October 23, 2024 • 57 mins
Alex and Jordan continue their TMI Halloween Spooktacular celebration by delving into the creation of this deathless novelty number that pays tribute to the golden age of monster movies. You'll learn about the wildly prolific (and possibly legally insane) producer behind the track, its tentative ties to James Brown, the early '60s pop royalty who sang on it, and Bobby Pickett's dogged attempts to continually update his song with the times. They'll also talk about Elvis' burning hatred of "The Monster Mash," and a brief history of novelty dance crazes and the evolution of the horror genre.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio.
(00:09):
Hello everyone, welcome to Too Much Information, the show that
gives you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts
and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more.
We are your two Bobby Boris pickets of Banality. I'm
Alex Hegel and I'm during Talk. And as you may
have surmised from that intro, we are forging ahead with
(00:29):
our special October Fest here at t M I with
an installment on that deathless slice of sixties novelty music Cheese.
It's the velveta of sixties novelty hits Monster Match by
the aforementioned Bobby Boris p bar Bar's. I would ask
(00:51):
you your personal history with it? Do you have one? No, Well,
you know what I do. You may not remember this, Uh,
this song actually played a crucial role in our friendship
and indirectly the creation to the show. Um, I don't
think you know that. Maybe I've never told you this.
For those of you who don't know, which I assume
is all of you, because why would you know this.
(01:12):
I met Higel on my first day working at People
Magazine in twenty sixteen, and I spent my first day,
decorating my desk with posters of Who and the Beatles
and asking loudly if there was any chance I could
interview Neil Young. And this was emphatically not the subject
matter that people covered. We were usually doing the ins
and outs of Justin Bieber's love life, and I'm pretty
(01:32):
sure the first interview I ever did there was either
Josh Groban or Harry Connick Jr. But my boss, the
wise and wonderful Sarah Ma Schaud, quickly sized up the
situation and said, Hey, there's someone who wants you to meet.
His name's Alex Heigel. And the unspoken subtext of this
was he doesn't belong here either, and if you're gonna
have any friends while you work here, you guys should connect.
(01:52):
And we did, and it was an immediate bond, and
you intimidated me greatly because you had tattoos and I
had none, and you didn't suffer fools gladly and I do.
And we got to know each other. We never really
worked together. I was an editor in the music section
and you were more of a generalist writer reporter, I
remember correctly, so our past didn't really cross on the
(02:14):
day to day, but then one day I was assigned
to edit one of your stories for the first time,
and it was this compelling, amazingly exhaustively researched history of
Monster Mash by Bobby bors Picket, And that was the
moment that we connected on this level, the t M
I level. I realized that you were just as much
of a freak as I was. So I actually will
(02:37):
always think of you when I hear this song. I
know that it was an amazing piece. It's still out
there on people right now, on people dot com, so
I got check it out. My parents got me. One
of the tapes that I had as a kid was
a compilation of sixties novelty songs. So it was like
this and like chev Wouli, Purple People Leader, And I
was trying to ask my dad this. He didn't remember.
(02:57):
Do you remember what that song was? That's like music
concrete like style, cut up collage. It's a fake news
bulletin about aliens coming to earth. But it's like cut
up from single lines of like dozens of other songs.
Oh man, it's not Joe Meek, is it? No? No sixties?
And yeah, I don't know anyway. That's so. Yeah, this
(03:18):
was one of my I used to play that tape
over and over again. It's one of my earliest musical memories. Yeah. So,
from the possibly legally insane and wildly prolific producer behind
this track, to the song's tenuous connection to James Brown
to Bobby Boris Pickets dogged attempts to continually update his
song with the times. Here is everything you didn't know
(03:40):
about the Monster Mash Pickett was born in summer Real, Massachusetts.
As he explained in one often aggregated interviews, he said,
you had two choices as a young man. You could
either be a gangster when you grew up, or an athlete.
Somerville was a tough place to live, but it was
(04:01):
a place where you could leave your door open and
no one would rob you. Well, maybe everyone knew everyone,
even though it was a city three miles long. And
if Somerville brings a crime related name for you, that's
because it's Winter Hill. Neighborhood where Bobby Boris Pickett grew up,
was the principal operating area of Whitey Bulger, famous criminal
(04:23):
head honcho famously fictionized by Jack Nicholson in The Departed.
Bulger was born nine years before Pickett and was already
a young man when the Winter Hill Gang was founded
by James Buddy McLean In and the Winter Hill Gang
fought a six year war with a group called the
McLoughlin Gang uh and what's now known as the Boston
(04:43):
Irish Gang War. And that started when one guy hit
on a rival gang member's girlfriend at Salisbury Beach. And
following said war, the Winter Hill Gang became the most
powerful Irish gang on the East Coast. This is all
operating in Bobby boris Pickets backyard. Well pick it. Fond
livercalls his childhood in Somerville not a place if I remember.
(05:07):
His father managed a movie theater, though, and he spent
a lot of time taking in the horror hits of
Universal Studios, watching Boris Karlov, Belle Legozi and Lawn Cheney Jr.
Stocked the screen in iconic films like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy,
and The Wolfman. At this point, the final Universal monster
that anyone actually remembers came out in fifty four, The
Creature of the Black Lagoon. But prior to that, you know,
(05:31):
this iconic period was kind of gone because they had
spent the intervening decade, introducing that entire roster of iconic
monsters to Abbott and Costello. I am not exaggerating that
was like their whole nineteen forties and come to think
that though that approach probably informed Pickett's entire life of
combining spooky stuff and cheesy humor. He did mention this
(05:54):
distribution company called Real Art, which actually cherry picked a
bunch of these old universal monster flack and reissued them
in the forties and fifties. And he also said that
he loved the William Castle road Show extravaganzas guy who
did Um House on hon Hill, where he had a
gimmick where a fake ghost on a wire would fly
from one end of the movie theater to the other,
(06:14):
and the buzzing seats in The Tingler, Friend of the
The Tingler making its third appearance on the t m
I podcast. Oh I didn't realize. I put it that
many times. Um Pickett did not actually have a musical childhood.
He didn't grow up singing. After a year and a
half in Korea with the Army as part of the
Signal Corps, he was actually on his way back that
he got his first experience with a singing group. He said,
(06:37):
on the ship we came back on, these guys were
putting together a show and there were three or four
of them who were singing doo wop and acapella stuff,
and they needed a bass baritone. So I became a
member of that group. But Boris wasn't exactly bitten by
the music bug when he got back to Massachusetts. Rather
than forming a band, he started performing stand up at
local places like the Irish American Club and Everett, performing
(06:58):
an act that he freely admits he stole. He said,
the first time I went on stage and Everett was
to do a five minute stand up comedy spoof of monsters,
which had kind of ripped off from a guy I
had seen do it on a boat when I was
returning from Korea in nineteen fifty eight. He did a
spoof of monsters. I just watched him and thought that's
a great act. He was doing Boris Karlof and Bella
Neegosti impressions. I said, you wrote that act, He said, no,
(07:20):
I stole it from Jack Carter. I saw it on TV.
I said, okay, then you won't mind if I use it,
and he said no, and pick it took that act
and started winning weekly talent contests with it, and uh,
I guess you get twenty five bucks a pop each
time he one, which, as he said, it was a
lot of money in those days for an unemployed x G. I.
But pick it could not be kept in Summerville. No,
(07:41):
his ambitions were larger. He spent a year in Massachusetts
before moving out to Hollywood to try and make it
as an actor, during which time he apparently dated Chloris
Leachman and Diane Kennon, the eventual wife of Carry grant Um.
And this is just this is so funny. This is
that truth is stranger than fiction. Stuff. Man, he happened
(08:02):
to run into some other dudes from Somerville while he
was bumping around Hollywood, with the astoundingly perfect names of
Lenny and Billy Capezzi. They grew up in winter Hill
as well, and uh, he said that they had shown
up in Hollywood at this time with two other Italian boys,
Ronnie del Toro and Lou Toscano. Who's bat a thousand.
(08:26):
This is the smell of olive oil suddenly came into
my folks. I can say that, uh, and they were
going to start a singing group called the Cordials, and
they asked me if I wanted to join them. Um, we,
he continued, We'd sing in a place called Alvo Turnos
on Pico Boulevard on Friday nights. We sang in the
parking lot of Ben Frank's wherever we could get a
(08:48):
paying gig. Uh. Interestingly enough, Alo Turno's was owned by
Timmy Euro, who is a singer who counted Elvis among
her fans. He bought a private table for her Vegas shows,
and Morrissey, who announced her death on his website in
two thousand four. Um she do you know these songs?
It will never be over for me? And what's the
Matter Baby? What's the Matter Baby was covered by The
(09:10):
Small Faces. It's the B side of their debut single
in n There you have it, folks, we got to
one degree of separation between Morrissey and The Faces and
Monster Mash. That is the t M I guarantee. Jordan
tell us about Ben Frank's. Yeah, Ben Frank's the place
where I used to play in the parking lot. That
was a well known hippie hangout in l A and
the sixties. The advertisement that was soliciting actors to audition
(09:32):
for The Monkeys in nineteen sixty five specified Ben Frank types,
which basically euphanism for long hairs. That was a Mels
Diner on Sunset and they kept all the original architecture
and everything. It's really cool. One of the songs that
was in the Cordial set Bobby's early band was Little
Darlin recorded by the Diamonds, a do wop classic. I
(09:53):
love that song, uh, and I guess Pickett asked Lenny
if he could do a Boris Karloff impression in the
middle of song, which apparently audiences immediately loved. I don't
know how they would shoehorn that in there, but pick
it's a monologue. There's like a monologue part in the beginning,
like the middle of the song, and it's sung by
the bass baritone. Pick It was like, Hey, but I
(10:16):
do this probably this Boris Carlof impression. God. As much
as I love most fifties Schmaltz, the whole phenomenon of
like the midsong breakdown, where you know, the just doing
this are you lonesome tonight? Yeah? I wanted to tell
you something. Yeah, I hate that. I just needed to
let you know. Yeah, I guess he would. I guess, well,
let's find let's find a little lyrics. Let's see if
(10:38):
you can do a little little t M I reenactment
of what this must have been like. What is the monologue?
Oh my god? You know the guy who wrote this song,
Dave Summerville. No way, Yeah, okay, So the monologue in
the beginning, in the middle, Uh, hang on, I was
working in the lab, my darling, I need you to
(10:59):
call my own own, never do wrong, to hold my
in mind, your little hand, something like that. It sounded
something like that, and lightning struck inexplicable way people loved it. Uh.
Bobby's accounts for the rest of this timeline has varied
over the years. In one telling, the very night he
did this bid on stage for the first time, his
(11:21):
bandmate Lenny said to him, you know, we should record
a novelty song like this, something like the Flying Purple
People Eater, which had become a big hit around this time. Uh,
doing that, just your cousin, Bobby Boris Pickett, you know
that news I was working in the lub. And another
(11:53):
version of this story, Bobby says that the group was
performing on a beach and after he did the Boris
karl Off it and a girl came up to them
and said, my old man produces records. He did the
song Ali Oop. He would love you guys, He'll get
your record contract. And that old man was Gary Paxton,
who had hits as part of Skip and Flip who
(12:15):
I don't know and the Hollywood Argyles who did the
song Ali Oop, which was the number one hit, And
that song was actually referenced by David Bowie on the
song Life on Mars. The lyric look at that Caveman
Go is a line from Ali. There's also Mark Bowland,
also referenced in a song called Truck on Tyke. Oh yeah, anyway,
(12:36):
Gary Paxton, Gary s excuse me, Oh my god, this
guy's life is insane. I'm just gonna do the quick
bullet point rundown. Paxton grew up with an adopted family
on a Kansas farm with no electricity or running water.
He started in music, started playing in bands, and twelve
years old, I heard at one point backed Um Buck
(12:57):
Owens or wait or Merle Haggard, some guy in Bakersfield,
because he was part of the Bakersfield sound as well.
