In 1962, an aspiring actor named Bobby Pickett first did the mash.

During the day, Pickett ran a Hollywood gauntlet of auditions for film and television. After sunset, he performed as the lead singer for a local band called The Cordials. According to his autobiography "Monster Mash: Half Dead in Hollywood," the idea for Pickett’s runaway novelty hit came to him one night, by accident, while he entertained the audience at one of his gigs with an imitation of horror movie legend Boris Karloff.

“Lenny [Capizi, his friend] sat down at the piano and began futzing with various four-chord progressions and I stood next to the piano,” Pickett writes, “Like me, Lenny was a major horror movie fan from childhood. He loved Bela Lugosi as Dracula. He knew I had the Boris Karloff voice pretty nailed, although in retrospect, I feel that what I actually had was a very cartoonish rendition of that wonderful actor’s voice.”

Cartoonish is right: Here’s Boris Karloff talking about his iconic performance in "Bride of Frankenstein":

And here’s Bobby Pickett doing it:

Pickett continues: “We agreed that the Karloff voice was the most obvious one to tell the story. And what was the story?”

Bobby and Lenny decided the story should be about the Frankenstein monster starting a dance craze. They recorded the “Monster Mash” in May of that year, and it was released in August. Remarkably, the BBC banned the novelty song because it was “too morbid” (!!!), but even that couldn’t quash its rise. Months later, just days before Halloween, the single became No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart.

More than half a century later, we’re still doing the mash.

**

If you’re like me, you probably only know the chorus of the “Monster Mash” by heart. That’s because the song’s verses, though utterly bizarre, are stupefyingly dull.

Here's the (spooky) skeleton of Pickett’s song:

Verse 1: Frankenstein is working on his monster in his lab late one night. His monster gets up and

Chorus: Dances.

Verse 2: We learn that Frankenstein’s roommates are vampires, and he lives in a ghoul town. Every so often, the “ghouls all come from their humble abodes / to get a jolt from [his] electrodes.” < - - - - remember this it’s very important

Chorus: After they do Electrode, they do the mash.

Verse 3: Zombies showed up to the party on time, but Wolfman, Dracula, and Dracula’s son (Nixon?) show up fashionably late. Igor is playing his chains like an instrument and dogs are howling.

Chorus: They do more mash.

Verse 4: Dracula pitches a fit and wants to know what happened to his Transylvania Twist. Is that a candy or a dance? I didn’t major in ethnomusicography, so your guess is as good as mine as to what that is but

Chorus: They did the mash anyway. Oh, apparently, the “Transylvania Twist” became the monster mash. You learn that in this chorus from context clues. That’s interesting.

Verse 5: Dracula stops pitching his fit, Monster Mash becomes a number No. 1 single (wow, cocky!). Bobby Pickett refers to himself as “Boris,” so I guess he is Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster but also as Boris. Anyway, he gives the listener the password to his party in the hopes that you will join him for

Chorus: A mash. This one, the final one.

So that’s probably more than you ever needed to know about the Monster Mash, but this is all really important. It’s Halloween today, and I wanted to get into the spirit with some music.

**

Halloween is like every other Q4 American holiday in that it is all about overindulgence. But Halloween is unlike Christmas (and just like Thanksgiving) in that there is no Halloween music, traditional or untraditional. When I asked three people what Halloween songs they could think of, they all did the mash.

So I made a Pandora station for the original Monster Mash to see what everyone's favorite aural algorithm would recommend. As I had feared and hoped, the station was interesting and insufferable. I listened until it killed me, and made some notes. I learned a lot about novelty monster music from around this period. It turns out that it is a genre with tropes. The genre is defined by a lead singer, male, doing a bad impression of Bobby Pickett’s bad impression of Boris Karloff. The lead singer always refers to himself in the third person, even though he is the lead monster in the song. The song is always about a party with other monsters, there is usually a new kind of dance introduced. There is also almost always a recreational drug, like the electrodes in the Monster Mash.

Anyway, here’s what Pandora vomits up when you make a Monster Mash station. I have included my notes on each song, and recorded how much life I had left in me after listening to each one. I started with 100/100 HP.

Unfortunately, “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” was not featured, or I could have continued well into the night.

The Mashes:

1. “Purple People Eater” – Sheb Wooley

Not a good song, even by monster novelty song standards. It’s also a weird call-and-response ballad with one of the chipmunks (Theodore? Just guessing). It also samples “Who Wears Short-Shorts?” I wonder how much this song cost to make. I wonder if anyone thought it was funny.

