SCORN AND DISDAIN SPIKE JONES GIFFS HITLER DER OLD BIRDAPHONE, 1942
Wednesday, March 3th 2004, 1:02AM
BY LATE 1942, the United States Army and Marines were throwing overland power against Adolf Hitler's Germany. The Navy was joining the battle at sea. The Army Air Corps was challenging the Third Reich in the air.
It was a big war, though, so there remained plenty of room for artists back home to open up one more front: ridicule.
For all the sophistication of the Allied military machine, one of the most enduring anti-Hitler thrusts turned out to be a simple Bronx cheer, elegantly inserted by Maestro Spike Jones into the immortal tune "Der Fuehrer's Face."
More rudimentary than this, weapons do not get.
IT'S QUITE likely the basic sound of the Bronx cheer goes back through centuries of unrecorded oral tradition, but by the 1940s it was associated across America with New York's northernmost borough.
Exactly when the Bronx got involved is a matter of some contention among linguists. Some link it to demonstrative fans at Yankee Stadium. Others trace it further back, to pre-World War I years. But there's no disagreement about the sound of a Bronx cheer, or its message. Dictionaries politely refer to it as a "splutter," created by closing one's lips around one's tongue and exhaling vigorously. What it conveys, and this may be where the plain-spoken folks of the Bronx come in, is a rich combination of scorn and disdain.
That's a message all of America devoutly wished on Adolf Hitler by 1942, which made it wholly fitting that it would become the signature sound in the most pervasive anti-Hitler song of the war.
THE SAGA began when Walt Disney approached songwriter Oliver Wallace, who recently had created the "Dumbo" soundtrack, and told him he needed a song that had to be both serious and funny.
More specifically, Disney said, he needed it for a cartoon short in which Donald Duck dreams he lives in Hitler's Germany and must endure life in the Fatherland until he wakes up and realizes he is still a free American.
Disney envisioned a song sung by the Germans: "To them it's serious. To us, it's funny."
Wallace, stumped, went home to dinner. He was still stumped. He and his wife got on their bicycles to ride to the grocery store. Suddenly, he would later recount, words came to him and he began lustily singing:
Ven Der Fuehrer says, 'Ve iss der master race,'
Ve Heil! Heil! Right in Der Fuehrer's face.
That was a chorus. Verses followed, and Wallace knew he had something that would sound serious to Germans. Now he needed something to ensure it would be "funny to us."
So how a Bronx cheer after each "Heil!"?
IT WASN'T subtle. It didn't have to be. It was a cartoon.
Now Wallace had to sell this loud, rude expulsion to the traditionalist Disney. "There's a funny sound in it," he admitted to Disney when he came around with the song the next day. "Let's hear it," Disney said.
Wallace obliged, Disney laughed - and "Donald Duck in Nutzi Land" had its song.
FOR THE recording of Wallace's song, Disney turned to Spike Jones, a young bandleader who had grown up playing the music straight - drumming, for example, on Bing Crosby's original "White Christmas" - and then decided to try his hand at crazed satire. It worked. Soon he was ratcheting up the zaniness by adding bizarre quasi-instruments to his mix.
One of them, solemnly called the "birdaphone," was a cheap novelty shop rubber device that made a Bronx cheer and thus was perfect for "Der Fuehrer's Face." So the tune was recorded with "Willie Spicer at the Birdaphone" - and Jones figured it also would make a good single for his own record label, RCA.
This was fine with Disney. RCA, however, was apprehensive, fearing the Bronx cheer might be too vulgar. The company insisted Jones rerecord the song, substituting a trombone for the birdaphone.
Jones did. But he also traveled to New York, a rare thing in his California life, to personally argue for the original version over the trombone version.
Despite some internal reluctance, RCA agreed. So did the American public, who bumped "Der Fuehrer's Face" up to No. 3 on the pop charts and made it an anthem for all ages.
THE SONG became so popular that the cartoon short was retitled "Der Fuehrer's Face" in midrelease. It won an Academy Award for best short animated feature in 1943. It kicked Jones' career into high gear as well, and in 1943 he gave up session work and "legitimate" band work to concentrate on tunes like "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth" and "Cocktails for Two," which gave a war-weary country some welcome laughs. Jones' City Slickers were still a first-rate musical ensemble, but for the rest of his career he was known solely for novelty material, which most of the time he heartily embraced.
Disney pulled the cartoon out of circulation after the war, saying it contained unfair anti-German stereotypes. As for the Bronx cheer, it's still very much around, though it may not ever be known why it's called a Bronx cheer.
SONGBOOK CHALLENGE: TODAY'S QUESTION: At what famous uptown nightclub did Duke Ellington make his name?
ANSWER TO LAST QUESTION: WILLIE COLON
