Remembering Vivian Stanshall, born on this date in 1943. —Ed.
I am tempted to call The Bonzo Dog Band (or the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, take your pick) the greatest group in the history of rock. And this despite the fact that they only occasionally got around to playing what could be called a rock song. They were too far too busy cracking themselves up with their hilarious, brilliantly surreal, and utterly deranged wit. If Monty Python had turned to music full-time, they might—although I honestly doubt it—have been as funny as The Bonzo Dog Band.
The genre-hopping mobile insane asylum that was The Bonzo Dog Band might throw anything at you: trad jazz, oldies covers, bizarre street interviews with perplexed normals, and parodies, heaps of parodies—of thirties songs, music hall songs, fifties songs, blues songs, hard-rock songs, psychedelic songs—you name it. And they were excellent musicians—when they wanted to be—with a genius for arranging songs. Your average Bonzo tune may sound anarchic, but you can be certain it was put together with an exacting eye for detail, and every detail is in its right place.
There’s really no one to compare The Bonzo Dog Band with except Frank Zappa, and the comparison is a poor one. Zappa’s humor was sneering and juvenile; his Brit counterparts favored an intelligent and good-natured Dadaism. Just check out “The Intro and the Outro,” a parody of a band introduction that grows stranger and stranger as it goes on, with the announcer snazzily saying, “And looking very relaxed on vibes, Adolf Hitler… niiiice” and “Representing the flower people, Quasimodo, on bells.” No yellow snow here.
Formed in London in 1962 as a trad jazz band, The Bonzo Dog Band’s core line-up included the mad and brilliant Vivian “Ginger Geezer” Stanshall on trumpet and lead vocals; the equally demented Neil Innes on piano, guitar, and lead vocals; Rodney “Rhino” Desborough Slater on saxophone; Roger Ruskin Spear on tenor saxophone and assorted mad sound-producing contraptions, including the trouser press and “Theremin leg”; Dennis Cowan on drums and vocals; and the legendary “Legs” Larry Smith—the tap dancer extraordinaire who played one of rock’s few tap solos on Elton John’s “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself”—on drums.
In 1967 the band moved from trad jazz into the terra incognito of demented dada rock, and quickly won fans such as Paul McCartney, who not only invited them to participate in The Beatles’ ill-fated TV film Magical Mystery Tour but also co-produced The Bonzos’ improbable hit, “I’m the Urban Spaceman.” Also in 1967, The Bonzos were hired as “house band” for the children’s comedy TV programme Do Not Adjust Your Set, whose cast included—surprise, surprise—future Pythons Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.
1969’s Tadpoles—which boasts a yellow cover so vile it had to be deliberately designed to annoy—is largely a compilation of songs performed on Do Not Adjust Your Set. LP opener “Hunting Tigers Out in Indiah” is a fast-paced romp featuring an exotic melody, Stanshall singing like an old Raj hand, and a great chorus baritoning away behind him. A snaky oboe solo falls into the middle of the song, a piano plinks away, and it’s all very Monty Python, except Monty Python hadn’t been invented yet. But it’s the clever lyrics that make the song, with Stanshall singing, “With big, hungry tigers/Table manners have no place/After they have eaten you they never say their grace” while the backup vocalists repeat, “Dear dear dear no/Dear dear dear no” behind him. And Stanshall really throws himself into the lines, “Hunting tigers can be ripping fun/Like three blind mice/See the hunters run.” And I love the conversation, dropped into the middle of the song, between two intrepid tiger hunters: “I say, J.O., it’s jolly frightening out here.” “Nonsense, dear boy, you should be like me.” “But look at you! You’re shaking all over!” “Shaking? You silly goose, I’m just doing the watusi, that’s all.”
Almost as great is “Ali Baba’s Camel,” another exotic tune about the tragic love between a man and his camel (they both die laughing) that lopes along like Ali Baba’s beloved ungulate at a trot. It features lot of cheesy Middle Eastern cries, one jolly piano, a snake charmer’s oboe, a big honking tuba, and sound effects ranging from gagging, a starting pistol, lip blubbering, what sounds like a trumpet being strangled, and much, much, more. The Bonzos also throw in a short doo wop interlude, a death march, a mock Gregorian chant, and an idiot’s chorus, while Stanshall tosses out such immortal lines as, “You’ve heard of Ali Baba/Forty thieves had he/Out for what we all want/Lots of LSD.”
“Mr. Apollo” is one utterly hilarious hard-rocker turned catchy acoustic number about a body-building guru that opens with some sublimely disturbed guitar squall and features an array of silly voices uttering some of the funniest lines you’ll ever hear. “Wrestle poodles and win!” promises Mr. Apollo in a spoken interlude that begins, “Just give me ten years of your life/And I’ll trade in your puny flab for living muscle,” and, “Five years ago I was a four-stone apology; today, I am two separate gorillas.” Meanwhile that great guitar returns, and Mr. Apollo says, “Play beachball. Shave your legs. Look over walls. Tease people. Brush them aside as if they were matchsticks” while behind him a chorus repeats, “Follow, Mr. Apollo/Everybody knows he’s the greatest benefactor of mankind” as the song fades out.