And he basically never stopped working in music. By the sixties,
he operated a bunch of different labels that basically just
existed to put out music that he made. I read
one account that he owned and operated or at least
operated five studios. Uh. He was involved with actual villain
(13:21):
of the l A music industry, Kim Fowley. Yes, Kim
Fowley worked with the Runaways and he put them together right. Yeah,
but Jackie Fox, the bassist, accused him of rape years later.
Nobody has anything nice to say about Kim Fowley. But
Paxton was a genuine eccentric. I've heard many people referred
(13:43):
to him as just being dirty and long haired, even
by sixties standards. Also, this is in the early sixties.
This is pre like the hippie stereotype. He alienated musicians
with his in studio demeanor and refused to play ball
with other labeled executives when it came to getting his
stuff played. People just put up with him because he
crafted hits. Phil Spector was reportedly literally actually frightened by him.
(14:08):
I say good. Once after a radio station turned down
one of his songs, Paxton assembled a protest parade down
Hollywood Boulevard that started fifteen cheerleaders and a live elephant
pulling a Volkswagen convertible. This got him arrested when the
elephant pooped in the street. The song was called Elephant
Game Parentheses Part one by Renfrow and Jackson for context
(14:31):
less Do you think he just got an unsolicited elephant? Uh?
Paxston moved to Nashville the nineteen seventies and converted to
Christianity after wandering into a church while stoned because he
was in the middle of an existential crisis after his
musical partner died. Uh. This failed to put a dent
in his eccentricities. For nineteen seventy two Clone Affair, he
(14:54):
shaved his head and eyebrows and started wearing a cape.
When his nineteen seventy five solo album The Astonished Ing Outrageous, Amazing, incredible,
unbelievable Different World of Garry S. Paxton one a Grammy,
he showed up to the ceremony wearing a sleeveless black
vest and leather pants. At this time, it's important to
note he had a large Mennonite beard and was going
(15:15):
around in a pseudo stovepipe hat. What the hell did
he win a Grammy for Best inspirational album In Night,
he was shot five times by men hired by a
country star he was producing, who was supposedly attempting to
get out of his contract or was simply mad about
the terms of his contract. I don't remember which one was.
This sidelined him for eight years, and he carried two
(15:38):
bullets from the shooting in his body for the rest
of his life. Nonetheless, he traveled to jail to forgive
the men personally. In The Washington Post reported that Tammy
Faye Baker had developed a crush on Paxton around the
same time that her husband Jim Baker has had the
big scandal with Jessica Han, the secretary at the evangelical
(16:01):
church the Bakers ran. Sadly, this basically ended Paxton's career
in the gospel Christian music world because he was at
the center of this Beeg infidelity scandal. In moved to Branson, Missouri,
friend of the Pod Branson, Missouri, and began performing in
a mask and cape as Grandpa Rock. He died in
(16:21):
He once estimated he had written two thousand songs. A
sampling of my favorite titles include Jesus is My Lawyer
in Heaven. If You're happy, notify your face and when
I die, just bury me at Walmart so my wife
will come visit me. Garius Paxton, everyone, I just want
(16:43):
to pause and say, for all those for a moment,
wow uh yeah. Everything that with no matter what I
could say after that really feels like a ton of
this letdown. But but Bobby Pickett around this time actually
quit the Cordials for a brief time his band, the Pursuit,
work as an actor, explaining, at one point I got
an agent after many, many months, and after two weeks
(17:06):
of being with him, he died of a heart attack.
So seeing that as some sort of a sign, he
returned to work with the Corridinals to revisit the whole
novelty song thing. Let's give you some context for the
monster craze. Well, let's just give you some context for
the monster mash period by two, the monster craze of
the nineteen fifties, which was aided by those reissues and
(17:29):
television because all this stuff started getting syndicated on TV
that had really blossomed. Three, a stymied actress named Malia
Nermi created the character of Vampira, which is she created
as a rip off of Mortitia Adams, and she launched
a successful show that started the template of these horror
host shows. Basically in costumes. She would introduce these classic
(17:53):
horror films and mock them. It was like a slash
comedy show. And it was all this stuff that affiliates
could get the rights to rebroadcast, either free or cheap,
and so they would just do these buttons with her
making fun of them and broadcast these and it was huge.
I mean even though only ran for a year. Soon
any regional television station that had the budget would have
(18:14):
one of these of their own. The one in Philadelphia
was hosted by a guy named John Zacherley, who was
a buddy with Dick Clark. Zachary actually cut a novelty
single called Dinner with drack Um that climate to number six,
as high as on Billboard in ninety eight, which is
(18:34):
the same year that this very influential fan magazine called
Famous Monsters of Film Land debuts. Adjacent to all of
this is the atomic age monster movies of the fifties.
You have nineteen fifty ones, the day they will sort
sill the War the World's nineteen fifty six is Invasion
of the Body Snatchers and then right around the turn
of the decade or becomes much more popular. We have
(18:57):
these proto slashers like Peeping Tom and psyche Go. Both
In the nineteen six Mario Bava directs Black Sunday, which
is banned. This movie it's a witchcraft theme movie. It
was banned for being I believe explicit or the occult themes.
And then Roger Corban puts out a series of these
Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Mask the Black Death, Hitting the Pendulum, um,
(19:19):
and those are all starring Vincent Price. It's amazing to
think about this stuff in context because until the exploitation era,
horror was like not disreputable. This was like cheesy popcorn entertainment.
They were like the Marvel movies of their day. That's
really interesting. What what change? Well, basically, I mean, this
is kind of an armchair theory of mine, but I
(19:41):
feel comfortable putting it out there. Um, you started to
get that wave of new Hollywood guys come out of
the USC around this time. John Carpenter particularly, and Wes
Craven is the other big one. And so in the seventies, well,
they had four Bears. There's a guy named Herschel Gordon
Lewis who was creating these violent exploitation movies. As early
the sixties he had Blood feast Um. His nickname is
(20:06):
the Godfather of Gore. But then through the mid seventies
the grindhouse circuit really kicks in, and that's when you
do see these movies start to get way more explicit.
And then the tail end of the seventies you have
basically the kind of shots across the Bow, Our Last
House on the Left, Texas, Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween. And
(20:26):
Halloween was the explicit inspiration for Sean Cunningham, who was
directing porn, to make Friday, and that is really what
jump starts the slasher craze the eighties. And and then
concurrently with that you have what's called the video Nasties
in the UK, which was a bunch of band titles.
So basically late seventies through the mid eighties is when
(20:48):
it gets really gross. I mean also the practical effects
advanced to the point where people like Tom Saffini or
coming out of Vietnam and just going into Hollywood and
making horor effects that reminded him of his Vietnam. That
is explicitly his inspiration for the stuff on the Georgia Marrow.
He was like, Yeah, I was just doing all this
stuff I saw in nom Wow. Anyway, don't ever prompt
(21:13):
me about horror movies again, because you get a three
minute monologue. We're going to take a quick break, but
we'll be right back with more too much information in
just a moment. Well, all of us to say back
(21:37):
to the Monster Mash by the National Pump was primed
for a guy to do an extended Boris Karloff riff
in a novelty song and pickup remembers. The may or
Sometimes June accounts very two writing session that produced Monster Mash.
Thus Lee Lenny Capeezi said, yeah, come on over Saturday.
I go over at the designated time, and of course
(21:58):
he's asleep. To wake him up, and he continued the
account in his two thousand five autobiography, Lenny sat down
at the piano and began futson with various four chord progressions,
and I stood next to the piano like me. Lenny
was a major horror movie fan from childhood. He loved
Bella Legosia's Dracula. He knew I had a Boris carl
Off voice pretty nailed although in retrospect I feel that
(22:20):
what I actually had was a very cartoonish rendition of
that wonderful actor's voice. You say that Pickets two thousand
five autobiography, which is called Monster Mash Half Dead in Hollywood,
is extremely rare, and copies of it are selling for
upwards of three on Amazon. Yeah, dude, not available digitally either.
I would have read the whole thing. Lenny arrives at
(22:42):
the classic doo Wop one minor six, four or five
chord progression, and Pickett said it was his idea to
capitalize on the monster craze and the novelty dance craze.
He said, at the time, I thought the Twist was
the latest dance, but Lenny said, no, it's the mashed Potato.
So I said, that's even better. We can call up
the Monster Mashed Potato. We shortened it to Monster Mash
(23:03):
and the rest was history. In about three hours, they
cut a piano and voice demo on a Mono Woolen
sack tape recorder and brought it to Paxton, who said, boys,
you gotta hit on your hands. So Brian Wilson used
to use the workouts harmonies in the early Beach Boys
song as an old Woolen sap tape recorder. Not the
first time the Beach Boys are gonna come up here? YEA. Incidentally,
(23:27):
Lenny was correct. Here's a history about the mash, not
that you folks asked for it. Uh. D D Sharp's
Mashed Potato Time had reached number one on the cash
Box Top one hundred, Billboard R and BEA Arts in
nine two, as well as the number two spot of
the Billboard Hot one. Uh. There's a great article about
monster Mash on Billboard that goes into the history of
the mashed potato. Billboard claims that this dance actually originated
(23:50):
with James brown Baby, the hardest working man in show
business in the late fifties. In his live shows, he
released a top ten R and B instrumental call do
the Mashed Potatoes In? I have that on forty five,
I guess for contractual reasons, the recording was credited to
Nat Kendrick and the Swans. Uh. And it's just a
(24:11):
wild song he got. I don't think it's him. I
think it's like a local DJ he got to do
the vocals for it, just screaming different types of potatoes
over one four or five pattern. It's like sounds mashed potatoes. Yeah,
it's it's pretty weird. You would have thought an Irish
guy would have cut that song too. Sorry our first
(24:35):
Irish potato famine joke. But in a post twist world
in nineteen sixty two, the label CAMEO Parkway. They wanted
a song that would capitalize on the twist, on the
order of Please Mr Postman, Marvolette nine hit, and in fact,
Mashed Potato Time. That d D sharp song is so
similar to Please Mr Postman that they had to share
(24:57):
writing credit on it, and the lyrics to Ash Potato
Time include references to not just Please Mr Postman, but
the Tokens number one hit, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, and
Gary Bond's Dear Lady Twist. So you have a reissue
of an older song that has been rewritten to sound
like new songs, right, and references from other new songs. Yes,
(25:22):
and this started a phenomenon of what you've very appropriately
called recursive novelty dance numbers, in which pop songs begin
referencing dance crazes that were themselves lifting from earlier dance crazes.
James Brown responded to mashed Potato time with his song
Mashed Potatoes USA, while Chris Montez is Let's Dance the
(25:44):
contours do You Love Me? Chris Kenner's Land of a
Thousand Dances, and Connie frances is V A C A
T I O N. And also Sam Cook's Having a
Party All name dropped the mashed Potato dance and Sam
Cook was probably the best at uh surfing this trend.
He calls out the mashed potatoes. Also the soul twist
in his song Having a Party, which followed his own
(26:04):
twist hit Twist in the Night Away, and Cook even
worked the line about a cat named Frankenstein and was
nine hit Another Saturday Night, Another Saturday Night, and I
Ain't Got Nobody, which is absolutely a reference to the
Monster Mash. That means, somewhere in the world there is
a this is probably an outtake somewhere of Sam Cook
singing Monster Mash that I will pay good money for anyway,
(26:31):
Gary s Paxton, Lenning Capezi and Bobby Pickett waste little
time and getting into the studio to record Monster Mash. Uh.
This is so interesting to me, this whole twisted origin
of this song. I really went a little cross side
with It. Pickett has frequently repeated this notion that the
Monster Mash session took place on the same day that
Herb Albert was in the studio recording the Lonely Bull,
(26:53):
which is the first single released on A and M Records,
and Jimmy Rogers was there recording his hit Honey Home.
