Zany Band Wrests ‘Phun,’ Music From Chaos

Spotlights play over a red curtain. The curtain is drawn, revealing a 10-man orchestra.

The silver-haired conductor raises his arms, and with a wave of a plumber’s helper . . . .

A plumber’s helper?

“With these guys, anything goes,” said Eric Hoffman, an assistant to the Phunharmonic Orchestra, which took over the stage of the Van Nuys High School Auditorium Saturday night for a benefit concert.

The leader of the band, Joe Siracusa, described the music his group creates as “organized chaos.” He and two other members are alumni of Spike Jones and the City Slickers, a musical and comedic ensemble that used gags, trick instruments and musical jokes to get laughs out of radio, movie and early television audiences in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Billed as performing “in the Spike Jones tradition,” the Phunharmonic has for three years performed an annual concert for the San Fernando Valley Corps of the Salvation Army.

Helping Local Homeless

“So many people were doing benefits for Africa, but we have all these homeless people right here in Los Angeles who desperately need help,” Siracusa said, showing his rarely seen serious side.

On Saturday afternoon, the group came together for a last rehearsal in the Van Nuys High School Auditorium before the performance that night.

The stage was crowded with musical instruments--if you can call a five-foot-tall board covered with 25 electric doorbell buzzers an instrument. The buzzers are hitched up to an electric piano keyboard, each tuned to produce a note of the scale.

Siracusa started the group not long after retiring from a career that started with drumming for Spike Jones and meandered through everything from film editing to creating sound effects and music for the “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.”

With his show business background, he was well positioned to put together a motley crew that includes a master of the pocket trumpet--a 10-inch long version of the traditional instrument--and a trombonist whose pant legs rise when he moves the slide on the instrument.

A battered silver tuba looked small wrapped around Lee Westenhofer, a heavyset man wearing baggy yellow shorts hiked up above his waist. Westenhofer was described by band members as the Rock of Gibraltar--for his steady beat, not his ample girth.

Siracusa himself performs on a console, left over from his Spike Jones days, that sprouts every imaginable form of Klaxon, horn, buzzer, beeper, whistle--and topping it all, a washboard. He got his musical start at age 12 on the washboard, Siracusa said, as he began to “tune” his instrument.

“Your A is a little sharp,” said the pianist, Leo De Lyon, wincing as Siracusa honked one of the horns.

Television Background

De Lyon has had a 40-year show business career that began when he was discovered on Arthur Godfrey’s talent search program and included playing piano behind Phil Silvers, appearing on Jackie Gleason’s shows and creating cartoon voices for Top Cat.

His act with the Phunharmonic includes a performance in which he simultaneously whistles one tune and hums another.

Siracusa ran down his stage directions for the show, scrawled out on a legal pad, which includes such notes as, “Play auto-crash tape . . . auto horns in tempo . . . all sneeze.”

One of his granddaughters practiced a routine where she burst forth from a trap door in the back of a bass fiddle. “We used to have a midget that would hide in there in the Spike Jones act,” Siracusa said.

Bob Dawson, the group’s musical “deranger,” tested out the percussion section, which included a standard drum kit, kettle drums, a jar of rice and a small electric jack hammer.

Then it was on to the full rehearsal. The curtain opened and the musicians joined in a swelling introductory fanfare that sounded somewhat like a New York City traffic jam.

Tree Tunes

A violinist, sporting tails and a white beard and full mane, stepped to the microphone. Despite the obvious lack of strings on his instrument--actually a bough from a tree--Earl Bennett, known from his Spike Jones days as Sir Frederick Gas, was able through a ventriloquist’s trick to produce an unearthly quavering tone.

“I’m in the Mood for Love” was tooted on an assemblage of bicycle pumps and pitch-pipes. A magician performed tricks with lit candles.

The band broke into a raucous version of “Tiger Rag.” “I suggest you run for your life,” Hoffman said, as a reporter ventured onto the stage.

The reason for his warning quickly became clear as an explosion flashed from one of the trombones and a bucket that would later contain water tumbled from the bell of Westenhofer’s tuba.