Two radio shows on each CD; featuring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre (separately) on Vol. 1 and Lassie and Frank Sinatra (separately) on Vol. 2.  Originally broadcast 1948 and 1949.  Well, Rhino has once again stepped into uncharted waters by releasing some Golden Age radio shows on CD.  It must be the power of Spike Jones' name that got these released; the only other Golden Age radio shows on CD of which I am aware are a few put out by Radio Yesteryear (the name describes their whole business).  Rhino's usual (high) production standards shine through here; the sound is nearly perfect, with only a little crackle, nothing like the typical tinny or tubby "old-time radio sound" so often heard.  Liner notes appear a bit skimpy until you realize that there are spoken "notes" on each CD:  Helen Grayco (Spike's widow) introduces each CD and provides notes for Vol. 2; Eddie Brandt (one of Spike's writers) gives some backstage anecdotes on Vol. 1 (my favorite is the story of Peter Lorre preparing to go on stage).  In the shows themselves, Spike does to radio comedy what he did to music.  Boris Karloff is featured in Frankenstein's Mother-In-Law, Peter Lorre offers his own version of My Old Flame, and  Frank Sinatra conducts the City Slickers.  Musical selections include, on Vol.1:  Charlie My Boy, Down Among the Sheltering Palms, We Like Western Movies, After You've Gone, Cuando Le Gusta, Tiger Rag, My Old Flame; and on Vol 2.:  Runnin' Wild, Knighthood Goes to Pot, Il Barkio, 12th Street Rag, and Hair of Gold, Eyes of Blue.  Doodles Weaver, as Prof. Feetlebaum, destroys one song in each show and gets in a commercial or two for Pootwaddle products.  Collector's note:  the shows play for 24 25 minutes each.  I will venture to say that the only things cut are some commercials (one Coca Cola commercial is included in each show).  I can't verify this; the only other copy of a Spike Jones radio show in my collection from this time period is severely cut and clocks in at 21 minutes!  Buy both volumes, and hopefully Rhino will keep 'em coming.

--Kimba W. Lion
from 1994 issues of The Off-Center Record newsletter

Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 GMT
From: Ted Hering
Newsgroups: rec.music.dementia

Here are a few comments about the Spike Jones reviews:

>From Rhino's Spike Jones "Radio Days" CDs, Kimba wrote:
>I will venture to say that the only things cut are some commercials
>(one Coca Cola commercial is included in each show).

Actually, the commercials are intact.  The shows are short because the
non-Spike Jones music was eleminated.  (Dorothy Shay, for example.)
This was probably a budget move.  Why pay premium royalties and
musician fees for the tracks now considered filler?

Another comment from Kimba made the universal assumption that 78s were
made direct to disc.  I was shocked when I found out that this was
often NOT the case!

Listen to "Red Wing" on the "Spiked!" CD for example.  Fantastic!  Yes,
this 1941 record was cut direct-to-disc.  (And this version is an
alternate take, to boot!)

A little known bit of RCA Victor history: After the 1942-43 musicians
strike, Victor mastered their sessions on 16-inch acetates, and
transfered ONLY THE ISSUED TRACKS to 10" 78rpm !!  That's why every 78
you find of "Cocktails for Two," "Chloe," "Nutcracker Suite," and the
other 1944-plus vintage sound so lousy.  They are literally DUBS!

When RCA (BMG) remastered Nutcracker for "Spiked!", they indeed went to
the "metal parts."  They should have gone back to the 16-inch master
acetates (if they still exist!).  I suspect the 45 rpm box set of
"Nutcracker" (released in 1949) DID return to the 16-inch masters, as
they are a far superior dub.

Country Washburn, who wrote Spike's "Nutcracker" lyrics, wrote Spike in
1960 to suggest any future reissue should include the printed lyric
sheet on the record jacket (because the words from the choir are nearly
impossible to catch).  This, of course, would have pre-dated the
Beatles pioneer use of printing the lyrics on the jacket by 7 or 8
years.  But the imagined re-issue never occured during Spike's lifetime.

(BTW, I'm amazed "Nutcracker" was reissued complete... considering the
racial dig leading into "The Chinese Dance.")

