Red Ingle
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Best known for his comedy records with Spike Jones and his own Natural Seven sides for Capitol, Ernest Jansen "Red" Ingle (1906-65) was a musician, singer and writer, arranger, cartoonist and caricaturist.
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[edit] Early years
Ingle was born in Toledo, Ohio on November 7, 1906. He was taught basic violin from age five by Fritz Kreisler, a family friend. However at 13, he took up the saxophone, and that instrument became his main instrument from then on. At 15 he was playing professionally with Al Amato, and by his late teens, Ingle was touring steadily with the Jean Goldkette Orchestra, along with future jazz legends Bix Beiderbecke and Frankie Trumbauer. He then joined up with Ted Weems in 1931, after briefly being a bandleader himself, and working under Maurice Sherman. His work with Weems was such a success that they worked together into the 1940s. The boy singer in the band, Perry Como, later called Ingle 'one of the most talented men I've ever met.'
[edit] The City Slickers
There then followed two years of unexciting war work. After he failed an eye test for the Air Force, he returned to music with Spike Jones & His City Slickers, where his comedic talents and flair for vocal effects found a welcoming home. Jones started featuring him as a front man immediately, and Ingle's outrageous stage presence helped transform the City Slickers' stage act into something more visual than before.
With Ingle's input, the band gradually became a complete stage package that would eventually peak in the 1950s with the successful "Musical Depreciation Revues".
"There was nobody in the band as funny as Red," said Zep Meissner, the band's clarinetist; "guys like him were funny in themselves, they didn't need material."
According to his son Don, "the stage shows became more active - or more violent - when Dad came on the band. He had basically a vaudevillian's approach to musical sight gags - the facial things, the body motions, the running gags; shooting the arrow in the wings, with a midget running back on with an arrow pinned to the seat of his pants."
An example of his routine appears in the film Bring on the Girls, where he takes off the vaudeville song "Chloe." He would run on in a frightwig, combat boots and a nightgown, while waving a lantern, climaxing the song with the cry "I gotta go!" as he dived into an outhouse. A record of this song went gold for the band, spending four weeks in the top ten. He was also the featured vocalist on other City Slickers hits, such as "You Always Hurt the One You Love" and "Glow Worm," - this last being featured in the film Breakfast in Hollywood, one of many films featuring the band.
Red Ingle (also called "Swamphead" by this time) was also the band's resident caricaturist, designing many of the Spike Jones likenesses used in, among other things, stage backdrops and press advertisements.
[edit] The Natural Seven
Ingle left in November 1946 after a salary dispute. He drifted through Radio and Hollywood, even working in light opera, until he made "Tim-Tay-Shun", a spoof recording of the then-popular Perry Como hit "Temptation", with Jo Stafford (under the name "Cinderella G. Stump"). As the single went on to sell three million copies, Ingle formed a new band - Red Ingle and His Natural Seven; the group included several former City slickers, as well as Country Washburne, who had arranged "Tim-Tay-Shun". The band had several more hits, including "Cigareetes, Whuskey, and Wild, Wild Women", "Them Durn Fool Things," and "'A', You're a Dopey Gal." The band also recorded short films of their numbers, before finally disbanding in 1952.
[edit] Retirement from music
After working again with Weems, Ingle eased out of music, tiring of touring. There was one last reunion with Jones, an album called Persuasive Concussion. Sadly Jones's death in 1965 meant it was never released; Ingle too died the same year of an internal haemorrhage.
[edit] References
- http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/ingle_red/bio.jhtml
- Visser, J. "Spike Jones and his City Slickers - Strictly for Music Lovers" Cd sleevenotes.Proper Records Properbox 5 (Proper Records, London 1999)
