The Dancing Dead: Bobby "Boris" Pickett & The Crypt Kickers: "Monster Mash"

As anyone who knows me well knows, I am not the biggest fan of anything scary or suspenseful; and I have a tough time watching horror movies, as I can suspend my disbelief only too quickly and have no real defense against anything that might occur on the screen.  I don't think I'm alone in that, but for me it's such an acute state that I can't (unless someone is with me to coach me on when I can look - and even then, it's a rare event) watch them at all.  I know for some people it's a catharsis, literally a cleansing thing, to watch these movies; but I just get itchy and jumpy and completely uncomfortable.*

Perhaps if I'd been shown old-school horror movies as a kid I would have grown up to be more comfortable with the genre; as a child Bobby Pickett got to see a lot of them for free as his dad ran a movie theater, and he was known for his spot-on imitations of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi from an early age.  This song was the ultimate fruit of his experience, and in 1962 it got to #1 in the US just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was making it feel as if there really were monsters in the world, and that the world itself was about to end at any moment.  Turning the horror into a new dance craze was the pop genius of this song; and since then it's always been around, a little bit dated but still witty, a girl group accompanies "Boris" as he tells his tale in a doleful, slightly sinister way.  (It wouldn't work if it wasn't scary in some sense - I still get a little frightened when he says "Tell them Boris sent you.")  It also works of course as no one expects figures of horror to be dancing and having a good time; if this time of year is when the dead and the living have the closest chance of contact (and it doesn't have to be frightening - Dias de los Muertos is about family togetherness, more than anything) then why not have a party in the graveyard?

That this wasn't a hit in the UK until '73 is something I'm not sure I can explain, but as I understand it, Noel Edmonds pushed it on his show and thus it became a hit (an NME #2). That the UK was suffering at this point, gearing down because of government policies and the oil crisis, is well known; for all I know this was a hit not just due to radio airplay but a sense of doom in the air, what with the IRA having now moved their bombing to London and Manchester, the three-day-week and gas rationing clearly ahead, and a strong sense that things were going to be worse in '74, not better...

...and while I can't remember when I first heard this song, it must have been on Dr. Demento's show in 1978 maybe; his show is a distillation of every strange, offensive, funny and just plain weird song that he can find, from pop hits like this one to more "outsider" type stuff like the Legendary Stardust Cowboy's "Paralyzed"** to Wild Man Fischer's "My Name Is Larry."  Anything that was too much for ordinary radio would be fine for Dr. Demento, and I got a dose of this every Sunday evening, which no doubt helped to form my musical taste.  With the belated success of "Monster Mash" the UK may have picked up - or at least some of the UK - that being odd or different or...genre-mashing was one way to get through this time, that the normalcy and optimism of even two years before was gone, and that now was the time for subversion, for arch imitations, for fun. Not fun in the Glam Slam sense but fun that could lead to something, a way out of The Fog, even.   But that's for the future; for now Halloween approacheth, the ghouls and goblins dance, the souls of the departed touch down briefly to remind the living that they too once had fun and got through hard times.  Time to rattle some chains and rebel...          

Next up:  it's a political song, because I say so.

*This said, I did manage to watch all of an early 90s Japanese anime movie once (Urotsukidoji) that was a total psycho-sexual freakout of epic proportions and got all the way through it, knowing what the basis of it was.  (It's completely unsuitable for children, and most adults for that matter.) (I should also note that Don't Look Now came out around this time, and I did manage to get through that, thanks to seeing it on commercial tv.  The Wicker Man also came out and even though I know how it ends, I can't watch it - the songs creep me out, quite frankly.)

**As featured on the closest thing to Dr. Demento in the UK, Kenny Everett's World's Worst Record Show compilation, alongside the immortal The Trashmen and many others. (This is completely unsuitable to anyone who doesn't understand the glory of music.)

The Grace of a Boy: The Kinks: "Lola"

1970 is a crossroads year, as so many first years of decades are – some things are bubbling up from under, some are signposts, others are the usual flotsam and jetsam after the wreckage of the previous ten years. This is different though; and while I sense that its writer doesn’t want me to take it too seriously, I can’t help but say that I’ve always been made a bit uneasy by this song. Why? I’m not sure myself; it could be that the song is named after a woman but no woman appears in the song, only a man who walks like one. The boy – he’d only left home a week before – somehow ends up in Soho and finds himself in a club with a transvestite. If I was a certain female prof from the US I would say that this is a song about the feminine, about femininity so strong that the ‘female’ is in all ways stronger than the male (a strength he seems to lack, as he says, so he appreciates it in another) – that even though Lola is a man he is female too, because that’s what the boy wants/needs; he is learning a lot on this night, for sure…

…and he’s glad he’s a man now, clearly weaker than the supposedly weaker sex. I guess. Half-drunk (that’s why he falls to the floor – all that champagne that tastes like “cherry cola” as the BBC-censored version goes) and on Lola’s knee, or kneeling, he is learning a lot, but I guess my problem is how will he cope with women after this? I mean actual women, not ones taller or stronger than him. (Unless, like Betjeman's young man, he goes for the sporty jolly-tennis-playing type.) He has survived a night in old Soho, but as a resident Londoner I can say with some authority that Soho is small and London is large. I think my itch here is – is this a pro-feminist song? Does the appearance of the female as a strong female count as a real one? Or is this just another step in the world of a certain kind of British male, who goes to a male-only school and knows nothing about women, and is directed (how does someone like this end up in Soho anyway?) to this place for, um, further education? Couldn’t he just go find a real woman somewhere instead? Is this a song that doesn’t really concern women at all (including listeners)?

