But Only Use a 10-Cent Comb

Red McKenzie of the Mound City Blue Blowers was the Benny Goodman of the kazoo and the Harry James of the musical comb, the man who made it a beautiful thing to be a comb player. The sound of McKenzie's melodic bzzz drifted off in the '30s, but his name is now revered in Cambridge, Mass., where Harvard students crowd into the Club 47 to hear the music of McKenzie's spiritual heirs: Jim Kweskin and His Jug Band. On washtub, kazoo, stovepipe, scrub board and comb, Kweskin's band plays old-fashioned "good time" music that folk faddists have pronounced the most culturally significant phenomenon since Joan Baez.

A Fatter Sound. Jug music got started as "spasm" jazz bands played by Negroes who lacked the price of honest-to-God instruments, and now, after 30 years' obscurity, it has returned as a rebellion against the formality of Bluegrass--which itself was exhumed only two or three years ago. Both Kweskin's band and New York's Even Dozen Jug Band have highly successful LPs on the market, and the demand for kazoos in Greenwich Village, where Kweskin's group played at the Bitter End, is as great as it is in Boston. Kweskin, a 23-year-old combist, got the band together for fun last winter, but now, with a nightclub booking in Hollywood a month away, he is steeling himself against the coming commercialization of his art. "We'd have a hard time being anything but spontaneous," he says steadily.

Kweskin and his men are the kind who worry about macrobiotic food and the yin and yang principle, and they talk about their instruments with great seriousness. "It's very important that you use a 10-c- comb," Kweskin says. "The expensive ones are too thick to vibrate well. A lifetime supply of wax paper costs 29-c-." Geoff Muldaur, 20, plays mandolin, guitar, kazoo and, most rewardingly, washboard. He was the National Washboard Co.'s "Soap Saver." Muldaur has modified his washboard by tacking it up against another washboard and stuffing old socks between the two grates to "give it a fatter sound." Mouth-Harpist Mel Lyman, 25, distinguishes between his instrument and the harmonica by saying, "People who play the harmonica are hung up."

Pucker Up & Blow. The Jug Band's anchor man is Fritz Richmond, 24, a shaggy, red-haired bean pole who plays washtub, stovepipe and jug. He is so immersed in washtub playing that once, while in the Army, he got carried away and played a Quonset hut by nailing the door shut, stringing a wire from the doorknob to the tip of a 10-ft. pole and strumming. "It made a deep, very deep sound," he says, lost in wonder at the effect. His present instrument is a $2.49 Sears, Roebuck washtub, but metal fatigue forces him to buy a new one every month. Both the jug and the stovepipe--a huge crook-necked whistle Richmond invented himself--are played by puckering up and blowing like hell. Three jug tunes in a row get Richmond so dizzy that he has taken to wearing a pair of steel-rimmed glasses with blue lenses so he won't look funny on the job.

Jug band music sounds like ragtime with hecklers, and when the Jug Band plays such oldtime tunes as Sweet Sue and Coney Island Washboard, the sounds it makes have a cheerful, giddy quality. Much of the band's appeal is in the delight its audiences take in watching it work all its contraptions. "You can make a noise on everything here," says Washboardist Muldaur, "but it's hard to play a tune."

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