Spike Jones and His City Slickers

Spike Jones kept up a frenetic pace in the late 1930s as a freelance studio musician for motion pictures, records, and radio shows. The busy young drummer commuted to Hollywood studios in a station wagon that was a veritable junkyard on wheels. But he had little opportunity to employ cowbells, sirens, and automobile horns in his work at the time. He felt so frustrated he decided to form his own band "where I could make as much noise as I wanted," he once claimed. Delmar Porter, who sang with the Foursome -- a vocal and ocarina quartet Jones had backed on Decca Records -- was...