cassidy. Next up are the truly annoying “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” and the Ink Spots parody “You Always Hurt the One You Love”.

And then, finally, grandpa’s favorite, an updated recording of Spike Jones’s breakthrough hit, 1942’s “Der Fuehrer’s Face”. The song originated in a Walt Disney short featuring Donald Duck in a nightmare working on an artillery line in Nazi Germany before waking up in stars and stripes pajamas and saying “Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America!” Forced to Heil Hitler endlessly in his dream, Donald knows a Nazi salute when he sees one.

In the Spike Jones version, an instrument called “the birdaphone” produces wet fart noises while a polka band provides backing to a stereotypical German accented vocal, in call and response with an obedient but only marginally enthusiastic backing vocal. The polka band goes back and forth with a military march style, and the birdaphone transitions to farting everytime anyone says “Heil!” This is, of course, the appropriate response to a Nazi salute.

The lyrics and delivery are best heard in the context of the performance, but the bridge is instructive:

We bring to the world New Order
Heil Hitler's world New Order
Everyone of foreign race
Will love der Führer's face
When we bring to the world dis-order

Spike Jones understood, as did my grandpa, that the best way to deal with fascists and their fellow travelers early was to laugh them out of polite society, because fascists cannot handle being treated as anything but serious. They are weird, and they carry a chip on their shoulders that everyone can’t see their imagined greatness. If allowed to come to power, they seek revenge. If laughed down, they skulk back to the shadows where they belong.

The album is finished by another wacky race commentary (this time a car race) to the tune of “Dance of the Hours”, featuring an announcer attempting to cross the track mid-race, and then “Hawaiian War Chant (Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai)”, whose influence will be recognized by anyone with deep-track knowledge of Weird Al’s catalogue.

Where to Find It

I have a 1967 re-print of the album, with “Stereo Effect Reprocessed from Monophonic”. Can’t say I noticed the alleged “Stereo Effect” much. You can find it on Discogs for prices ranging from $0.99 to $4.00. It is also available on Spotify, with individual songs on YouTube and Apple Music.

The Krueger Score

Grandpa had a system for scoring his records, recorded with ballpoint pen on the record sleeves. While there is some variation over the years, in general he assigned a check for strong performances and a star for something he particularly liked. In extraordinary circumstances he would add additional notes. The Krueger Score are his recorded comments on a particular album.

In this case, grandpa placed a “check” by every song except “None But the Lonely Heart” and “Dance of the Hours”. I tend to think that’s generous, but I know from the frequency with which he played it that he enjoyed “Der Fuehrer’s Face” the best.