--   from 1994 issues of The Off-Center Record newsletter

A TREATISE ON THE RELATIVE MERITS OF VARIOUS WORLDWIDE REISSUES OF 78-RPM RECORDINGS MADE BY SPIKE JONES AND HIS CITY SLICKERS

Oh, BPhBPhBPhTtBTt!!!! I had some time to kill and wanted to justify buying a another CD.

    OK Spike Jones lovers, I know that you've probably grabbed every reissue you've seen, but Rhino is coming out with a 2-CD Spike Jones set in early 1994, and that, with Dr. Demento involved in putting it together, promises to be the best yet. If the original 78s and master tapes are used, we'll be able to dump the messy reissues RCA has given us in the past. As for now, since I've never seen anyone discuss the relative merits of the Spike Jones reissues that have appeared so far, I am here to discuss one that may surprise you because it offers only a mixture of Jones sides that have long been available THE WACKY WORLD OF SPIKE JONES on the PAIR label (PDC2-1216).
    Why, if you have passed this over because of its apparent lack of originality, should you consider it? Well, while it bears the RCA logo, it contains remasterings that sound considerably different from those appearing on the RCA Victor label.  I will be comparing this CD to various issues that have appeared over the years:
    German RCA BL89057, THANK YOU MUSIC LOVERS (a monophonic version of the domestic BEST OF SPIKE JONES which is in phony stereo)
    RCA LSC3235(e), SPIKE JONES IS MURDERING THE CLASSICS (yes I know this is out on CD, but the CD emphasizes everything they did wrong in tricking these sides up for "stereo", especially the excruciating amounts of distortion it's like they overloaded their equipment). Side Note: Can anyone tell me if RCA has corrected the sound on their CD of this album since its first release?
    PICKWICK/CAMDEN ACL7031, THE HILARIOUS SPIKE JONES.
    LOTUS (Italy) LOP14084, AROUND THE WORLD WITH SPIKE JONES.

    Taking each track on the Pair CD individually:
    Cocktails for Two   Similar to German RCA, but with a midrange ("presence") emphasis, filtered highs.
    The Blue Danube   This could be a mono mixdown of the phony stereo on LSC3235e,
but it has more presence. The version on Pickwick is obviously filtered, but better balanced
overall.
    Pal-Yat-Chee   sounds to me like a mono mixdown of the tricked up sound on
LSC3235e. Phony stereo is like colorized movies, once the damage has been done, you can't get back to the original by using the damaged version.
    My Old Flame   This time Pair has the best sound, more mellow than German RCA. The Pickwick is heavily filtered, with lots of echo added.
    Dance of the Hours   Sounds like another mono mixdown of LSC3235e. Pickwick has a different phony stereo version with lotsa echo, and muffled sound. Lotus sounds like a true mono master; they have much less echo but the highs are filtered. A boo and a hiss to Pair for programming this cut before the William Tell Overture.
    The Man on the Flying Trapeze   Pair gives a very "hollow" sound, plus there is more echo than on German RCA.
    Liebestraum   Pair seems to have gone back to the original 78 for this one; there is some surface noise and scratches, but the sound is far more natural than RCA gave us on LSC3235e or on any other LP I have heard. NO ECHO ADDED! For once, it sounds like you are in the same room as the performers! For me, this one track was worth the $10 price of the CD, that's how much improved the sound is.
    Der Fuehrer's Face   They backslid on this one; tons of echo added ("bottom of steel drum sound" was my original note for the sound). The Lotus LP mentioned above has a good version.
    You Always Hurt the One You Love   similar to German RCA, more echo but less harsh. Pickwick's sound is almost pleasant, with a touch more echo.
    Chloe   again, very similar to German RCA, but this time the advantage goes to Pair; they give us a more open sound with less echo (but there is still plenty of it). Pickwick's is heavily filtered.
    Ill Barkio   sounds like a mono mixdown of LSC3235e.
    The Glow Worm   German RCA has the best version. Pair sounds distant in comparison with added echo again (I've found adding echo or reverberation helps cover up surface noise; that's probably why it is so prevalent in these remasterings.) Pickwick and Lotus are both better than Pair.
    None But the Lonely Heart   similar to German RCA, with a midrange emphasis. It sounds phasey, like it was derived from a phony stereo source, but there is less echo added than on LSC3235e.
    Rhapsody from Hunger(y)   sounds like (another) mono mixdown of LSC3235e.
    Hawaiian War Chant   fairly good sound on Pair; less midrange makes it less close-up  and uncomfortable than the German RCA LP; better highs also. The Lotus LP is even better in terms of wide-range sound, but distortion is noticeable.
    William Tell Overture   similar to German RCA, but Pair takes the honors for more natural sound. None of the distortion found on LSC3235e.
    So there you have it. Pair has provided a decent, if not perfect, collection of Spike Jones sides, some better mastered than any other re-issue I am familiar with, plus one real surprise: Liebestraum is so well transferred that it sounds like you are listening to a factory-fresh copy of the original 78.     CA

Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones   Catalyst / BMG Classics 09026-61982-2
1. Hotcha Cornia (Black Eyes);
2. Pal-Yat-Chee;
3. Serenade to a Jerk;
4. Knock Knock (Who's There?);
5. Holiday for Strings;
6. Laura;
7. I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight;
8. Baby Buggie Boogie;
9. Red Wing;
10. Minka;
11. Deep Purple;
12. The Man on the Flying Trapeze;
13. I Dream of Brownie with the Light Blue Jeans;
14. Our Hour (The Puppy Love Song);
15. I'm Getting Sentimental Over You;
16. Powerhouse;
17. Frantic Freeway;
18. Nutcracker Suite

OK folks, this is going to be a long piece, so I'll give you the bottom line right now: Go get both sets. That's it, if you read no further (just don't read the liner notes for the BMG CD more on that later). A treasure trove of Spike Jones material has been unleashed on the marketplace, a lot of it not available for a long time. BMG even includes two "world premieres." If you are a Spike Jones fan, scrape together the 45 bucks to get both. If you will settle for only one set, the Rhino is definitely the one to get. If you only know Spike Jones' records from previous long-play versions, you will not believe how good the original records sounded.  I originally approached this article with the thought that I wouldn't review the recordings themselves, since this is, after all,  Spike Jones and thus basically unreviewable. Then I began to wonder if there is anyone reading this that is not familiar with Spike Jones. I was 17 before I had heard of him, and he had been around for half of my life. Today, the people born after Spike Jones' death could be pushing 30. I know that I meet a lot of people who don't know who he was (but then I meet a lot of people who don't know who "Weird Al" Yankovic is either)!  To add to the dilemma, Spike Jones assumed a certain musical sophistication on the part of his audience. Classical music was a bigger part of most peoples' lives four or five decades ago, and he got a lot of mileage out of popular classical pieces (which didn't used to be an oxymoron). Also, a listener today has to be a bit sophisticated if he is to get all the jokes; maybe you don't need to know the original Rinso and Super Suds radio Commercials, but it helps if you know the two notes that signified "B.O."  However, tuned cowbells, rhythmic body noises, weird instruments, limericks, and the many other musical assaults in Jones' arsenal are still funny, and a lot of the 40s and 50s culture does still linger on. So the best I can say is, if you don't know who Spike Jones was and what he did (and here you are, reading a newsletter about comedy recordings), just go buy the sets and find out what you've been missing. As Hendrix is to guitarists, as Ed Sullivan was to variety shows, as the Clintons will be to crooked politicians, Spike Jones was and still is the king of the comedy record.
   Since this is a review and not a press release, I feel obligated to find some nits to pick. Starting with the Rhino box, the volume level fluctuates a bit for about the first minute of Chloe. This is not evident on the 78, so I assume something went wrong with whatever noise reduction was being used. It's not horrendous, just noticeable. Oh yeah, the typeface used on the back card could have been a bit easier to read, and it would have been nice if they had used one of those new slimline 2-CD boxes (but then, I suppose that book wouldn't have fit, and that would be a real loss). That's about it for the flaws; everything else is near perfect. The sound quality is gorgeous, the selection of recordings is about as good as you could want for only (!) 40 tracks (I do miss "The Blue Danube"), the tracks are in chronological order (the only logical way to do a set like this), and there is a generous book lovingly put together by Cub Koda and Dr. Demento.
   Now, the BMG set dare I call it thrown together? I get the impression that this CD was produced by people who don't know much about Spike Jones and don't care much either. What is with that cover picture? It is an ugly caricature of Spike that has been sliced apart. That, and the double band-aid on Spike's chin give a hint of the beating he takes in the liner notes. (After reading the booklet, it becomes clear that this CD is aimed at Generation X [a much hated and deservedly so label that I use only because it is so beloved by marketing types because it gives them a hole in which to pigeon their "target demographic"]. We are told by the album's executive producer that Spike helped pave the way for Public Enemy. I suppose the cover art is the 90s equivalent of the "psychedelic" pictures of Toscanini RCA used on budget classical issues in the '70s.)
Speaking of liner notes, let's compare quotes from the two albums:

