John Wayne, Adolf Hitler, and the origins of ‘outro’: The bizarre impact of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s comedy masterpiece
An ‘outro’ is, in the modern musical age, such an innocuous, everyday word that it is difficult to attach much importance to its origins; surely, it has been around since the dawn of pop music itself. In actuality, the word outro was coined back in 1967, with the aid of John Wayne, Hitler, Lord Snooty, and one of the greatest comedy songs ever written.
Such a strange amalgamation of cultural figures could only have arisen from the minds of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, who were blazing a particularly individual trail through the musical realm of the late 1960s. Whereas, in the preceding decades, comedy groups were limited to either an outdated club comic sense of humour, parodying the popular music of the day, or, going back quite far, embracing the realm of music hall, the Bonzos offered something entirely and beautifully different.
Concocting an unholy blend of music hall tradition, avant-garde jazz music, and the blossoming style of psychedelia, there was nothing else – even in the expansive countercultural age of the late 1960s – that could have been confused for the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Despite forming way back in 1962, it was five years later, in 1967, when the band truly broke into the cultural landscape.
Hired as the house band on the children’s television programme Do Not Adjust Your Set, where they rubbed shoulders with future Monty Python members, the Bonzos also found themselves in the favour of The Beatles in the same year, appearing in the Magical Mystery Tour film. Their crowning achievement of 1967, though, was their masterpiece of a debut album, Gorilla, featuring the trailblazing ‘The Intro and the Outro’.
Confusingly, the track does not act as either the introduction or the outro of the album, appearing as the first track on side two, but its content certainly acts as a good summary of the spirit of the entire album. In essence, the track is a parody of old-school jazz records, specifically their tendency to individually introduce each member from the extensive line-ups of their orchestras.
Along with the real members of the Bonzos, including the likes of Neil Innes and Vivian Stanshall – the songwriter behind the track – John Wayne is introduced on xylophone, a “very relaxed” Adolf Hitler on vibes, Princess Anne on sousaphone, and comic character Lord Snooty tap-dancing. A myriad of other names are mentioned, including then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson and guitar hero Eric Clapton, reduced to the first ukulele player.
Over the course of the song’s three-minute runtime, the names keep coming until the song descends into a chaotic menagerie of sound, albeit one which still doesn’t seem to bother the transatlantic narrator.
Aside from the comedic quality of that jazz surrealism, the song was also pioneering in a much more unexpected way, being the first to coin the word ‘outro’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
While it seems unlikely that Stanshall was deliberately trying to strike upon a new word that is now overwhelmingly commonplace, the modern prevalence of ‘outro’ certainly speaks to the assuming yet colossal impact of that pioneering jazz-comedy track.
