HALLOWEEN - Bobby 'Boris' Pickett - "Monster Mash"

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. I'm Garrett Fischer and Bobby Pickett never wanted to be a singer when he moved to Hollywood in nineteen sixty. His ambition was to be a movie actor. He'd grown up in Somerville, Massachusetts, watching horror films for free because his father managed the local theater two three times a day. Young Bobby would sit in the dark watching Boris Karloff lumber across the screen as Frankenstein's Monster, as the Mummy, absorbing every gesture, every inflection of that cultured English voice playing monsters. By the time Picket got to Hollywood after a stint in the army in Korea, he had perfected a dead on Karloff impression. He'd been winning talent contests back in Massachusetts with a four minute comedy routine about monsters twenty five dollars a pop, which was good money for an unemployed XGI in nineteen fifty nine.

1:01 But in Hollywood the acting jobs weren't coming, so on weekends to make ends meet, he sang with a doop group called the Cordials at local clubs, sometimes literally singing for their supper spaghetti dinners at an Italian restaurant on Pico Boulevard. The Cordials had a regular number. They did Little Darln by the Diamonds, a nineteen fifty seven hit with a spoken word section in the middle. One night, Pickett asked bandmate Leonard Kpezzi if he could do the monologue as Boris Karloff. The audience went wild. Capizzi pulled him aside after the show, that's a great voice for a novelty record. Pickett wasn't interested. He was an actor, not a recording artist. But then his agent died of a heart attack. The acting gigs dried up completely, and suddenly a novelty record didn't seem like such a bad idea.

1:54 One Saturday morning in May nineteen sixty two, Pickett went to Kapizzi's house. Capizzi sat at the piano and started playing a simple four chord progression G E, minor C and D. What do you think of this riff, Kapedesi asked, I don't know, Pickett said, but maybe we should base something on the monster getting up and doing the latest dance. The latest dance in nineteen sixty two was the mashed potato, popularized by Dede Sharp's mashed potato time. It involved a heelto action with your feet while making various arm movements. James Brown had been doing it in his live performances since nineteen fifty nine. It was everywhere. Within half an hour, they had written Monster Mash. The song tells the story narrated in Karlov's voice, of a mad scientist whose monster rises from his slab late one night and starts dancing.

2:48 Soon all the monsters join in, vampires, zombies, wolfman, Dracula, asking about the Transylvania twist. It's a monster party and the dance they're doing is the monster mash, basically the mashed potato with Frankenstein arm gestures. They recorded a demo on a Woollensack tape recorder and took it to Gary S. Paxton, who'd had a hit two years earlier with Ali Oop as lead singer of the Hollywood Argyles. Paxton, all of seventeen years old but already one of the hottest producers in Hollywood, listened once and said, I want to produce this. This is a hit record. The recording session was as makeshift as the writing. Less than an hour start to finish, the session musicians included a young piano player named Leon Russell, who showed up late and only played on the B side.

3:41 The ventures drummer Mel Taylor might have been there. The backing singers Johnny McCrae, Ricky Page, and Terry Berg were credited as the crypt Kickers. The sound effects were pure Dey magic. The coffin opening a rusty nail being pulled from a board, the cauldron bubbling water being blown through a straw, a trick the Beatles would later use on Yellow Submarine. The chains rattling, actual chains being dropped on the tile floor. Total production cost about two hundred dollars. Every major record label turned it down four rejections. Then Packson decided to release it himself on his tiny Garpax Records label, with distribution through London Records. Released in August nineteen sixty two, Monster Mash climbed the charts just in time for Halloween. On October twentieth, nineteen sixty two, it hit number one on the Billboard Hot one hundred, where it stayed for two weeks. The BBC immediately banned it two morbid for British airwaves. They declared the ban only made it more popular. The song would return to the charts again and again in August nineteen seventy, May nineteen seventy three, when it hit the top ten again, and then in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, and twenty twe twenty three. As of twenty twenty three, the song was generating one million dollars annually in royalties. Not bad for a half hour's work. The real Boris Karloff loved it.

5:11 He performed his own version on the Halloween episode of Shindig on October thirtieth, nineteen sixty five. When a record promoter ran into Karloff at a music store buying the album, Karloff told him it was wonderful. The Monster approved of his Monster. Pickett tried to capitalize with follow ups Monsters Holiday for Christmas nineteen sixty two, which hit number thirty, Monster Swim, Werewolf Wa two Z, Monster Motion. In nineteen eighty five, as rap was emerging, he released Monster Rap teaching the Monster how to Talk through hip hop. None captured the magic of the original, but here's what makes Monster Mash immortal. It's a perfect joke that never gets old.

5:57 Every Halloween somewhere in the world a d reaches for it every October. It creeps back onto the charts. It's been covered by the Beach Boys, the Misfits, and countless others. It spawned dance crazes, merchandise, even academic studies about novelty songs. The genius is in its simplicity. Its monsters doing a popular dance. That's it. That's the whole joke, but wrapped in Pickett's perfect Karloff impression, backed by those homemade sound effects. Riding the wave of a dance craze, it became something more than a novelty. It became tradition. Think about what Monster Mash represents. It's a failed actor doing an impression of another actor who played a character from an eighteen eighteen novel, set to a variation of a dance popularized by James Brown and Dede Sharp, recorded with sound effects made from household items, rejected by every major label, banned by the BBC, and yet immortal. Pickett once said about the recording, my attitude towards this project was, yeah, sure, it's a hit. Just give me a check and some copies for my friends and family and I'll be happy.

7:08 He thought it was just a lark, something a few Boris Karlas freaks might enjoy. Instead, he created the Halloween Anthem, the song that every October rises from its grave, does its dance, and returns to the charts, a graveyard smash that literally will not die more in a moment. Picket passed away in two thousand and seven from leukemia. In his autobiography Monster Mash Have Dead in Hollywood, he wrote about death with the same dark humor that made his song immortal, even quoting Bela Lugosi's Dracula about how being really dead must be glorious. But Bobby Boris Pickett isn't really dead. Every Halloween, in every time zone, at every costume party and school dance and radio station, his voice rises again. The mad Scientist creation still dances, the monsters still mash, and somewhere a new generation of kids learns those Frankenstein arm movements, continuing a dance that started as a joke in nineteen sixty two and became forever. The Mash Potato dance craze died by nineteen sixty three. Deede Sharp faded into obscurity. The Twist, the Watousi, the Frog all forgotten, but the monster mash that dance is eternal,

8:39 because unlike those other crazes, this one comes with its own mythology, its own season, its own reason to exist beyond just being a dance. It's the only dance craze that's also a ghost story, a comedy routine, a horror movie, and a Halloween tradition. Written in half an hour, recorded in an hour, rejected by everyone who should have known better, and still here, still playing, still making a million dollars a year. As Pickett used to say when he performed it live wearing his blood splattered lab coat. The monster isn't Frankenstein. That was the doctor. The monster was the creation, and sometimes, just sometimes, the creation outlives its creator in the most spectacular ways. Every Halloween, when you hear that familiar Boris Karlov voice starting the story about working in the lab late one night, remember you're listening to a failed actor's impression of a British actor playing a German monster doing an American dance at a party that never ends.

9:42 That's not just a graveyard smash. That's immortality.