Tim Page, BMG:
    "Spike Jones and his City Slickers...had several hit songs in its [sic] first decade; these, however, were usually 'novelty' cuts that rarely represented the group at its most interesting."

HUH?!? Exsqueeze Me? I think somebody's reality check just bounced.

Dr. Demento, Rhino:
    "Spike Jones devised more ways to make phonograph records funny than anyone else before or since. What sounded like three minutes of utter chaos was usually the result of tireless rehearsal and meticulous honing."

Thomas Pynchon, BMG:
    "...this will require the sort of listener who either wants to wince with embarrassment or can find in vintage bigotry quaint refuge from the more virulent forms encountered in our own era."

Er, Tom, if you don't like this stuff, you could have asked me to fill in for you.

Cub Koda, Rhino:
    "Spike had a musical vision that also encompassed a total assault against the conventions of general show business pomposity....Once you heard Spike's version of the tune, you could never take any of those idols quite as seriously as you might have before."

   That last quote brings me back to another aspect of Thomas Pynchon's "notes": there is enough Politically Correct crap in there to set Rush Limbaugh off for an entire 3-hour radio show with spillover into his TV show too. Pynchon uses the phrase "class hostility" twice in talking about Spike's recordings. I think Cub Koda had it right when he referred to general pomposity; class hatred never entered into it pomposity cuts across all "classes," and the most pompous I can think of are the PC wonks. And Tim Page's little blurb practically says "I'm working for BMG Classics, why did they saddle me with this stuff?". One gets the feeling that the Catalyst label concept itself was a hurried response to some competitor perhaps EMI's Matrix? (Actually, I just learned that Catalyst was created as a label just for Tim Page to produce. So why this attitude, especially after having a radio show titled "New, Old, and Unexpected Music" for 11 years?)
   Do yourself a favor, get the nearest 3-year-old to draw a picture you can paste over the cover of the BMG booklet, save the first four pages for the discographic information and toss the rest. Anyway, enough of the notes, and onto the music. The BMG collection is lightweight compared to the Rhino, but no less valuable to the diehard collector. Only 5 tracks are duplicated between the two and none of the first 15 tracks could really be called weak. Powerhouse and Frantic Freeway, the two "world premieres," are (we learn from deep within the notes by Pynchon) part of an unfinished album (Persuasive Concussion, but to find that out you have to refer to Jordan R. Young's book Spike Jones and His City Slickers) with vocals and additional layers of sound still to be added. That may explain a certain "something's missing" quality to Powerhouse, but Frantic Freeway is a gem and it gets us dancing every time. I even have it recorded on my PC so it is never more than a couple of mouse clicks away. It is a snappy mambo with car noises as the rhythm section. Very infectious. The last selection, The Nutcracker Suite, was aimed at children when it was recorded, and because of that not all of it holds up well to repeated hearings. I hate to be a heretic, but I prefer the concept of the edited version that appeared 23 years ago on the LP Spike Jones Is Murdering the Classics. (Of course, that LP was my first exposure to Spike Jones my wife says I must have been brought up in a closet so there may be some of the "first version" effect taking place here.)
As for remastering, the Nutcracker sounds suspiciously like the overloaded tape used (before the phoney stereo effects were added) for the old LP version. The booklet says it was mastered from the original metal parts, but there is distortion here that shows up nowhere else on the CD (they don't say when the remastering was done). The rest of the tracks (except for the two recorded on tape) were probably subjected to computerized noise reduction, either NoNoise or CEDAR, and there is almost no trace of the traditional 78-type noises. There is a certain life missing from the CD as well; it's OK for casual listening, but upon careful listening you start to notice things like the effect of little pinholes punched in Homer and Jethro's vocals on Pal-Yat-Chee, or a sense that the natural overtones die away a little too quickly. The effect is that of listening to a over-scrubbed restoration of the original recording. The Rhino tracks, where no computerized noise reduction was used, have a constant (light) surface noise, but also give the impression of aliveness, of being in the same room with the performers (these were originally "direct-to-disc" recordings, after all). The Rhino set can be genuinely thrilling. (I don't know if I am correct about BMG using CEDAR, but consider this:
