The Guckenheimer Sour Kraut Band was a group of Bay Area musicians in the 1940's and 1950's who held a wide variety of day jobs and capitalized on post-WWII fun-poking of German music and culture via the performing of light classical and village band / oompah numbers. Members of the group were sworn to proudly wear band uniforms that one critic described as "army surplus from the Franco Prussian War", and to perform neither in time or in key.
They released three albums during their reign of teutonic terror. 1955's "Ooom pah pah in Hi Fi" on the small, local label San Francisco Records, 1957's "Sour Kraut in Hi Fi" on RCA Victor, and their crowning jewel, 1958's "Music for Non-Thinkers" on RCA Victor in Stereo, featuring their masterpiece renditions of Liszt's "Second Hungarian Rhapsody" and Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" (with German lyrics!).
All three have been out of print for many, many years. Only a music lover and, possibly, a musician could appreciate the difficulty in playing that badly yet keeping it all together. I always have thought of the GSKB's performances as the aural equivalent of that moment when you lean back too far in a chair and almost tip over but catch yourself at the last minute.
Perhaps even funnier than the performances themselves are the liner notes on each album jacket, which are worth picking copies of in of itself. The band is led by "Herr Doktor Fritz Guckenheimer", who in reality was Richard Gump, a Bay Area art dealer, amateur composer and owner of Gump's Department Store in San Francisco. Gump named the band after a brand of whiskey. Other notable members included George Lichty, cartoonist of the syndicated "Grin and Bear It" cartoon series, a professor, an insurance executive, an architect who had played viola in the San Francisco symphony, a leader of a dance band, an owner of several music stores and even a fireman on the Southern Pacific.
Pick these up if you run across them.