Spike Jones became bored playing the same music each night with orchestras. He found other like-minded musicians and they-The City Slickers- began playing parodies comic arrangements of standard songs for their own entertainment.
Sometimes tunes and songs punctuated with gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, burps breaking bottles and exploding firecrackers with Spike leaping around playing a washboard, cowbells, a suite of klaxons and foghorns, then xylophone, then shooting a pistol.
The Musical Depreciation Revue.
Spike Jones and the Band that Plays for Fun.
Let’s call attention to the precision of his most ‘outlandish’ musical arrangements- ‘One of the things that people don't realize about His 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!’
I hear Stan Freburg, the Bonzo dogs… Zappa too.