    James H. North reports in the March 1994 issue of Fanfare that one unnamed record company, upon getting many complaints about its CDs that were processed with CEDAR, kept on using the process and merely removed the notice from the CDs that CEDAR had been used. Face it computerized noise reduction is going to be with us for a long time. It is sold to the record companies as a set-and-forget type of solution, which means big bucks saved during remastering.  And while I can talk about the life being stripped away from a recording, there are some people who would prefer it this way, those who really do have fits when they hear any extraneous noise on a CD. I will still champion Rhino and others who appreciate the music.)
Alright, I've spent all this time on the negative aspects of the BMG CD. I assume you'll know from the track listing whether you'll want it, and comparisons with the wonderfully-produced Rhino set make its shortcomings more noticeable. I am grateful that the sound at least was not  If you only know these recordings from previous reissues, you will not believe how good they sound.processed with tons of echo, and I do not intend to look at the booklet again. I am not about to give up the CD. It has some real rarities, and while it is not all top-drawer Spike Jones, there is not a dog in the bunch (except for Our Hour, of course). And the Rhino set, as you have gathered by now, is as close to Spike Jones heaven as a mere 40 tracks will allow you to get. Dr. Demento gives lengthy, informative, and interesting notes about each track. There are dozens of photos of Spike Jones and band, record jackets, labels, vintage posters, ads more than enough to make a record collector jump for joy of drool with envy. The sound on Rhino is thrilling in its clarity and honesty. There is a time machine quality at work here the recordings are all between 35 and 52 years old, and yet I can listen and feel as if they are happening now. I certainly don't expect you to complain about being able to detect some surface noise in the background. (All this talk about surface noise and noise reduction reminds me of the man who would start a fire in his fireplace whenever he was going to listen to his collection of 78s, and he never once noticed a bit of surface noise. He had discovered a sort of aural illusion the brain will automatically ascribe the crackle and pops to the visual cues of the fire.)
   The Rhino set is assembled in chronological order, so if you feel like hearing all two hours at once, you get a feeling of development. A time journey along Spike Jones' career, if you will. And look again at that track listing. Some of these titles have been real hard to find for a long time. Take Ya Wanna Buy a Bunny, for example: the only other long-play reissue of this song was Dr. Demento's 1975 album Delights (which is now a rarity itself). While falling far short of every side Spike recorded, Rhino certainly includes the best of Spike's best period, the Victor records of the 40s and early 50s, plus a sampling from his LPs. And with a body of work as large as Spike's one can always name a particular title he wishes was included, but I cannot say any track in this set shouldn't be there. A wonderful job. Dr. Demento and Cub Koda, along with the re-masterers Bill Inglot, Ken Perry, and Rosemary Woods (and to give credit where it is due, BMG licensed this material to Rhino and provided the original metal parts of the Victor recordings), have produced a set which will be the standard against which other reissues will have to be judged. But, there is still one nagging question: Why aren't there three discs? Or four? Or five...

--   from 1994 issues of The Off-Center Record newsletter