So it has been said that Lonely Bull sessions took
place at Conway Recorders in Hollywood. Gets deeper, though, George,
that is right. Meanwhile, singer Darlene Love, who is a
(27:15):
legend in early sixties pop music, sang on He's a
Rebel and Christmas Baby, Please Come Home. Like next to
Ronnie Specter, probably the singer most famously identified with Phil
Specter and the Wall of Sound type of stuff. She
was part of a singing group called the Blossoms, who
were sort of the first call backing singer group for
(27:35):
all sorts of uh. If you're familiar with The Wrecking Crew,
the group of musicians who were the first call session
players on all l A pop sessions at this time,
they were sort of the singing equivalent. They sang on
all sorts of stuff. Anyway, She claims that Monster Mash
was recorded at gold Star Studios, which is where Phil
Spector cut most of his records, again, not where Bobby
(27:56):
Pickett remembers cutting the song. Darlene says that incredibly super
producer Lou Adler, who worked with The Mamas and the
Papas and later produced Carol King's Tapestry album, told her
about the Monster Mash for the first time, and in
an interview with Billboards, she says she remembers thinking, oh,
please a Halloween song. Who's going to do a song
about Halloween? She said, quote, we sat down and listened
(28:18):
to the song and try to figure out what the
background was going to be. And after the initial backing
trucks were laid down, the vocalist came and sang live
with Bobby Pickett. She said he had to sing his
vocals so we could figure out where to come in.
It made it more fun with him singing his line
and then us answering him. It's just like the sun
record scene from Walk the Line, but there's yeah, Sam Phillips,
(28:39):
like you have fifteen minutes to sing me something that
will strike me down to my very core. I was
working in the lab. I told you I polished that
one that was good. If you were a loved one,
help record Monster Mash. Please tell us where the hell
it was cut, because it's driving me nuts. Personnel wise,
(29:01):
the band credited as the crypt Kickers on Monster Mash
was the aforementioned Garius Paxton, a writing partner of his
name Johnny Dog McCrae, who I guess I wrote songs
for Ray Charles, George Jones, Reba McIntyre, possibly the Blossoms
backup singers The Blossoms, and another session singer named Ricky Page.
(29:21):
Leon Russell is often credited with playing piano and Monster Mash.
That is not true. Pickett said he played on the
B side Monster Mash Party because he said he got
to the session late. And this is what gives credence
to the Herb Autpert thing, because Russell was a member
of the Wrecking Crew and they are credited with playing
on that Herb Alpert track. So I don't know, do
(29:45):
with that what you will? Apparently Ricky Page is singing
the line oh tennis shoe Wow Wow in the song's
bridge and Pickaton dr Tamento and do thousand six. We
don't know. Why isn't that girl by the Beatles. John
(30:08):
Lennon sneaked in. Um. Yes, instead of deep deep, he's
singing T T T because he was a child. Yeah. Meanwhile,
adding to the insane early sixties pop superstardom, brew that
when making this song, uh, drummer for the Ventures, you
(30:30):
know walk Don't run fame incredible sixties surf guitar instrumental
group The Ventures, Mel Taylor was credited with playing on
Monster Mash and Taylor had moved from l A from
his native Tennessee and was working as a meat cutter
the Grand Central Market in nine When he wasn't busy
being adventure and through his gigs at night, he picked
up session work during the day, including supposedly Monster Mash
(30:53):
and The Lonely Bull by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass,
for which he was paid ten dollars to record on
the very same day. Think about that, Thatcher's drummer Mel
Taylor possibly recorded the very first single on and M
Records and also a Monster Mash in a single afternoon
incredible day right yeah for a flat fee. Um. He
(31:16):
may have been called on this session because of Paxton
as well. I've heard some sources that credit him with
playing the drums on alley oop um, but Gary Packson
said that was not correct, So I don't know, man,
I mean the whole thing about. I have to stop
myself from going too far into this because these guys
were making like seventeen songs a day, five days a week,
(31:36):
calling in whoever you know. UM pick its own account
of the session, though, which costs a whopping three hundred bucks,
is that it took between two and three hours and
his vocals were done in thirty minutes. Gary Packiston did
all the sound effects, he said, like a straw in
into a glass of water to get the bubbling lab sound.
He was he was pulling a rusty name ail out
(32:00):
of a board to get the sound of the coffin creaking.
Those are actual chains. He dragged chains across the floor
to get the sound of chains um. Once they were finished,
mixes took a day, perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm shocked it took
that long. Oh yeah, Uh. Paxton took the finish forty
five around four major labels and they all turned it down,
(32:23):
so he pressed up. I've heard between five hundred and
a thousand records on his own label, gar Packs or
I guess gear packs, uh, and drove north from l A,
stopping in Ventura, Bakersfield, Fresnoe to hand distribute copies of
Monster Mash. DJ's Bigott said by the time Gary got
back to southern California, his phone had been lighting up
(32:43):
like a Christmas tree. London Records, which is of course
one of the outfits that had turned him down, called
and said they had changed their mind. Of course, the
records were being ordered on a massive level. Monster Mass
debut on the Billboard Hot one hundred the week of
September eight, and six weeks later the single not the
Fourth Season Sherry from the top spot to begin a
two week reign at number one that ended four days
(33:05):
before Halloween, and it's returned to the chart multiple times
over the years, including in nineteen seventy and also nineteen
seventy three. Uh, this is hilarious to me. The BBC
famously bands Monster Mash upon its initial release for being
quote to morbid, and it only lifted the band in
nineteen seventy three when it hit number three in the UK.
(33:26):
Did they even do Halloween over there? Like, oh, yeah,
maybe not. I don't think it is as much of
a thing over since. Uh. The song obviously recharts digitally
pretty much every October eighteen, Billboard reported that it appeared
in two thousand and five, and also between two thousand
and seven and two thousand eleven, and again between two
thousand and thirteen and two thousand and seventeen. What would
(33:47):
happened to the years when it didn't Just people weren't
feeling a Halloween spirit, thriller took over. Pickett appeared on
American Bandstand to perform the song, and again in nineteen
seventy three, the song recharted and Paxson duly sent him
out on the road for sock hops and these other
one off shows. Um. He said he would start in
northern Maine and then do Jersey, Boston, New York. Uh,
(34:12):
this is hilarious. I always used the house band wherever
it was, much like Chuck Berry. Yes, Bobby, that is
how you were. Like Chuck Berry. I'd hit town, teach
the band the chord changes my entire act, and we
go on stage and do it. My favorite tour story
of his is that his bust supposedly once broke down
outside of Frankenstein, Missouri. No way, no way, that's too
(34:36):
he's making that out might be the song launched fans
and enemies, as we'll get to in a minute in
high Places. From an early live performance, Bobby Boris Pickett
was backed by a then unknown Beach Boys, and there's
a truly surreal clip of the band performing the Monster
Mash with a I'll just say animated, you said, unhinged
(34:58):
Mike Love on vocals, uh, visibly miserable. Brian Wilson introduces
it as Mike's favorite song. History between Mike lev and
Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys will know how loaded
that exchange. It's probably was. Boris Karloff himself was apparently
a fan of the Monster Mash. Pick It later said
(35:21):
one of the London Records promotion men, a guy by
the name of George Sherlock, ran in the Boris Karloff
at Wallacks Music City, which is a big record store
in l a as he was buying a copy of
the Monster Mash album. And in fact you can actually
see Boris Karloff alongside Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch on
The Adams Family, performing Monster Mash on the TV show
Shin Dig in nineteen, a music show. In other words,
(35:44):
Boris Karloff is doing an impression of the guy who's
doing an impression of him. Sadly, apparently Bobby, Boris Pickett,
and Boris Karloff never actually met. That's a shame. But
lest you thought that was as weird as it gets,
you can see a of this song performed by Mike
Tyson and Bobby Brown on Kimmel in two thousand five.
(36:05):
So if that's the thing that you want, go nuts. Um.
There is an oft repeated line that Elvis Presley hated
Monster Mash and I was able to trace this anecdote
to a book that came out called The Wacky Top
forty by guy's named Bruce Nash and Alan Zulo. These
are Picketts words. I was a real Elvis fan. One
(36:26):
day after the song had become a hit, I bumped
into this girl who used to hang around Elvis's house
in Los Angeles. So I asked her, how's the king?
She wrote? She said, well, he hates your record, Bobby.
When I asked why, she told me he thinks it's
the stupidest thing he's ever heard. So I said, well,
whoever liked him anyway? I don't think he knew who
(36:48):
Boris Karlov was to tell you the truth. Uh. Picky
would often retell this story when performing the song live,
ending it with if you're still out there listening Elvis,
I'm still here, which is such a great shot across
the bow. Apparently, Tiny Tim these two did a lot
of tours together. Pikett just mentioned talking about touring with
(37:08):
Tiny Tim. He said, Tiny Tim thinks Elvis is still alive.
It's arguably Bobby Boris Pickett and Tiny Tim of the
two biggest novelty artists, I would argue, possibly of all time,
certainly of the twentieth century. Oh kings of the novelty circuit.
Tight Tim man, eccentric dude. He apparently used to drink
bottles of salsa and what's going through your head? But
(37:39):
I'm just just him like braiding a manager, like his manager.
But it's in the like Shutton, it's time to my
three pm s So yeah, he as have had an
(38:00):
undiagnosed maybe undiagnosed o c D. He used to use
um not only paper towels, but a very specific brand
of paper towels, Viva paper towels, whenever he went to
hotels because he didn't trust that the towels were clean.
So he would always dry himself off with paper towels
after showers. Uh. He wore adult diapers when he was
out because he didn't like using other people's bathrooms. Jesus.
(38:21):
And he applied oil of l A eight times a day. Um, yeah, yeah, Elvis.
Elvis was very um. When he hated something, he let
you know. There's a famous story about he apparently hated
Robert Goulay. I don't know why she actually hated him,
or it became a bit And whenever he'd be watching
TV and Robert Gulay came on, he would just take
out his gun and shoot the TV. And so the
(38:43):
Graceland archive have all these TVs with gun shots in
him from when was shot the TV out when Robert
gul was on. That is incredible. He's got no heart,
That's what always used to say whenever he was on that.
He's wild. Poebe and Jane Bacon sandwich in one hand
and a still the other, just getting furious at Robert Coulay.
(39:06):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more.
Too much information after these messages. Anyway, Pickett was not
able to successfully capitalize on that hit. In another example
(39:29):
of music industry throat cutting. John Zacherley, who you'll remember
was one of the original TV whore hosts and predated
Pickett with his own novelty hit Dinner with Drack, actually
beat him to the punch to record a Monster Mash album,
a full length Monster Mash. He released his own LP
with a cover of Bobby Bores Pickett's song on Cameo
(39:50):
Parkway before Pickett could get Capezi and packs And into
the studio for a follow up, which is why Picket's
full length is called the original Monster Mash. But there's
apparently no bad blood. You can see footage of the
pair performing this song together on YouTube. Pick And said, Gary,
like Lenny, was not a terribly professional individual, which is
a tremendous understatement, so there would always be delays in
(40:13):
areas of promotion and recording dates. By the time we
had finished Monsters Holiday and Monster Motion, which was the
follow up single, John Zacherlely on Cameo Parkway Records had
sold forty copies of a unit called Monster Mash. That's
Taylor Swift numbers these days. Yeah, yeah, seriously, I blamed Gary,
and I blamed London Records for not getting an LP
(40:34):
out to follow the two singles. Getting Gary and Me
into the studio was a laborious process. Once we got there,
it was done in a rush and it was slip shot.
It was amazing that anything got done at all. Monster motion.
That's gotta be a locomotion. Uh that he did move on,
at least artistically, relatively quickly, at least in the moment.
He attempted to pivot to teen idol style crooning with
(40:56):
a gloppy ballad called Graduation Day, which he has repeatedly
called embarrassing, although it did crack the Hot one hundred
in June sixty three, which keeps him from being a
true one hit wonder in the strictest definition of the word.
Oh that's a good song. That the Beach Boys did
a version of that that was released as a bonus track.
I love the fact that Mike Love was out there
(41:17):
just agitating for Bobby Boris Pickett in the Beach Boys.
It's like, we gotta do it a cover. When Star
Trek came out into The Doctor Tremento Show twelve years later,
Mike Love somewhere was like, it's a good song. Brian,
get out of bed. I got a song for you.
