Comedy
Andre Jacquemin remembers the day he was asked to engineer some comedy records for a young group of writers in London. He thought, who will want a record with only jokes? That group of writers became the nucleus of Monty Python and, over the years, Andre became their musical director. For over...
Weird Al Yankovic built his career upon creating parodies of hit songs, with a special focus on incorporating his beloved accordion. Al began recording his silly songs on tape and mailing them into the Dr. Demento radio program. Once his songs were gaining popularity, Al expanded his band and...
Brooks Arthur began singing as an early age, and in fact began taking lessons to sing in his temple before he was a teenager. While working in the mail room of a record company, Brooks heard his first live recording and fell in love! He soon was hired to engineer some products, which lead to a...
Red Dog Weber saw a pogo-cello during the NAMM show in the early 1950s and thought if there was a percussive version of this instrument he could play it with his band and have a lot of fun. He started designing the instrument that he called the "boom schtick" in 1958 and has made thousands of them...
Hal Blaine was perhaps the most recorded drummer from the California recording studios of the 1950s-'70s. His influential style can be heard on more than 170 number one hit songs and 450 tunes that made the top 40 on the charts during those decades. His beat can be heard on hundreds of albums by...
Billy May was a fun loving trumpeter who arranged some of the best-loved music of the Big Band Era! His humor and musical talents provided hit recordings for Glenn Miller, Charlie Barnet and Frank Sinatra, to name but three. His enormous output included radio, TV and movie work as well as thousands...
This audio only interview was conducted for a radio program by Dan Del Fiorentino and donated to the NAMM Oral History program: Phil Harris was a big band leader, singer, and actor who hit fame as the voice of Baloo the bear in Disney’s 1967 movie The Jungle Book. His career began as a drummer who...