Monster Mash 📀 Bobby Boris Pickett & The Crypt Kickers {Stereo} 1962 Recording

1962......#1 U.S. Billboard Hot 100, #1 U.S. Cash Box Top 100, #1 Canada, #1 New Zealand Original video edited and AI remastered with HQ stereo sound. "Monster Mash" is a 1962 novelty song by Bobby "Boris" Pickett. The song was released as a single on Gary S. Paxton's Garpax Records label in August 1962 along with a full-length LP called The Original Monster Mash, which contained several other monster-themed tunes. The "Monster Mash" single was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on October 20–27 of that year, just before Halloween. "Monster Mash" has sustained a lasting impact in various recordings, film inclusions, and re-releases since its initial release. In 2021, nearly 60 years after its release, "Monster Mash" re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart at number 37. As of 2023, the song was generating $1 million annually in royalties. Pickett was an aspiring actor who sang with a band called the Cordials at night while going to auditions during the day. One night, while performing with his band, Pickett did a monologue in imitation of horror movie actor Boris Karloff while performing the Diamonds' "Little Darlin'." The audience loved it, and fellow band member Lenny Capizzi encouraged Pickett to do more with the Karloff imitation. Pickett and Capizzi composed "Monster Mash" and recorded it with producer Gary S. Paxton. The band with which Pickett recorded the song is not known with certainty, except for some session backing singers including Paxton himself: Fred "Johnny" MacRae, Rickie Page and Terry Berg, credited as "The Crypt-Kickers" (in the song is mentioned a fictional vocal group, "The Crypt-Kicker Five"). Mel Taylor, drummer for the Ventures, is sometimes credited playing on the record as well with his traditional percussion technique. Some sources incorrectly credit Leon Russell as the pianist; Pickett has clarified that Russell "was not on 'Monster Mash', just the flip side. He had shown up to the session late, and we had already finished 'Monster Mash'." Some sources cite Darlene Love and her group The Blossoms as female backing vocalists, but this is not officially accredited. Pickett sings his song as a humorous horror story that never repeats the lines, except the term "Monster Mash". It was partially inspired by Paxton's earlier novelty hit "Alley Oop," as well as by the Mashed Potato dance craze of the era. A variation on the Mashed Potato was danced to "Monster Mash," in which the footwork was the same, but Frankenstein-style monster gestures were made with the arms and hands. The producers made extensive use of sound effects in the recording; the sound of a coffin opening was imitated by a rusty nail being pulled out of a board. The sound of a cauldron bubbling was simulated by water being bubbled through a straw (The Beatles would later do the same on their hit "Yellow Submarine") and the chains rattling were simply chains being dropped on a tile floor. The song is narrated in first-person by a mad scientist whose monster, late one evening, rises from his slab to perform a new dance, with a name implying it is inspired by the Mashed Potato, a popular dance of the early 1960s. The dance becomes "the hit of the land" when the scientist throws a party for other monsters, among them classic 1940s horror film icons such as the Wolfman, Igor, Mummy, and Dracula's son. In addition to narrating the song in the Karloff voice, Pickett impersonated fellow horror-film actor Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula with the line, "Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?", and character actor Peter Lorre as Igor (a role Lorre never played, though he did play numerous deformed eccentrics). The mad scientist explains that the twist has been replaced by the Monster Mash, which Dracula embraces by joining the house band, the Crypt-Kicker Five. The story closes with the mad scientist inviting "you, the living" to the party at his castle. The song was re-released several times and appeared on the U.S. Billboard charts on two occasions after the original release: August 1970 and May 1973. The BBC had banned the record from airplay in 1962 on the grounds that the song was "too morbid", but it was later performed on the network's television program, Juke Box Jury, by "The Children of the Night", a novelty group. The record was re-released in the United Kingdom in 1973, where it peaked at number three in early October. In Canada, it reached number one on August 4, 1973. In the U.S., the record re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 on May 5, 1973, peaking at number ten on August 11. On the September 15, 1973, edition of American Top 40, Casey Kasem mistakenly said that the record had accumulated 40 weeks on the Hot 100, which then would have been the all-time record, only for a listener to inform Kasem later that the record's three weeks on the Hot 100 in 1970 had been included in the 1973 run, thus reducing the total to 37 weeks.