I'll give you a cheeseburger if you do this Star
Trek parody. They did, They know him the right songs
(41:40):
with bags of cheeseburgers. Who among us? I mean, that's
how you get me to do this podcast. A year later,
Bobby rehashed the Carloff impression for cover of an old
novelty Western swing song called Smoke, Smoke, Smoke that cigarette.
You may remember, the original being in the opening credits
of the Air and cart film Thank You for Smoking,
(42:03):
the band on that he christened to the Filter Tip Kickers. Sadly,
that had the poor timing to be released just as
the dangers of smoking were beginning to be made public,
so whoops. He was, however, able to parlay his success
into a run of guest spots on TV shows like
Dr Kildair, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, Bobby Bores
(42:25):
but it was on Bonanza You Know It Wow, and
later t J. Hooker starring William Shatner. And he was
also when commercials for things like Schlitz beer and lipped
in iced tea just as it. I just can't imagine
him appearing in any of these things without referencing the
fact that he was the voice of Monster Match. I
just love Bobby's work. Ethic man, you cannot accuse this
(42:49):
guy of not getting out there and pounding the damp pavement,
just covered in flop sweat, staggering from one commercial bit
part God of Him. But unfortunately, real success as an
actor eluded him, though he continued to appear in regional
theater wherever he lived throughout the rest of his life,
including it an off Broadway performance in New York, and
(43:11):
he would later co star with Tony Curtis in a
movie that Orson Wells was supposed to have been involved with,
Lobster Man from Mars. I have heard that Orson Welles
was supposed to hurt I read this. I gotta stop
saying that. Sources tell me me googling things alone at
three in the morning, and my pajama pants told me
(43:32):
that Orson Wells was supposed to star in this movie
and died, and Tony Curtis picked it up anyway. From
the late sixties into the early seventies, pick It apparently
pivoted to working in a folk duo with his then
wife Joan Payne, working what he called the Ski resort
areas singing soft folk harmonies. There are photos or at
(43:53):
least a photo of the two of them together doing
this act as Picket and Paine on Sale and eBay.
He has a must sash and long hair and looks
like Lee hazel Wood. It's amazing. Uh. They supposedly toward Europe.
I read somewhere that they got as far as Afghanistan.
Then they both moved to New York in nineteen seventy two,
where Picky was driving a cab and she was working
as a waitress before Monster Mash recharted again in seventy three. Uh,
(44:17):
he said either to the Washington Post of the l
A Times. I forget what he said. It was on
the charts for six months before anyone told me that
it had been re released, let alone charted. I called
the head of London Records, Walt McGuire, and said, well,
I hear the records doing well. He said yeah. I said, well,
I'm driving a cab here in New York City. I
(44:39):
was wondering if I could turn my cabin and come
get a check I have. Oh yeah, a little bit. Hey,
Philip Glass drove a cab until I stand on the beach.
He was driving a cabin instant on the beach came out.
Oh yeah, um. I have read this and been unable
to substantiate, but I dearly hope it is true that
when Pickett took the crypt Kickers out again in seventy three,
(45:01):
a teenaged Eddie Van Halen was among the musicians who
backed him up the timeline tracks. And it would have
been like eighteen or nineteen when they came through California,
so might have been in one of the pickup bands. Uh.
He did pop sort of back into the main stream
in the nineteen seventies with a truly truly star trek
novelty hit called star Drek. I've never heard this. It's
(45:25):
just like spoken word. It's awful. It's not even to
like a like a recognizable tune. Uh. It appeared on
Dr Demento and apparently became its most requested number. I
dcor Demento was a huge I guess and dear friend,
big fan and friend of Bobby Boris Pickett. He would
just play whatever Bobby put out. But in that song,
(45:46):
the USS Enterprise is renamed the Booby Prize. I don't
get it. I think Booby Prize was like it was
like a gag prize. But I don't think it was
like a boom. I don't think it was like a
cleavage reference. But who's to say, Who's who's to say? Uh?
(46:06):
The year after that, Bobby came out with you can't
even say with the straight I can't because I, as
you referenced, I thought it was gonna be an Elton
johnre so did. I'm so mad it wasn't. He came
out with Kings with King Kong Your Song, which is
sadly not a parody of Elton John's Your Song. It
(46:29):
was right there. Who uh? In Bobby released Monster Rap,
which is what you'd expect. Frankenstein's Monster is having trouble
learning how to speak. So the scientist who takes the
form of Bobby Boris Pickets bores call off impression teaches
him how to rap, and amazingly, have you heard that?
(46:52):
Did you listen to that one? Oh? It's so good.
It's actually like it's pretty funny because it's like there
are in fact, like there's like drum programming and synths
on it, so it it's like sort of sounds like
hip hop of the time. Amazingly, Bobby bors. Picket kept
this going into two thousand five, when he teamed with
an environmental organization, Clean Air, and released Climate Mash, which
(47:17):
that's that's a that's a stretch. It's Monster Mash, as
you can imagine, with lyrics about climate change. A worthy cause, yes,
but and one near and dear to his heart. Yes,
that's true. Just the year prior, in two thousand and four,
he'd released Monster Slash. I'm sponsored by the Campaign to
Protect America's Lands and the Feathers of Wildlife Action Fund,
(47:40):
which encouraged citizens to write in against the proposal to
permit logging, mining, and other activities and protected areas. God
love him. One of his most common quips about the
song was, it's paid my rent for the last insert.
However many decades it has been. He said that in
every interview. Um, but the rights to the song we're
(48:00):
messed up, you know, as you would expect for an
early sixties novelty song cut by the likes of Garyus Paxton.
So he's recut Monster Mash a few times. Um. When
Paxiston was still alive, pick It told the l a
Times this is an eight seven that the two had
planned to re release Monster Mash in ninety seven. London
Records had distributed the initial single. That label was later
bought by PolyGram, so pick It explained. The lawyers told
(48:21):
us that PolyGram International held the rights, so we went
to them, but they told us we don't own that song.
So we went ahead and released it on Rhino Records,
and PolyGram's lawyers call us and say, you can't do that.
We own that record. It's been kind of that thing
all along. A single that sells four million copies still
gets lost in the paperwork. Two years later, a guy
(48:43):
by the name of Stuart Kirsch, who was the son
of Marshall King, the resident hypnotist on the Howard Stern Show,
began managing Picket and learned that he did not own
the master recording of the original song, so they recut
a note perfect recreation of the song, which they began
marketing for licensing opportunities via a direct website www dot
(49:08):
The Monster mash dot com, which is still live to
this day, and it features the promise we monstrously undercut
Universal and Rheino for the other two people you would
have to go through to license it. As I mentioned,
is still up and it contains Hirsh's personal phone number
and his email address, which is simply the nineteen sixties
(49:29):
at a o L dot com. Incredible as think it
was telling journalist jan Alan Henderson that I've worked more
in the last five years than i have in fifteen
or twenty, including a theme park called Spooky World. I
guess there were two of them. This was like an
international thing and now I yeah, I don't know, I
(49:52):
don't know. I was one in New Hampshire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um.
Around this time, another thing came, another thing rose from
the dead in Bobby Pickett's life. Uh. He had written
a musical called I'm Sorry the Bridge is out You'll
have to spend the night with a guy named Shelton Allman,
who is a television writer who also wrote the lyrics
to the George of the Jungle theme song. And they
(50:15):
teamed up on this um and I guess it was
picked up by some local theaters. At some point it
came to the attention of the guys who co wrote
toy Story, Joel Cohen not the one you're thinking of,
and Alex Sokolow. They produced a movie called Monster Mash.
The movie of this which starts not only Bobby Pickett
(50:36):
and Dr Demento, but John Waters, bit player, mink Stole,
Fullhouse is Candice Camberon and the host of the View
and Dancing with the Stars, Judge Carry and in Naba.
Not the Joel Cohen you're thinking of, but you wouldn't
be the first person to make that mistake. Bill Murray
famously only signed on to do the Garfield movie because
he saw Joel Cohen's name on the script and thought
(50:57):
it was the good one. As I mentioned earlier, Bobby
Boris pickets autobiography is currently going for hundreds of dollars
on E Day, so I was not able to get
a lot of details about his personal life, but from
what I was it seemed kind of sad. He and
Joan divorced, uh and at some point in seventies their
son drowned in a swimming pool when he was three
(51:19):
years old. Um, you know, you want to put like
review lens on this, but it does seem like this
guy's life had a lot of death in it. There
was his agent who died two weeks after signing him.
Is you know his son tragically drowned. And Lenny Capezi,
who wrote the song with him died after battling heroin addiction.
(51:41):
But there was an even bigger twist waiting in the
wings for Pickett. His manager Stuart Harrish told Vice inteen
that at one point pick And made an offhand comment
to him that he might have a daughter somewhere out
in the world, and the pair undertook a search and
found the likely candidate, but a DNA test proved negative.
Soon after, a completely different woman contacted them, claiming to
(52:02):
be Pickett's daughter. Incredibly, this happened a week before Halloween
that year, of course, uh and Pikett's sister, Linda s Proctor,
said she remembered the day of the call. She told
a newspaper that when Bigot hung up the phone that day,
he said he knew she was someone special, that minity
heard her voice, and his manager, Stuart Hirst added, they
met up at the airport and they looked so similar
(52:24):
that they didn't even have to do a DNA test,
and pick It, he said, went from this loader to
a family guy, and he loved it. And he spent
the holidays with his newfound daughter and grandkids, and it
was beautiful. And the woman whose name was Nancy, who's
h u U s she'd obviously heard the song Monster
Match before. She told Billboard. When I found him, he
was out of his mind, thrilled since he thought he
(52:44):
was going to grow old alone. I still remember the
night I told my kids that Grandpa is the Monster
Match singer. Not every child gets to hear their dad
on the radio every year. I feel blessed that story.
Man just comes out of nowhere and it just gets me.
I just I love that our for him. Um. Bobby
Pickett died in April of two thousand seven of leukemia.
(53:05):
He kept performing live until November two thousand six. That's unbelievable.
Hersch has this tremendous anecdote. He said that he he
told Vice that he would call Picket at the hospital
to check up on him after his regular blood transfusions,
and Pickett would get on the phone and say, in
his dracular voice, STU, there's nothing like fresh blood. This
(53:30):
guy commits to love it. Um. Nancy was at pickets
side when he died, and true to form, Bobby Boris
Pickett was able to get his name in the headlines
one last time after he shuffled loose this mortal coil.
She said in two thousand and seven, I saw a
show about turning cremated remains into diamonds, and I immediately
(53:53):
called my father and told him that I wanted to
make a diamond from his cremated remains. He loved the idea.
H This company called Life Jem complied, creating a point
forty four carrot colorless diamond from Bobby's remains, and she
wears in a white gold solitaire ring to this day.
They sent out a press release with this news and
(54:15):
that quote, and everyone and their mother gleefully aggregated it
because you can't keep Bobby Boris pick it down. I
love this story. I love this song. There is something
so wonderfully American about the story of Bobby Pickett. Here
was a guy, Here's a guy who wanted to be
one thing, lucked into being another thing that he didn't
(54:38):
love that much, which he stole in the first place,
and then maintained an iron grip on that consolation prize
for his entire life, choking every last bit of life
out of it until the end of his own And
now every year he rises from the grave with a
gleeful laugh to help us celebrate Halloween. The most wonder
(55:00):
fulle American of all holidays. The day we stopped shutting
death away and it's sterile cloisters, march it out into
our streets and windows to stare it full in the
eye and threaten ut, telling it to give us candy
or we'll tp its house. God, I love Halloween. I'm
glad I did the song pick it set in the
(55:21):
interview because some people never get to do anything that's
really sweet. That's God love him. Say it with us, folks.
I was working in the lab one night. I'm going
horse with my enthusiasm for Bobby Boris Pickett. Jordan is
staring into middle distance like a like a shell shocked,
(55:45):
hollow version of himself. This has been too much information.