I confess to having been a bit bewildered by the Bonzos’ relatively straightforward cover of Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “The Monster Mash.” That was until I learned that the song had fallen into obscurity and wouldn’t be “rediscovered” for another six years. The Bonzo Dog Band should have scored a hit with it, but it didn’t happen. This despite the fact that their version rocks, with Stanshall hamming it up to the accompaniment of a great sax and some cool drums. “Igor,” he asks at song’s end, “Have you washed the brains today?” And, “Come in Boris, we always have a guest for breakfast. I mean Horus, we always have a Breast Forget Fest,” which he finds so hilarious he laughs until he’s screaming. Meanwhile, “I’m the Urban Spaceman” is a very pleasant pop tune—and I suspect a Donovan parody—despite it’s unorthodox instrumentation, which includes one very prominent and nifty flute, a honking trombone, banjo, and a chorus of kazoos at the end. It’s not particularly hilarious but it’s a great number—authentic fake psychedelia of the first order.
If the previous two songs were hits or attempts at hits, the same certainly can’t be said of the sublimely off-kilter “Shirt,” a series of guerilla street interviews with bewildered passersby about “the problem of shirts” that ends in a song, about shirts of course. “Shirt” begins with the sound of loud munching, then Stanshall says, “Hello, well, that was the sound of Roger’s wah wah rabbits,” and later declares, “And here comes a lady with an enchanting… little… kangaroo.” After wrapping up the interviews Stanshall says, “And I’m going to take you straight over to the Ascot Olympia to watch the Shirt Event,” at which point some fifties doo wop singers and a banjo come in, and several choruses of “Shirt, shirt, shirt, shaking the shirt” ensue, followed by an Elvis impersonator who sings, “Well I’m shaking my shirt all over the place/But it’s been thrown right back in my face.” Finally Stanshall says, “New horizons in sound now as Roger plays the electric shirt collar,” which is followed by some odd ponging and lots of desperate gasps of exertion. The electric shirt collar must be one difficult instrument to play.
The instrumental “Laughing Blues” is as wonderful as it is infuriating; it sounds like it was recorded in the 1920s, and staggers along thanks to some great rudimentary piano, heaps of odd sound effects, and several endearingly lugubrious horn solos. Then Stanshall comes in on muted trumpet and makes it laugh and laugh and laugh, while The Bonzos laugh along. Very annoying it is, but you’ll want to hear it again, you masochist, I promise. As for the cover of Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain’s 1930 popular song “By a Waterfall,” it doesn’t do much for me, because I’m exclusively a fan of unpopular song. That said, I can appreciate the song’s elaborately sophisticated arrangement, and delight in the odd instrumentation. And Stanshall’s vocals are spot on, old chap.
The Dog Band’s “trip” down memory lane also includes a cover of King Oliver and Walter Melrose’s “Dr. Jazz,” which moves at a madcap speed, and on which the band throws in everything—saxophone, an odd whistle, trumpet, oboe, what I think is a kazoo, bells, and one zany set of spoons—but the kitchen garbage disposal unit. Which I’m sure they’d have added, had Roger Ruskin Spear only thought of it. The band’s twisted magical memory tour concludes with the popular tune parody “Tubas in the Moonlight,” which features, duh, lots of tubas, including a tuba solo and an ensemble tuba solo while Stanshall croons, “Tubas in the moonlight/Will bring my loved one hooooome.” Makes me want to get out the old tuba and join in, it does.
Very cool indeed—and more Zappaesque than any other Bonzo Dog Band song—is “Canyons of Your Mind,” a fifties parody that features a slew of absurd metaphors, one deranged (and heavy on the echo) lead vocal by Stanshall, some great backing vocals, a tinny piano and big sax, and what is either the greatest or the worst guitar solo I’ve ever heard. Meanwhile Stanshall sings, “And each time I hear your name/Oh! How it hurts/In the wardrobe of my soul/In the section labeled ‘Shirts’.” And during the melodramatic spoken segment describes the smell of his lover’s hair as “the sweet essence of giraffe.”
The Bonzo Dog Band released three more studio LPs—1969’s Keynsham, 1972’s Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly (to meet contractual obligations following the band’s official 1970 breakup) and 2007’s Pour l’Amour des Chiens during the last of their periodic reunions. Personally I don’t count the last one, as it was recorded sans Stanshall, who spent his final years a virtual agoraphobic addicted to booze (he once quipped, “If I had all the money I’d spent on drink, I’d spend it on drink”) and valium, which didn’t stop him from writing some truly brilliant material for television, radio, and film before he died in a 1995 house fire.
The Bonzo Dog Band never became a household name like Monty Python, but you don’t hear The Bonzos complaining. They’d done what they’d set out to do, namely make the weirdest, most sublimely funny, and musically diverse music of their era, or any era for that matter. Stanshall, a true Dadaist like his band mates, once said, “Why can’t I be different and unusual… like everyone else?” It was that Wildean wit that made The Bonzo Dog Band so brilliant, and we’re unlikely to see their likes again. If bands had tombstones, I would want theirs to read, “We wrestled poodles—and won!”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