It ends with the chipmunk saying “tequila,” which is pretty edgy, maybe, for a song that only a small child could enjoy.

Current HP: 80/100

2. Monster Mash – The Bonzo Dog Band

A solid cover of a stupid song. The iconic chorus is all men, though, which makes it a standout entry into the genre. Here, the line “to get a jolt on my electrodes” sounds distinctly sexual, owing to lead singer Neil Innes’s voice sounding more sultry than Pickett’s, more “Gary Oldman Dracula” than “Boris Karloff Frankenstein.”

Actually, Innes’s delivery makes the Monster Mash sound like an orgy. I really don’t like this one.

Current HP: 50/100

3. “Witch Doctor” – Don Lang

This song is FILTHY with chipmunk voice.

Current HP: 30/100

4. “Love Potion No. 9” – The Clovers

An okay, sterile cover of the song. Pandora’s notes on The Clovers states that “The Drifters tended to eclipse” them. Weird when even Pandora doesn’t like its own music, but I needed a break from novelty monster jams.

Current HP: 60/100 (this one was curative)

5. “Igor’s Party” by Tony’s Monstrosities

Looks like Igor played his cards right in the world of spooky socialites. Now, he’s throwing the party. I was genuinely curious about who would be showing up for a party for Frankenstein’s intern, but this song sounds like someone recorded an unhinged old man ranting, then set it to music.

Also, the Purple People Eater makes a surprise cameo in this song. This feels like when Pepper appeared in "AHS: Freak Show."

HP: 50/100

6. “Dracula’s Deuce” by the Ghouls

This is off of an album called “Halloween’s Gravest Hits.” That’s not a pun. And based on how this song sounds, maybe it was never meant to be.

The hook for this song goes as follows: “He’ll race anyone for a pint of juice / You’d better watch out for Dracula’s deuce.” I guess Dracula is such a hardened killer and so removed from the business of being human that he refers to blood as “juice.” But the race? And the deuce? No idea.

HP: 30/100

7. “Werewolf” by Southern Culture on the Skids

According to the Pandora notes, SCotS is “a parody of local white-trash trailer park culture.” That doesn’t really come across on the song, but this song actually kind of works outside of its novelty trappings. It’s funky and slinky. I could see chaperones really getting down to this one at a middle-school prom. (“But Anthony… you *are* the chaperone.”)

HP: Still 30/100

8. “Riboflavin-Flavored Non-Carbonated Polyunsaturated Blood” by Don Hinson and the Rigormorticians

I want to be cynical about this one, but the meter is actually really impressive. If this were a line from Nabokov's "Pale Fire," your college professor would linger over it. The song itself is about a party where the monsters get together to try this new way to drink blood. This is about where I realized that there was a whole genre of music that is just monsters going to a monster mash that isn’t necessarily the Monster Mash to try the newest party drug with other monsters. Fascinating stuff.

This was about where I became reinvigorated, and where I gained newfound purpose.

HP: 120/100

9. “Monster Swim” by Bobby Pickett & The Rolling Bones

This is the song that put me at death’s door. It begins with Bobby Pickett screaming about how he was the one who created this whole damn genre that’s full of imitators, but now everyone should stop doing all those other lesser dances because he’s back with a new dance, and it’s called the Monster Swim.

No one’s ever accused Bobby Pickett of being prolific before. Anyway, this time:

Chorus: “We do the swim / it’s a poolside swim / the Monster Swim / it’s bigger than the Mash”

No such luck this time, Bobby. A woefully underattended pool party has a hard time attracting listeners.

HP: 10/100

10. “Graveyard Shift” by The Ghouls

This song isn’t available on YouTube, but it’s worth talking about/ending on. If this genre of novelty monster music is all about partying and party drugs, this song – literally about working a graveyard shift – is the genre’s “9 to 5.”

That’s the only interesting thing about it. It ends with the lead singer announcing that he has dirt in his mouth.

HP: 0/100

**

I guess the moral of this tale is that we should be grateful for Halloween’s gustatory delights, because this it’ll never be a sonic holiday. But if you *did* want to listen to some spooky music, just head on over to Pandora. The station will make you say “boo,” but for all the wrong reasons.

(Sorry)

Halloween