Thank you for listening. Keep listening for more of our
October Fest two right, Jordan, we got we got two
more weeks. This yea believe so yes to keep the
SOPs occupied for a little while. Thanks for listening, folks.
(56:09):
Has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm
Jordan Runt Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much
Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The
supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written
(56:30):
and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with
original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows,
Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio.
(00:09):
Hello everyone, welcome to Too Much Information, the show that
gives you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts
and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more.
We are your two Bobby Boris pickets of Banality. I'm
Alex Hegel and I'm during Talk. And as you may
have surmised from that intro, we are forging ahead with
(00:29):
our special October Fest here at t M I with
an installment on that deathless slice of sixties novelty music Cheese.
It's the velveta of sixties novelty hits Monster Match by
the aforementioned Bobby Boris p bar Bar's. I would ask
(00:51):
you your personal history with it? Do you have one? No, Well,
you know what I do. You may not remember this, Uh,
this song actually played a crucial role in our friendship
and indirectly the creation to the show. Um, I don't
think you know that. Maybe I've never told you this.
For those of you who don't know, which I assume
is all of you, because why would you know this.
(01:12):
I met Higel on my first day working at People
Magazine in twenty sixteen, and I spent my first day,
decorating my desk with posters of Who and the Beatles
and asking loudly if there was any chance I could
interview Neil Young. And this was emphatically not the subject
matter that people covered. We were usually doing the ins
and outs of Justin Bieber's love life, and I'm pretty
(01:32):
sure the first interview I ever did there was either
Josh Groban or Harry Connick Jr. But my boss, the
wise and wonderful Sarah Ma Schaud, quickly sized up the
situation and said, Hey, there's someone who wants you to meet.
His name's Alex Heigel. And the unspoken subtext of this
was he doesn't belong here either, and if you're gonna
have any friends while you work here, you guys should connect.
(01:52):
And we did, and it was an immediate bond, and
you intimidated me greatly because you had tattoos and I
had none, and you didn't suffer fools gladly and I do.
And we got to know each other. We never really
worked together. I was an editor in the music section
and you were more of a generalist writer reporter, I
remember correctly, so our past didn't really cross on the
(02:14):
day to day, but then one day I was assigned
to edit one of your stories for the first time,
and it was this compelling, amazingly exhaustively researched history of
Monster Mash by Bobby bors Picket, And that was the
moment that we connected on this level, the t M
I level. I realized that you were just as much
of a freak as I was. So I actually will
(02:37):
always think of you when I hear this song. I
know that it was an amazing piece. It's still out
there on people right now, on people dot com, so
I got check it out. My parents got me. One
of the tapes that I had as a kid was
a compilation of sixties novelty songs. So it was like
this and like chev Wouli, Purple People Leader, And I
was trying to ask my dad this. He didn't remember.
(02:57):
Do you remember what that song was? That's like music
concrete like style, cut up collage. It's a fake news
bulletin about aliens coming to earth. But it's like cut
up from single lines of like dozens of other songs.
Oh man, it's not Joe Meek, is it? No? No sixties?
And yeah, I don't know anyway. That's so. Yeah, this
(03:18):
was one of my I used to play that tape
over and over again. It's one of my earliest musical memories. Yeah. So,
from the possibly legally insane and wildly prolific producer behind
this track, to the song's tenuous connection to James Brown
to Bobby Boris Pickets dogged attempts to continually update his
song with the times. Here is everything you didn't know
(03:40):
about the Monster Mash Pickett was born in summer Real, Massachusetts.
As he explained in one often aggregated interviews, he said,
you had two choices as a young man. You could
either be a gangster when you grew up, or an athlete.
Somerville was a tough place to live, but it was
(04:01):
a place where you could leave your door open and
no one would rob you. Well, maybe everyone knew everyone,
even though it was a city three miles long. And
if Somerville brings a crime related name for you, that's
because it's Winter Hill. Neighborhood where Bobby Boris Pickett grew up,
was the principal operating area of Whitey Bulger, famous criminal
(04:23):
head honcho famously fictionized by Jack Nicholson in The Departed.
Bulger was born nine years before Pickett and was already
a young man when the Winter Hill Gang was founded
by James Buddy McLean In and the Winter Hill Gang
fought a six year war with a group called the
McLoughlin Gang uh and what's now known as the Boston
(04:43):
Irish Gang War. And that started when one guy hit
on a rival gang member's girlfriend at Salisbury Beach. And
following said war, the Winter Hill Gang became the most
powerful Irish gang on the East Coast. This is all
operating in Bobby boris Pickets backyard. Well pick it. Fond
livercalls his childhood in Somerville not a place if I remember.
(05:07):
His father managed a movie theater, though, and he spent
a lot of time taking in the horror hits of
Universal Studios, watching Boris Karlov, Belle Legozi and Lawn Cheney Jr.
Stocked the screen in iconic films like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy,
and The Wolfman. At this point, the final Universal monster
that anyone actually remembers came out in fifty four, The
Creature of the Black Lagoon. But prior to that, you know,
(05:31):
this iconic period was kind of gone because they had
spent the intervening decade, introducing that entire roster of iconic
monsters to Abbott and Costello. I am not exaggerating that
was like their whole nineteen forties and come to think
that though that approach probably informed Pickett's entire life of
combining spooky stuff and cheesy humor. He did mention this
(05:54):
distribution company called Real Art, which actually cherry picked a
bunch of these old universal monster flack and reissued them
in the forties and fifties. And he also said that
he loved the William Castle road Show extravaganzas guy who
did Um House on hon Hill, where he had a
gimmick where a fake ghost on a wire would fly
from one end of the movie theater to the other,
(06:14):
and the buzzing seats in The Tingler, Friend of the
The Tingler making its third appearance on the t m
I podcast. Oh I didn't realize. I put it that
many times. Um Pickett did not actually have a musical childhood.
He didn't grow up singing. After a year and a
half in Korea with the Army as part of the
Signal Corps, he was actually on his way back that
he got his first experience with a singing group. He said,
(06:37):
on the ship we came back on, these guys were
putting together a show and there were three or four
of them who were singing doo wop and acapella stuff,
and they needed a bass baritone. So I became a
member of that group. But Boris wasn't exactly bitten by
the music bug when he got back to Massachusetts. Rather
than forming a band, he started performing stand up at
local places like the Irish American Club and Everett, performing
(06:58):
an act that he freely admits he stole. He said,
the first time I went on stage and Everett was
to do a five minute stand up comedy spoof of monsters,
which had kind of ripped off from a guy I
had seen do it on a boat when I was
returning from Korea in nineteen fifty eight. He did a
spoof of monsters. I just watched him and thought that's
a great act. He was doing Boris Karlof and Bella
Neegosti impressions. I said, you wrote that act, He said, no,
(07:20):
I stole it from Jack Carter. I saw it on TV.
I said, okay, then you won't mind if I use it,
and he said no, and pick it took that act
and started winning weekly talent contests with it, and uh,
I guess you get twenty five bucks a pop each
time he one, which, as he said, it was a
lot of money in those days for an unemployed x G. I.
But pick it could not be kept in Summerville. No,
(07:41):
his ambitions were larger. He spent a year in Massachusetts
before moving out to Hollywood to try and make it
as an actor, during which time he apparently dated Chloris
Leachman and Diane Kennon, the eventual wife of Carry grant Um.
And this is just this is so funny. This is
that truth is stranger than fiction. Stuff. Man, he happened
(08:02):
to run into some other dudes from Somerville while he
was bumping around Hollywood, with the astoundingly perfect names of
Lenny and Billy Capezzi. They grew up in winter Hill
as well, and uh, he said that they had shown
up in Hollywood at this time with two other Italian boys,
Ronnie del Toro and Lou Toscano. Who's bat a thousand.
(08:26):
This is the smell of olive oil suddenly came into
my folks. I can say that, uh, and they were
going to start a singing group called the Cordials, and
they asked me if I wanted to join them. Um, we,
he continued, We'd sing in a place called Alvo Turnos
on Pico Boulevard on Friday nights. We sang in the
parking lot of Ben Frank's wherever we could get a
(08:48):
paying gig. Uh. Interestingly enough, Alo Turno's was owned by
Timmy Euro, who is a singer who counted Elvis among
her fans. He bought a private table for her Vegas shows,
and Morrissey, who announced her death on his website in
two thousand four. Um she do you know these songs?
It will never be over for me? And what's the
Matter Baby? What's the Matter Baby was covered by The
(09:10):
Small Faces. It's the B side of their debut single
in n There you have it, folks, we got to
one degree of separation between Morrissey and The Faces and
Monster Mash. That is the t M I guarantee. Jordan
tell us about Ben Frank's. Yeah, Ben Frank's the place
where I used to play in the parking lot. That
was a well known hippie hangout in l A and
the sixties. The advertisement that was soliciting actors to audition
(09:32):
for The Monkeys in nineteen sixty five specified Ben Frank types,
which basically euphanism for long hairs. That was a Mels
Diner on Sunset and they kept all the original architecture
and everything. It's really cool. One of the songs that
was in the Cordial set Bobby's early band was Little
Darlin recorded by the Diamonds, a do wop classic. I
(09:53):
love that song, uh, and I guess Pickett asked Lenny
if he could do a Boris Karloff impression in the
middle of song, which apparently audiences immediately loved. I don't
know how they would shoehorn that in there, but pick
it's a monologue. There's like a monologue part in the beginning,
like the middle of the song, and it's sung by
the bass baritone. Pick It was like, Hey, but I
(10:16):
do this probably this Boris Carlof impression. God. As much
as I love most fifties Schmaltz, the whole phenomenon of
like the midsong breakdown, where you know, the just doing
this are you lonesome tonight? Yeah? I wanted to tell
you something. Yeah, I hate that. I just needed to
let you know. Yeah, I guess he would. I guess, well,
let's find let's find a little lyrics. Let's see if
(10:38):
you can do a little little t M I reenactment
of what this must have been like. What is the monologue?
Oh my god? You know the guy who wrote this song,
Dave Summerville. No way, Yeah, okay, So the monologue in
the beginning, in the middle, Uh, hang on, I was
working in the lab, my darling, I need you to
(10:59):
call my own own, never do wrong, to hold my
in mind, your little hand, something like that. It sounded
something like that, and lightning struck inexplicable way people loved it. Uh.
Bobby's accounts for the rest of this timeline has varied
over the years. In one telling, the very night he
did this bid on stage for the first time, his
(11:21):
bandmate Lenny said to him, you know, we should record
a novelty song like this, something like the Flying Purple
People Eater, which had become a big hit around this time. Uh,
doing that, just your cousin, Bobby Boris Pickett, you know
that news I was working in the lub. And another
(11:53):
version of this story, Bobby says that the group was
performing on a beach and after he did the Boris
karl Off it and a girl came up to them
and said, my old man produces records. He did the
song Ali Oop. He would love you guys, He'll get
your record contract. And that old man was Gary Paxton,
who had hits as part of Skip and Flip who
(12:15):
I don't know and the Hollywood Argyles who did the
song Ali Oop, which was the number one hit, And
that song was actually referenced by David Bowie on the
song Life on Mars. The lyric look at that Caveman
Go is a line from Ali. There's also Mark Bowland,
also referenced in a song called Truck on Tyke. Oh yeah, anyway,
(12:36):
Gary Paxton, Gary s excuse me, Oh my god, this
guy's life is insane. I'm just gonna do the quick
bullet point rundown. Paxton grew up with an adopted family
on a Kansas farm with no electricity or running water.
He started in music, started playing in bands, and twelve
years old, I heard at one point backed Um Buck
(12:57):
Owens or wait or Merle Haggard, some guy in Bakersfield,
because he was part of the Bakersfield sound as well.
And he basically never stopped working in music. By the sixties,
he operated a bunch of different labels that basically just
existed to put out music that he made. I read
one account that he owned and operated or at least
operated five studios. Uh. He was involved with actual villain
(13:21):
of the l A music industry, Kim Fowley. Yes, Kim
Fowley worked with the Runaways and he put them together right. Yeah,
but Jackie Fox, the bassist, accused him of rape years later.
