Joe Siracusa died yesterday…about ten weeks shy of what would have been his 100th birthday. His death is being reported by the eminent medical authority, Dr. Demento.
Joe had many fascinating careers but the most impressive — and the reason for the Good Doctor's interest in him — was that he was the last surviving member of the Spike Jones band. That's Spike on the left in the above photo. Joe's head is one of the two on the right. Joe was Spike's drummer — and a key contributor to the craziness of that band — from about 1946 to 1953. You had to be really, really good to play with Spike and his City Slickers in those, his peak years.
Later on, Joe was in a couple of other bands that played zany tunes but he came to realize that popular music was changing and his style was not the style of the future. He decided to put his great sense of timing to work and around 1960, he became a film editor, mostly for animation.
Among the shows he worked on over the years were — and this is very much a partial list — Rocky & Bullwinkle, The Alvin Show, the various Bugs Bunny and Road Runner shows that repackaged vintage Warner Brothers cartoons for television, the 1960 Popeye cartoons, pretty much anything the DePatie-Freleng studio did in the sixties and seventies including The Pink Panther and the 1978 Fantastic Four cartoons, various Spider-Man and Hulk cartoon shows, Muppet Babies, My Little Pony, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Dungeons & Dragons…and well, you get the idea.
He not only cut film but all those years of inserting odd noises into Spike Jones arrangements made him an expert at sound effects and he worked a lot in that area, too.
I got to sit and talk with Joe on several occasions. He was a delightful, funny man.