Happy Halloween! If you're in the mood for a true horror story on this All Hallows' Eve, we hope you'll check out our special Tale for Our Time, The Wendigo. If you prefer the dark arts with a lighter touch, here's a timely selection, adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season:
"And now a medley of my hit," Bobby "Boris" Pickett would announce on some stage somewhere round about Halloween every year of the last four decades of the 20th century. And then you'd hear the sound of a rusty-hinged coffin opening and Mr Pickett would begin the sole opus in his oeuvre:
I was working in the lab late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For my monster from his slab began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise...
He did the Mash, he did the Monster Mash, and it was a graveyard smash for Bobby Pickett for 44 years. In fact, he could have extended the medley of his hit and made it plural. The Yuletide sequel "Monsters' Holiday" did, after all, get to Number 30 on the Billboard Hot One Hundred at Christmas 1962:
But that song was pretty much dead by Ephiphany 1963, and no one's been interested in hearing it since. "Monster Mash", on the other hand, became a kind of perennial novelty song, a novelty that lasted long after the novelty wore off - a Number One in 1962, and back in the charts in 1970, and a Top Ten hit again in 1973, and a Number Three in Britain, and endlessly covered, by punk bands and ska groups and Mannheim Steamroller. It was half an hour's work that paid the rent for Bobby Pickett for the rest of his life, until his death from leukemia in 2007.
It began in Bobby's home town of Somerville, Mass. He liked to enter talent shows even though he wasn't exactly overflowing with talent. "I did this shtick about Boris Karloff," he said, "and every time I did it I'd win." Back then, he wanted to be an actor, but out in Hollywood in 1962 the only guys he knew were Lenny Capizzi and three other fellows from Somerville who'd started a quartet, the Cordials, and were okay with having Bobby boost it up to a quintet. They did cover versions, including "Little Darlin'", a big hit in the late Fifties for the Diamonds, the absurdly over-emphatic vocal group:
Little Darlin'
Oh, Little Darlin"
Oh-oh-oh where ar-are you?
My love-a
I was wrong-a
To-oo try
To lo-ove two
A-hoopa-hoopa-hoopa...
Etc. It has an even more emphatic Ink Spots-esque spoken interlude over the instrumental break:
My darlin' I NEED you [La-la-la-la]
To call my own and NEVER do wrong
To hold in mine your little hand
I'll know too soon that ALL is so grand
PLEASE hold my hand...
One night Bobby asked the guys if they'd mind him doing the monologue in his Boris Karloff/Frankenstein voice. It wasn't a terribly original idea because the actual Boris Karloff had already done "Little Darlin'" - on The Dinah Shore Show, with spirited backup from Dinah, Betty Hutton and Art Carney:
Thus "Boris Karloff and his All-Ghoul Orchestra", anticipating Bobby "Boris" Pickett and his Crypt-Kicker Five.
But evidently Mr Karloff's appearance with Dinah had been forgotten. So the crowd loved the Cordials' "Little Darlin'" with spoken interlude by "Boris". Afterwards Lenny said, "You know, that would be a great voice to use on a novelty record." But Bobby Pickett still wanted to act. He left the group, signed with an agent, and two weeks later the agent died. He called Lenny back and said, "Remember that idea for the novelty song?"
They got together one Saturday night to write it. How about Frankenstein's monster doing a groovy Sixties dance craze? Hey, neat! Bobby wanted to call it "The Monster Twist". But Lenny thought the Twist was on the way out and proposed instead "The Monster Mashed Potato". But Bobby thought it would go better as "The Mean Monster Mashed Potato". Eventually they got it right:
(He did the mash)
He did the Monster Mash
(The Monster Mash)
It was a graveyard smash
(He did the mash)
It caught on in a flash
(He did the mash)
He did the Monster Mash...
If you've got a great idea, the trick is not to overcomplicate it - and Bobby Pickett was never in much danger of making that mistake. He's no Noel Coward or Allan Sherman, but he knew enough to figure it out - a simple tune, verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and, although his prosody's a bit clunky and the inverted word order doesn't help, he manages to come up with one distinctive rhyme in each quatrain:
From my laboratory in the castle east
To the master bedroom where the vampires feast
The ghouls all came from their humble abodes
To get a jolt from my electrodes...