Nobody has anything nice to say about Kim Fowley. But
Paxton was a genuine eccentric. I've heard many people referred
(13:43):
to him as just being dirty and long haired, even
by sixties standards. Also, this is in the early sixties.
This is pre like the hippie stereotype. He alienated musicians
with his in studio demeanor and refused to play ball
with other labeled executives when it came to getting his
stuff played. People just put up with him because he
crafted hits. Phil Spector was reportedly literally actually frightened by him.
(14:08):
I say good. Once after a radio station turned down
one of his songs, Paxton assembled a protest parade down
Hollywood Boulevard that started fifteen cheerleaders and a live elephant
pulling a Volkswagen convertible. This got him arrested when the
elephant pooped in the street. The song was called Elephant
Game Parentheses Part one by Renfrow and Jackson for context
(14:31):
less Do you think he just got an unsolicited elephant? Uh?
Paxston moved to Nashville the nineteen seventies and converted to
Christianity after wandering into a church while stoned because he
was in the middle of an existential crisis after his
musical partner died. Uh. This failed to put a dent
in his eccentricities. For nineteen seventy two Clone Affair, he
(14:54):
shaved his head and eyebrows and started wearing a cape.
When his nineteen seventy five solo album The Astonished Ing Outrageous, Amazing, incredible,
unbelievable Different World of Garry S. Paxton one a Grammy,
he showed up to the ceremony wearing a sleeveless black
vest and leather pants. At this time, it's important to
note he had a large Mennonite beard and was going
(15:15):
around in a pseudo stovepipe hat. What the hell did
he win a Grammy for Best inspirational album In Night,
he was shot five times by men hired by a
country star he was producing, who was supposedly attempting to
get out of his contract or was simply mad about
the terms of his contract. I don't remember which one was.
This sidelined him for eight years, and he carried two
(15:38):
bullets from the shooting in his body for the rest
of his life. Nonetheless, he traveled to jail to forgive
the men personally. In The Washington Post reported that Tammy
Faye Baker had developed a crush on Paxton around the
same time that her husband Jim Baker has had the
big scandal with Jessica Han, the secretary at the evangelical
(16:01):
church the Bakers ran. Sadly, this basically ended Paxton's career
in the gospel Christian music world because he was at
the center of this Beeg infidelity scandal. In moved to Branson, Missouri,
friend of the Pod Branson, Missouri, and began performing in
a mask and cape as Grandpa Rock. He died in
(16:21):
He once estimated he had written two thousand songs. A
sampling of my favorite titles include Jesus is My Lawyer
in Heaven. If You're happy, notify your face and when
I die, just bury me at Walmart so my wife
will come visit me. Garius Paxton, everyone, I just want
(16:43):
to pause and say, for all those for a moment,
wow uh yeah. Everything that with no matter what I
could say after that really feels like a ton of
this letdown. But but Bobby Pickett around this time actually
quit the Cordials for a brief time his band, the Pursuit,
work as an actor, explaining, at one point I got
an agent after many, many months, and after two weeks
(17:06):
of being with him, he died of a heart attack.
So seeing that as some sort of a sign, he
returned to work with the Corridinals to revisit the whole
novelty song thing. Let's give you some context for the
monster craze. Well, let's just give you some context for
the monster mash period by two, the monster craze of
the nineteen fifties, which was aided by those reissues and
(17:29):
television because all this stuff started getting syndicated on TV
that had really blossomed. Three, a stymied actress named Malia
Nermi created the character of Vampira, which is she created
as a rip off of Mortitia Adams, and she launched
a successful show that started the template of these horror
host shows. Basically in costumes. She would introduce these classic
(17:53):
horror films and mock them. It was like a slash
comedy show. And it was all this stuff that affiliates
could get the rights to rebroadcast, either free or cheap,
and so they would just do these buttons with her
making fun of them and broadcast these and it was huge.
I mean even though only ran for a year. Soon
any regional television station that had the budget would have
(18:14):
one of these of their own. The one in Philadelphia
was hosted by a guy named John Zacherley, who was
a buddy with Dick Clark. Zachary actually cut a novelty
single called Dinner with drack Um that climate to number six,
as high as on Billboard in ninety eight, which is
(18:34):
the same year that this very influential fan magazine called
Famous Monsters of Film Land debuts. Adjacent to all of
this is the atomic age monster movies of the fifties.
You have nineteen fifty ones, the day they will sort
sill the War the World's nineteen fifty six is Invasion
of the Body Snatchers and then right around the turn
of the decade or becomes much more popular. We have
(18:57):
these proto slashers like Peeping Tom and psyche Go. Both
In the nineteen six Mario Bava directs Black Sunday, which
is banned. This movie it's a witchcraft theme movie. It
was banned for being I believe explicit or the occult themes.
And then Roger Corban puts out a series of these
Edgar Allan Poe adaptations Mask the Black Death, Hitting the Pendulum, um,
(19:19):
and those are all starring Vincent Price. It's amazing to
think about this stuff in context because until the exploitation era,
horror was like not disreputable. This was like cheesy popcorn entertainment.
They were like the Marvel movies of their day. That's
really interesting. What what change? Well, basically, I mean, this
is kind of an armchair theory of mine, but I
(19:41):
feel comfortable putting it out there. Um, you started to
get that wave of new Hollywood guys come out of
the USC around this time. John Carpenter particularly, and Wes
Craven is the other big one. And so in the seventies, well,
they had four Bears. There's a guy named Herschel Gordon
Lewis who was creating these violent exploitation movies. As early
the sixties he had Blood feast Um. His nickname is
(20:06):
the Godfather of Gore. But then through the mid seventies
the grindhouse circuit really kicks in, and that's when you
do see these movies start to get way more explicit.
And then the tail end of the seventies you have
basically the kind of shots across the Bow, Our Last
House on the Left, Texas, Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween. And
(20:26):
Halloween was the explicit inspiration for Sean Cunningham, who was
directing porn, to make Friday, and that is really what
jump starts the slasher craze the eighties. And and then
concurrently with that you have what's called the video Nasties
in the UK, which was a bunch of band titles.
So basically late seventies through the mid eighties is when
(20:48):
it gets really gross. I mean also the practical effects
advanced to the point where people like Tom Saffini or
coming out of Vietnam and just going into Hollywood and
making horor effects that reminded him of his Vietnam. That
is explicitly his inspiration for the stuff on the Georgia Marrow.
He was like, Yeah, I was just doing all this
stuff I saw in nom Wow. Anyway, don't ever prompt
(21:13):
me about horror movies again, because you get a three
minute monologue. We're going to take a quick break, but
we'll be right back with more too much information in
just a moment. Well, all of us to say back
(21:37):
to the Monster Mash by the National Pump was primed
for a guy to do an extended Boris Karloff riff
in a novelty song and pickup remembers. The may or
Sometimes June accounts very two writing session that produced Monster Mash.
Thus Lee Lenny Capeezi said, yeah, come on over Saturday.
I go over at the designated time, and of course
(21:58):
he's asleep. To wake him up, and he continued the
account in his two thousand five autobiography, Lenny sat down
at the piano and began futson with various four chord progressions,
and I stood next to the piano like me. Lenny
was a major horror movie fan from childhood. He loved
Bella Legosia's Dracula. He knew I had a Boris carl
Off voice pretty nailed although in retrospect I feel that
(22:20):
what I actually had was a very cartoonish rendition of
that wonderful actor's voice. You say that Pickets two thousand
five autobiography, which is called Monster Mash Half Dead in Hollywood,
is extremely rare, and copies of it are selling for
upwards of three on Amazon. Yeah, dude, not available digitally either.
I would have read the whole thing. Lenny arrives at
(22:42):
the classic doo Wop one minor six, four or five
chord progression, and Pickett said it was his idea to
capitalize on the monster craze and the novelty dance craze.
He said, at the time, I thought the Twist was
the latest dance, but Lenny said, no, it's the mashed Potato.
So I said, that's even better. We can call up
the Monster Mashed Potato. We shortened it to Monster Mash
(23:03):
and the rest was history. In about three hours, they
cut a piano and voice demo on a Mono Woolen
sack tape recorder and brought it to Paxton, who said, boys,
you gotta hit on your hands. So Brian Wilson used
to use the workouts harmonies in the early Beach Boys
song as an old Woolen sap tape recorder. Not the
first time the Beach Boys are gonna come up here? YEA. Incidentally,
(23:27):
Lenny was correct. Here's a history about the mash, not
that you folks asked for it. Uh. D D Sharp's
Mashed Potato Time had reached number one on the cash
Box Top one hundred, Billboard R and BEA Arts in
nine two, as well as the number two spot of
the Billboard Hot one. Uh. There's a great article about
monster Mash on Billboard that goes into the history of
the mashed potato. Billboard claims that this dance actually originated
(23:50):
with James brown Baby, the hardest working man in show
business in the late fifties. In his live shows, he
released a top ten R and B instrumental call do
the Mashed Potatoes In? I have that on forty five,
I guess for contractual reasons, the recording was credited to
Nat Kendrick and the Swans. Uh. And it's just a
(24:11):
wild song he got. I don't think it's him. I
think it's like a local DJ he got to do
the vocals for it, just screaming different types of potatoes
over one four or five pattern. It's like sounds mashed potatoes. Yeah,
it's it's pretty weird. You would have thought an Irish
guy would have cut that song too. Sorry our first
(24:35):
Irish potato famine joke. But in a post twist world
in nineteen sixty two, the label CAMEO Parkway. They wanted
a song that would capitalize on the twist, on the
order of Please Mr Postman, Marvolette nine hit, and in fact,
Mashed Potato Time. That d D sharp song is so
similar to Please Mr Postman that they had to share
(24:57):
writing credit on it, and the lyrics to Ash Potato
Time include references to not just Please Mr Postman, but
the Tokens number one hit, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, and
Gary Bond's Dear Lady Twist. So you have a reissue
of an older song that has been rewritten to sound
like new songs, right, and references from other new songs. Yes,
(25:22):
and this started a phenomenon of what you've very appropriately
called recursive novelty dance numbers, in which pop songs begin
referencing dance crazes that were themselves lifting from earlier dance crazes.
James Brown responded to mashed Potato time with his song
Mashed Potatoes USA, while Chris Montez is Let's Dance the
(25:44):
contours do You Love Me? Chris Kenner's Land of a
Thousand Dances, and Connie frances is V A C A
T I O N. And also Sam Cook's Having a
Party All name dropped the mashed Potato dance and Sam
Cook was probably the best at uh surfing this trend.
He calls out the mashed potatoes. Also the soul twist
in his song Having a Party, which followed his own
(26:04):
twist hit Twist in the Night Away, and Cook even
worked the line about a cat named Frankenstein and was
nine hit Another Saturday Night, Another Saturday Night, and I
Ain't Got Nobody, which is absolutely a reference to the
Monster Mash. That means, somewhere in the world there is
a this is probably an outtake somewhere of Sam Cook
singing Monster Mash that I will pay good money for anyway,
(26:31):
Gary s Paxton, Lenning Capezi and Bobby Pickett waste little
time and getting into the studio to record Monster Mash. Uh.
This is so interesting to me, this whole twisted origin
of this song. I really went a little cross side
with It. Pickett has frequently repeated this notion that the
Monster Mash session took place on the same day that
Herb Albert was in the studio recording the Lonely Bull,
(26:53):
which is the first single released on A and M Records,
and Jimmy Rogers was there recording his hit Honey Home.
So it has been said that Lonely Bull sessions took
place at Conway Recorders in Hollywood. Gets deeper, though, George,
that is right. Meanwhile, singer Darlene Love, who is a
(27:15):
legend in early sixties pop music, sang on He's a
Rebel and Christmas Baby, Please Come Home. Like next to
Ronnie Specter, probably the singer most famously identified with Phil
Specter and the Wall of Sound type of stuff. She
was part of a singing group called the Blossoms, who
were sort of the first call backing singer group for
(27:35):
all sorts of uh. If you're familiar with The Wrecking Crew,
the group of musicians who were the first call session
players on all l A pop sessions at this time,
they were sort of the singing equivalent. They sang on
all sorts of stuff. Anyway, She claims that Monster Mash
was recorded at gold Star Studios, which is where Phil
Spector cut most of his records, again, not where Bobby
(27:56):
Pickett remembers cutting the song. Darlene says that incredibly super
producer Lou Adler, who worked with The Mamas and the
Papas and later produced Carol King's Tapestry album, told her
about the Monster Mash for the first time, and in
an interview with Billboards, she says she remembers thinking, oh,
please a Halloween song. Who's going to do a song
about Halloween? She said, quote, we sat down and listened
(28:18):
to the song and try to figure out what the
background was going to be. And after the initial backing
trucks were laid down, the vocalist came and sang live
with Bobby Pickett. She said he had to sing his
vocals so we could figure out where to come in.
It made it more fun with him singing his line
and then us answering him. It's just like the sun
record scene from Walk the Line, but there's yeah, Sam Phillips,
(28:39):
like you have fifteen minutes to sing me something that
will strike me down to my very core. I was
working in the lab. I told you I polished that
one that was good. If you were a loved one,
help record Monster Mash. Please tell us where the hell
it was cut, because it's driving me nuts. Personnel wise,
(29:01):
the band credited as the crypt Kickers on Monster Mash
was the aforementioned Garius Paxton, a writing partner of his
name Johnny Dog McCrae, who I guess I wrote songs
for Ray Charles, George Jones, Reba McIntyre, possibly the Blossoms
backup singers The Blossoms, and another session singer named Ricky Page.
(29:21):
Leon Russell is often credited with playing piano and Monster Mash.
That is not true. Pickett said he played on the
B side Monster Mash Party because he said he got
to the session late. And this is what gives credence
to the Herb Autpert thing, because Russell was a member
of the Wrecking Crew and they are credited with playing
on that Herb Alpert track. So I don't know, do
(29:45):
with that what you will? Apparently Ricky Page is singing
the line oh tennis shoe Wow Wow in the song's
bridge and Pickaton dr Tamento and do thousand six. We
don't know. Why isn't that girl by the Beatles. John
(30:08):
Lennon sneaked in. Um. Yes, instead of deep deep, he's
singing T T T because he was a child. Yeah. Meanwhile,
adding to the insane early sixties pop superstardom, brew that
when making this song, uh, drummer for the Ventures, you
(30:30):
know walk Don't run fame incredible sixties surf guitar instrumental
group The Ventures, Mel Taylor was credited with playing on
Monster Mash and Taylor had moved from l A from
his native Tennessee and was working as a meat cutter
the Grand Central Market in nine When he wasn't busy
being adventure and through his gigs at night, he picked
up session work during the day, including supposedly Monster Mash
(30:53):
and The Lonely Bull by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass,
for which he was paid ten dollars to record on
the very same day. Think about that, Thatcher's drummer Mel
Taylor possibly recorded the very first single on and M
Records and also a Monster Mash in a single afternoon
incredible day right yeah for a flat fee. Um. He
(31:16):
may have been called on this session because of Paxton
as well. I've heard some sources that credit him with
playing the drums on alley oop um, but Gary Packson
said that was not correct, So I don't know, man,
I mean the whole thing about. I have to stop
myself from going too far into this because these guys
were making like seventeen songs a day, five days a week,
(31:36):
calling in whoever you know. UM pick its own account
of the session, though, which costs a whopping three hundred bucks,
is that it took between two and three hours and
his vocals were done in thirty minutes. Gary Packiston did
all the sound effects, he said, like a straw in
into a glass of water to get the bubbling lab sound.
He was he was pulling a rusty name ail out
(32:00):
of a board to get the sound of the coffin creaking.
Those are actual chains. He dragged chains across the floor
to get the sound of chains um. Once they were finished,
mixes took a day, perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm shocked it took
that long. Oh yeah, Uh. Paxton took the finish forty
five around four major labels and they all turned it down,
(32:23):
so he pressed up. I've heard between five hundred and
a thousand records on his own label, gar Packs or
I guess gear packs, uh, and drove north from l A,
stopping in Ventura, Bakersfield, Fresnoe to hand distribute copies of
Monster Mash. DJ's Bigott said by the time Gary got
back to southern California, his phone had been lighting up
(32:43):
like a Christmas tree. London Records, which is of course
one of the outfits that had turned him down, called
and said they had changed their mind. Of course, the
records were being ordered on a massive level. Monster Mass
debut on the Billboard Hot one hundred the week of
September eight, and six weeks later the single not the
Fourth Season Sherry from the top spot to begin a
two week reign at number one that ended four days
(33:05):
before Halloween, and it's returned to the chart multiple times
over the years, including in nineteen seventy and also nineteen
seventy three. Uh, this is hilarious to me. The BBC
famously bands Monster Mash upon its initial release for being
quote to morbid, and it only lifted the band in
nineteen seventy three when it hit number three in the UK.
(33:26):
Did they even do Halloween over there? Like, oh, yeah,
maybe not. I don't think it is as much of
a thing over since. Uh. The song obviously recharts digitally
pretty much every October eighteen, Billboard reported that it appeared
in two thousand and five, and also between two thousand
and seven and two thousand eleven, and again between two
thousand and thirteen and two thousand and seventeen. What would
(33:47):
happened to the years when it didn't Just people weren't
feeling a Halloween spirit, thriller took over. Pickett appeared on
American Bandstand to perform the song, and again in nineteen
seventy three, the song recharted and Paxson duly sent him
out on the road for sock hops and these other
one off shows. Um. He said he would start in
northern Maine and then do Jersey, Boston, New York. Uh,
(34:12):
this is hilarious. I always used the house band wherever
it was, much like Chuck Berry. Yes, Bobby, that is
how you were. Like Chuck Berry. I'd hit town, teach
the band the chord changes my entire act, and we
go on stage and do it. My favorite tour story
of his is that his bust supposedly once broke down
outside of Frankenstein, Missouri. No way, no way, that's too
(34:36):
he's making that out might be the song launched fans
and enemies, as we'll get to in a minute in
high Places. From an early live performance, Bobby Boris Pickett
was backed by a then unknown Beach Boys, and there's
a truly surreal clip of the band performing the Monster
Mash with a I'll just say animated, you said, unhinged
(34:58):
Mike Love on vocals, uh, visibly miserable. Brian Wilson introduces
it as Mike's favorite song. History between Mike lev and
Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys will know how loaded
that exchange. It's probably was. Boris Karloff himself was apparently
a fan of the Monster Mash. Pick It later said
(35:21):
one of the London Records promotion men, a guy by
the name of George Sherlock, ran in the Boris Karloff
at Wallacks Music City, which is a big record store
in l a as he was buying a copy of
the Monster Mash album. And in fact you can actually
see Boris Karloff alongside Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch on
The Adams Family, performing Monster Mash on the TV show
Shin Dig in nineteen, a music show. In other words,
(35:44):
Boris Karloff is doing an impression of the guy who's
doing an impression of him. Sadly, apparently Bobby, Boris Pickett,
and Boris Karloff never actually met. That's a shame. But
lest you thought that was as weird as it gets,
you can see a of this song performed by Mike
Tyson and Bobby Brown on Kimmel in two thousand five.
(36:05):
So if that's the thing that you want, go nuts. Um.
There is an oft repeated line that Elvis Presley hated
Monster Mash and I was able to trace this anecdote
to a book that came out called The Wacky Top
forty by guy's named Bruce Nash and Alan Zulo. These
are Picketts words. I was a real Elvis fan. One
(36:26):
day after the song had become a hit, I bumped
into this girl who used to hang around Elvis's house
in Los Angeles. So I asked her, how's the king?
She wrote? She said, well, he hates your record, Bobby.
When I asked why, she told me he thinks it's
the stupidest thing he's ever heard. So I said, well,
whoever liked him anyway? I don't think he knew who
(36:48):
Boris Karlov was to tell you the truth. Uh. Picky
would often retell this story when performing the song live,
ending it with if you're still out there listening Elvis,
I'm still here, which is such a great shot across
the bow. Apparently, Tiny Tim these two did a lot
of tours together. Pikett just mentioned talking about touring with
(37:08):
Tiny Tim. He said, Tiny Tim thinks Elvis is still alive.
It's arguably Bobby Boris Pickett and Tiny Tim of the
two biggest novelty artists, I would argue, possibly of all time,
certainly of the twentieth century. Oh kings of the novelty circuit.
Tight Tim man, eccentric dude. He apparently used to drink
bottles of salsa and what's going through your head? But
(37:39):
I'm just just him like braiding a manager, like his manager.
But it's in the like Shutton, it's time to my
three pm s So yeah, he as have had an
(38:00):
undiagnosed maybe undiagnosed o c D. He used to use
um not only paper towels, but a very specific brand
of paper towels, Viva paper towels, whenever he went to
hotels because he didn't trust that the towels were clean.
So he would always dry himself off with paper towels
after showers. Uh. He wore adult diapers when he was
out because he didn't like using other people's bathrooms. Jesus.
(38:21):
And he applied oil of l A eight times a day. Um, yeah, yeah, Elvis.
Elvis was very um. When he hated something, he let
you know. There's a famous story about he apparently hated
Robert Goulay. I don't know why she actually hated him,
or it became a bit And whenever he'd be watching
TV and Robert Gulay came on, he would just take
out his gun and shoot the TV. And so the
(38:43):
Graceland archive have all these TVs with gun shots in
him from when was shot the TV out when Robert
gul was on. That is incredible. He's got no heart,
That's what always used to say whenever he was on that.
He's wild. Poebe and Jane Bacon sandwich in one hand
and a still the other, just getting furious at Robert Coulay.
(39:06):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more.
Too much information after these messages. Anyway, Pickett was not
able to successfully capitalize on that hit. In another example
(39:29):
of music industry throat cutting. John Zacherley, who you'll remember
was one of the original TV whore hosts and predated
Pickett with his own novelty hit Dinner with Drack, actually
beat him to the punch to record a Monster Mash album,
a full length Monster Mash. He released his own LP
with a cover of Bobby Bores Pickett's song on Cameo
(39:50):
Parkway before Pickett could get Capezi and packs And into
the studio for a follow up, which is why Picket's
full length is called the original Monster Mash. But there's
apparently no bad blood. You can see footage of the
pair performing this song together on YouTube. Pick And said, Gary,
like Lenny, was not a terribly professional individual, which is
a tremendous understatement, so there would always be delays in
(40:13):
areas of promotion and recording dates. By the time we
had finished Monsters Holiday and Monster Motion, which was the
follow up single, John Zacherlely on Cameo Parkway Records had
sold forty copies of a unit called Monster Mash. That's
Taylor Swift numbers these days. Yeah, yeah, seriously, I blamed Gary,
and I blamed London Records for not getting an LP
(40:34):
out to follow the two singles. Getting Gary and Me
into the studio was a laborious process. Once we got there,
it was done in a rush and it was slip shot.
It was amazing that anything got done at all. Monster motion.
That's gotta be a locomotion. Uh that he did move on,
at least artistically, relatively quickly, at least in the moment.
He attempted to pivot to teen idol style crooning with
(40:56):
a gloppy ballad called Graduation Day, which he has repeatedly
called embarrassing, although it did crack the Hot one hundred
in June sixty three, which keeps him from being a
true one hit wonder in the strictest definition of the word.
Oh that's a good song. That the Beach Boys did
a version of that that was released as a bonus track.
I love the fact that Mike Love was out there
(41:17):
just agitating for Bobby Boris Pickett in the Beach Boys.
It's like, we gotta do it a cover. When Star
Trek came out into The Doctor Tremento Show twelve years later,
Mike Love somewhere was like, it's a good song. Brian,
get out of bed. I got a song for you.
I'll give you a cheeseburger if you do this Star
Trek parody. They did, They know him the right songs
(41:40):
with bags of cheeseburgers. Who among us? I mean, that's
how you get me to do this podcast. A year later,
Bobby rehashed the Carloff impression for cover of an old
novelty Western swing song called Smoke, Smoke, Smoke that cigarette.