The sound effects were state-of-the-art. The coffin lid opening was a rusty nail being pulled out of a two-by-four with a claw hammer. The bubbling cauldron was someone blowing a straw into a glass of water. The clanking chains were real but they made that sound by being dropped on some plywood on the studio floor. The singers included the writers, the producer Gary Paxton, Paxton's writing partner Johnny McCrae, and a session vocalist, Ricki Paige. The pianist was Leon Russell, who went on to do that archetypal slice of sultry Seventies smoocheroo, "This Masquerade":
Leon, Johnny, Ricki et al did it in one take, and for the name of the "band" fell back on the combo identified in the lyric:
The scene was rockin', all were digging the sounds
Igor on chains backed by his baying hounds
The Coffin Bangers were about to arrive
With their vocal group the Crypt-Kicker Five...
So the record got credited to Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers. He took it to four labels, and he got turned down by all four. But Pickett knew he had a hit and put up his own money to press a thousand copies. Then he drove around southern California dropping it off at radio stations. By the end of the day, it had already been played. One of the labels who'd rejected him, London Records, called up and said, "We made a mistake. Is it too late to make a deal?"
Elvis thought it was the dumbest record he'd ever heard, which is high praise indeed coming from the guy who sang "No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car". A funny idea rather than a funny lyric, "Monster Mash" made for an oddly sincere song, which is perhaps why Boris Karloff liked it so much he sang it on TV. ABC managed to lose that performance, so here's Vincent Price:
And yes, for Top of the Pops fans, that's the classic Pan's People line-up - Flick, Babs, DeeDee, Ruth, Louise and Cherry - grooving with Mr Price.
Boris Pickett wasn't a mere one-impression impressionist. In what passes for variety in the number, this verse ended with his Bela Lugosi Transylvanian accent:
Out from his coffin, Drac's voice did ring
Seems he was troubled by just one thing
He opened the lid and shook his fist
And said, 'Vottever hoppened to my Transylvania Twist?'
Good question. In fact, the "Transylvania Twist" turned up on the Crypt-Kickers' album, and what happened it to it was a big nothing. Likewise, nothing happened to the "Werewolf Watusi" or "Me And My Mummy", or any of Bobby Pickett's other Baron von Frankensteinish efforts to make lightning strike twice and thrice. His acting career went nowhere, though there was some fitful employment in schlock-horror fillers like Frankenstein General Hospital and Lobster Man From Mars and a very belated Monster Mash movie (1995).
But the song never went away. It was on Happy Days, where Richie did it in a Peter Lorre voice:
The nearest to a real singer there is Donnie Most (Ralph, the ginger), who now does his own lounge act and has dueted with our chum Linda Purl. Still, sitcom-wise, you're spoilt for choice: Cheers and Roseanne and The Simpsons and Sabrina The Teenage Witch have all done "Monster Mash". So did Mike Tyson and Bobby Brown, somewhat under-rehearsed:
As the above suggests, it became far too easy a joke. But the band Rush sampled it on a track called "Limbo" (at approx 3-10), and Bob Dylan played it on his XM radio show for Halloween 2006. And in 2005 Bobby Pickett himself returned to the song, chugging down the global-warming kool aid and transforming "Monster Mash" into an attack on the Bush Administration's environmental policies. This must be the first time anyone's tried to turn one iconic Sixties genre - the novelty dance craze - into another - the earnest protest anthem. With the best will in the world, it's hard to account it a success:
We were hiking past the White House late one night
When our eyes beheld an eerie sight
The President appeared with folks very strange
The zombies and vampires of global climate change
(The Climate Mash)
They're doing the Climate Mash
(The Climate Mash)
Real science is bashed
(The Climate Mash)
Solutions are trashed
(The Climate Mash)
And they do it for the cash'It's not global warming,' say oil company disciples
'According to our math, it's natural weather cycles'
Claims from these and other industry heavies
Let the President rest behind his own protective levees(The Climate Mash)
They're doing the Climate Mash...
Oh, dear. Still, let's not hold that against Bobby "Boris" Pickett. He gave the world a song that became a Halloween staple, a "White Christmas" for a black night - the biggest holiday song for one of the few American holidays Irving Berlin never cornered. A lot of mileage for a very slight gag. Rest in peace, Bobby Pickett, and remember:
For you the living, this mash was meant too
When you get to my door, tell them Boris sent you.
~adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
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