You may remember, the original being in the opening credits
of the Air and cart film Thank You for Smoking,
(42:03):
the band on that he christened to the Filter Tip Kickers. Sadly,
that had the poor timing to be released just as
the dangers of smoking were beginning to be made public,
so whoops. He was, however, able to parlay his success
into a run of guest spots on TV shows like
Dr Kildair, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, Bobby Bores
(42:25):
but it was on Bonanza You Know It Wow, and
later t J. Hooker starring William Shatner. And he was
also when commercials for things like Schlitz beer and lipped
in iced tea just as it. I just can't imagine
him appearing in any of these things without referencing the
fact that he was the voice of Monster Match. I
just love Bobby's work. Ethic man, you cannot accuse this
(42:49):
guy of not getting out there and pounding the damp pavement,
just covered in flop sweat, staggering from one commercial bit
part God of Him. But unfortunately, real success as an
actor eluded him, though he continued to appear in regional
theater wherever he lived throughout the rest of his life,
including it an off Broadway performance in New York, and
(43:11):
he would later co star with Tony Curtis in a
movie that Orson Wells was supposed to have been involved with,
Lobster Man from Mars. I have heard that Orson Welles
was supposed to hurt I read this. I gotta stop
saying that. Sources tell me me googling things alone at
three in the morning, and my pajama pants told me
(43:32):
that Orson Wells was supposed to star in this movie
and died, and Tony Curtis picked it up anyway. From
the late sixties into the early seventies, pick It apparently
pivoted to working in a folk duo with his then
wife Joan Payne, working what he called the Ski resort
areas singing soft folk harmonies. There are photos or at
(43:53):
least a photo of the two of them together doing
this act as Picket and Paine on Sale and eBay.
He has a must sash and long hair and looks
like Lee hazel Wood. It's amazing. Uh. They supposedly toward Europe.
I read somewhere that they got as far as Afghanistan.
Then they both moved to New York in nineteen seventy two,
where Picky was driving a cab and she was working
as a waitress before Monster Mash recharted again in seventy three. Uh,
(44:17):
he said either to the Washington Post of the l
A Times. I forget what he said. It was on
the charts for six months before anyone told me that
it had been re released, let alone charted. I called
the head of London Records, Walt McGuire, and said, well,
I hear the records doing well. He said yeah. I said, well,
I'm driving a cab here in New York City. I
(44:39):
was wondering if I could turn my cabin and come
get a check I have. Oh yeah, a little bit. Hey,
Philip Glass drove a cab until I stand on the beach.
He was driving a cabin instant on the beach came out.
Oh yeah, um. I have read this and been unable
to substantiate, but I dearly hope it is true that
when Pickett took the crypt Kickers out again in seventy three,
(45:01):
a teenaged Eddie Van Halen was among the musicians who
backed him up the timeline tracks. And it would have
been like eighteen or nineteen when they came through California,
so might have been in one of the pickup bands. Uh.
He did pop sort of back into the main stream
in the nineteen seventies with a truly truly star trek
novelty hit called star Drek. I've never heard this. It's
(45:25):
just like spoken word. It's awful. It's not even to
like a like a recognizable tune. Uh. It appeared on
Dr Demento and apparently became its most requested number. I
dcor Demento was a huge I guess and dear friend,
big fan and friend of Bobby Boris Pickett. He would
just play whatever Bobby put out. But in that song,
(45:46):
the USS Enterprise is renamed the Booby Prize. I don't
get it. I think Booby Prize was like it was
like a gag prize. But I don't think it was
like a boom. I don't think it was like a
cleavage reference. But who's to say, Who's who's to say? Uh?
(46:06):
The year after that, Bobby came out with you can't
even say with the straight I can't because I, as
you referenced, I thought it was gonna be an Elton
johnre so did. I'm so mad it wasn't. He came
out with Kings with King Kong Your Song, which is
sadly not a parody of Elton John's Your Song. It
(46:29):
was right there. Who uh? In Bobby released Monster Rap,
which is what you'd expect. Frankenstein's Monster is having trouble
learning how to speak. So the scientist who takes the
form of Bobby Boris Pickets bores call off impression teaches
him how to rap, and amazingly, have you heard that?
(46:52):
Did you listen to that one? Oh? It's so good.
It's actually like it's pretty funny because it's like there
are in fact, like there's like drum programming and synths
on it, so it it's like sort of sounds like
hip hop of the time. Amazingly, Bobby bors. Picket kept
this going into two thousand five, when he teamed with
an environmental organization, Clean Air, and released Climate Mash, which
(47:17):
that's that's a that's a stretch. It's Monster Mash, as
you can imagine, with lyrics about climate change. A worthy cause, yes,
but and one near and dear to his heart. Yes,
that's true. Just the year prior, in two thousand and four,
he'd released Monster Slash. I'm sponsored by the Campaign to
Protect America's Lands and the Feathers of Wildlife Action Fund,
(47:40):
which encouraged citizens to write in against the proposal to
permit logging, mining, and other activities and protected areas. God
love him. One of his most common quips about the
song was, it's paid my rent for the last insert.
However many decades it has been. He said that in
every interview. Um, but the rights to the song we're
(48:00):
messed up, you know, as you would expect for an
early sixties novelty song cut by the likes of Garyus Paxton.
So he's recut Monster Mash a few times. Um. When
Paxiston was still alive, pick It told the l a
Times this is an eight seven that the two had
planned to re release Monster Mash in ninety seven. London
Records had distributed the initial single. That label was later
bought by PolyGram, so pick It explained. The lawyers told
(48:21):
us that PolyGram International held the rights, so we went
to them, but they told us we don't own that song.
So we went ahead and released it on Rhino Records,
and PolyGram's lawyers call us and say, you can't do that.
We own that record. It's been kind of that thing
all along. A single that sells four million copies still
gets lost in the paperwork. Two years later, a guy
(48:43):
by the name of Stuart Kirsch, who was the son
of Marshall King, the resident hypnotist on the Howard Stern Show,
began managing Picket and learned that he did not own
the master recording of the original song, so they recut
a note perfect recreation of the song, which they began
marketing for licensing opportunities via a direct website www dot
(49:08):
The Monster mash dot com, which is still live to
this day, and it features the promise we monstrously undercut
Universal and Rheino for the other two people you would
have to go through to license it. As I mentioned,
is still up and it contains Hirsh's personal phone number
and his email address, which is simply the nineteen sixties
(49:29):
at a o L dot com. Incredible as think it
was telling journalist jan Alan Henderson that I've worked more
in the last five years than i have in fifteen
or twenty, including a theme park called Spooky World. I
guess there were two of them. This was like an
international thing and now I yeah, I don't know, I
(49:52):
don't know. I was one in New Hampshire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um.
Around this time, another thing came, another thing rose from
the dead in Bobby Pickett's life. Uh. He had written
a musical called I'm Sorry the Bridge is out You'll
have to spend the night with a guy named Shelton Allman,
who is a television writer who also wrote the lyrics
to the George of the Jungle theme song. And they
(50:15):
teamed up on this um and I guess it was
picked up by some local theaters. At some point it
came to the attention of the guys who co wrote
toy Story, Joel Cohen not the one you're thinking of,
and Alex Sokolow. They produced a movie called Monster Mash.
The movie of this which starts not only Bobby Pickett
(50:36):
and Dr Demento, but John Waters, bit player, mink Stole,
Fullhouse is Candice Camberon and the host of the View
and Dancing with the Stars, Judge Carry and in Naba.
Not the Joel Cohen you're thinking of, but you wouldn't
be the first person to make that mistake. Bill Murray
famously only signed on to do the Garfield movie because
he saw Joel Cohen's name on the script and thought
(50:57):
it was the good one. As I mentioned earlier, Bobby
Boris pickets autobiography is currently going for hundreds of dollars
on E Day, so I was not able to get
a lot of details about his personal life, but from
what I was it seemed kind of sad. He and
Joan divorced, uh and at some point in seventies their
son drowned in a swimming pool when he was three
(51:19):
years old. Um, you know, you want to put like
review lens on this, but it does seem like this
guy's life had a lot of death in it. There
was his agent who died two weeks after signing him.
Is you know his son tragically drowned. And Lenny Capezi,
who wrote the song with him died after battling heroin addiction.
(51:41):
But there was an even bigger twist waiting in the
wings for Pickett. His manager Stuart Harrish told Vice inteen
that at one point pick And made an offhand comment
to him that he might have a daughter somewhere out
in the world, and the pair undertook a search and
found the likely candidate, but a DNA test proved negative.
Soon after, a completely different woman contacted them, claiming to
(52:02):
be Pickett's daughter. Incredibly, this happened a week before Halloween
that year, of course, uh and Pikett's sister, Linda s Proctor,
said she remembered the day of the call. She told
a newspaper that when Bigot hung up the phone that day,
he said he knew she was someone special, that minity
heard her voice, and his manager, Stuart Hirst added, they
met up at the airport and they looked so similar
(52:24):
that they didn't even have to do a DNA test,
and pick It, he said, went from this loader to
a family guy, and he loved it. And he spent
the holidays with his newfound daughter and grandkids, and it
was beautiful. And the woman whose name was Nancy, who's
h u U s she'd obviously heard the song Monster
Match before. She told Billboard. When I found him, he
was out of his mind, thrilled since he thought he
(52:44):
was going to grow old alone. I still remember the
night I told my kids that Grandpa is the Monster
Match singer. Not every child gets to hear their dad
on the radio every year. I feel blessed that story.
Man just comes out of nowhere and it just gets me.
I just I love that our for him. Um. Bobby
Pickett died in April of two thousand seven of leukemia.
(53:05):
He kept performing live until November two thousand six. That's unbelievable.
Hersch has this tremendous anecdote. He said that he he
told Vice that he would call Picket at the hospital
to check up on him after his regular blood transfusions,
and Pickett would get on the phone and say, in
his dracular voice, STU, there's nothing like fresh blood. This
(53:30):
guy commits to love it. Um. Nancy was at pickets
side when he died, and true to form, Bobby Boris
Pickett was able to get his name in the headlines
one last time after he shuffled loose this mortal coil.
She said in two thousand and seven, I saw a
show about turning cremated remains into diamonds, and I immediately
(53:53):
called my father and told him that I wanted to
make a diamond from his cremated remains. He loved the idea.
H This company called Life Jem complied, creating a point
forty four carrot colorless diamond from Bobby's remains, and she
wears in a white gold solitaire ring to this day.
They sent out a press release with this news and
(54:15):
that quote, and everyone and their mother gleefully aggregated it
because you can't keep Bobby Boris pick it down. I
love this story. I love this song. There is something
so wonderfully American about the story of Bobby Pickett. Here
was a guy, Here's a guy who wanted to be
one thing, lucked into being another thing that he didn't
(54:38):
love that much, which he stole in the first place,
and then maintained an iron grip on that consolation prize
for his entire life, choking every last bit of life
out of it until the end of his own And
now every year he rises from the grave with a
gleeful laugh to help us celebrate Halloween. The most wonder
(55:00):
fulle American of all holidays. The day we stopped shutting
death away and it's sterile cloisters, march it out into
our streets and windows to stare it full in the
eye and threaten ut, telling it to give us candy
or we'll tp its house. God, I love Halloween. I'm
glad I did the song pick it set in the
(55:21):
interview because some people never get to do anything that's
really sweet. That's God love him. Say it with us, folks.
I was working in the lab one night. I'm going
horse with my enthusiasm for Bobby Boris Pickett. Jordan is
staring into middle distance like a like a shell shocked,
(55:45):
hollow version of himself. This has been too much information.
Thank you for listening. Keep listening for more of our
October Fest two right, Jordan, we got we got two
more weeks. This yea believe so yes to keep the
SOPs occupied for a little while. Thanks for listening, folks.
(56:09):
Has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm
Jordan Runt Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much
Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The
supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written
(56:30):
and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel, with
original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows,
Host
Jordan Runtagh
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