I don’t know, but it has always left me a bit uneasy, despite the banjos and Davies’ wolfish smile, that the boys’ club of rock – that seems to be obliquely mocked here, the hero being not a passionate dude as with the previous song but something of a naïf – is still a boys’ club, that Lola is a man and the men and boys hearing this song are somehow ‘safe’ from involving themselves with someone so changeable and variable as an actual female. Things are beginning to get mixed up, notes the hero, but Lola is the exception, the odd one out that proves the rule. The shaking up of gender roles in rock continues, to be sure (remember how The Beatles’ haircuts were seen as being girly) but when will any actual women get to show their masculine side? In the meantime, Lola dances by electric candlelight and the real women are perhaps still too much for the hero, and so he repeats her name…enthralled to the feminine, if not the female.

Tension In Any Language: Los Bravos: "Black Is Black"

It's the summer and everyone's feeling good. That goodness is in the air, a positivity that spread out and flared up into a kind of manic glee. Men wear tight suits, women have miniskirts, asymmetrical haircuts and everyone says "wow" and "far out" a lot. Though it's not a 60s term, this song is a club banger of the old school, loud and in-your-face and defying normal conversation.

Such songs either work or they don't, either making the club-goer dance or remain in his/her seat; what happens is based on a hundred things, the words usually being pretty low on that list. I once assumed (wrongly) that Spain's own Los Bravos wrote this color-based song, but they didn't; Michelle Grainger, Tony Hayes and Steve Wadey did. (Did they ever write anything else? Not sure.) The song's simplicity - it's like a nursery rhyme, really - meant that it could and indeed was translated easily into Italian, French, Finnish, Croatian...the main thing is the beat, the club/garage crossover that is just this side of out-and-out cheesy, pounding away as the the singer (who sounds remarkably like Gene Pitney though he isn't - and like he's from Spain even though he's German) blares out like a living siren about his helpless state. It is an anxious song, never resting, pacing up and down like someone who has lost something and, even though he knows it's gone, cannot stop himself from looking anyway. There is only tension, but thee is joy in that tension, in expressing it; thus the dancer has to dance and the singer smiles. It is a happy kind of sadness, or a sad kind of happiness that resolves into a good feeling, for a moment.

What is needed is a song of another kind that does more than compel a release of tension; but in the club the songs pound on, the dancers rejoice in England winning the World Cup - (itself a tense game that found release at last) - all seems right in the world, London is swinging and the party goes on, fuelled by drink and drugs, the search for the right 'bird'...

...meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, something quite different is going on. How different? So different that it will, in effect, change everything.

Past, Present and Future: Them: "Here Comes The Night"

Once again we are with a man who is alone, looking out the window. There is someone he is thinking of, and there she is...

...he used to try to interest her in things, please her as best he could; movies, cafes, just hanging around his place listening to jazz and blues sides. But for whatever reason, maybe he was fooling himself, maybe she was fooling him, it ended. He knows that she left him for another guy, one who maybe dressed a bit sharper or had a different accent - is she really that superficial? Then he checks himself, wonders if he isn't just as superficial, in his ways. Would he have wanted her had she worn a bandeau or had green eyes? He can't move away from the window, knowing it is wrong but unable to stop. He won't do anything, as he watches them go along, watches them go in and turn the light on; it is all too vivid and he cannot stop now, but it is as if he is watching himself. Another version of himself, veritably a doppelganger, not in looks but in results. She is swinging from man to man as if she were at a dance and there is nothing that can be done about it. All this time the night encroaches, he is alone, things are getting darker and darker...all the time he veers between the emptiness of the night and the near-puppet-like show he is watching, too hapless and just plain down to do much of anything but maybe drink and listen to the blues...


**************************

This is the first time this blog has gone to Northern Ireland, Belfast in particular, and politics aside (or perhaps...not), there is a point to the shifts in the song from the dreaded and inevitable night and the girl and her guy, going about their affair - it can be said that any area with tensions will create great music, not that anyone really wants tensions, of course. Van Morrison grew up in a house full of music courtesy of his father's varied record collection of country, blues, jazz and folk and was playing guitar from 11, saxophone a few years later and he started playing in bands as soon as anyone would have him. But above all this is his voice; here he brings in the whole scope of jealousy, doubt, resentment and acceptance. He blows hot and cool, is self-reflective, bitchy and oddly warm. Sung by someone else this could be ho-hum; however Them* make it a full picture even though we are there with the man as he watches, keeps watching even though he shouldn't. Unlike other songs, he does not wish he could be with her still, but then why does he watch if she did him wrong? This is what the night cannot answer, and he cannot answer himself, either. The song is a big illustrated question mark. There is no way out of this, besides the growing darkness...

The b-side to this is a rough blues called "All For Myself" (written by Morrison; "Here Comes The Night" is by Bert Berns). It is the answer to the a-side, or maybe the true feelings he has and knows he shouldn't have, despite himself. I mention it as I had assumed (wrongly) that "Gloria" was the b-side here, a song that is the direct opposite of "Here Comes The Night" - there he sits and anticipates her arrival, her every action, before they meet; but he is in much the same place, and the anticipation is just as exciting as her being with him, maybe even more so. He is saved in this song by her presence, just as here he is somehow lost, unable to see anything in the darkness besides her. I will mention it anyway as it is Morrison's gift to garage bands everywhere, and eventually would be turned on its head by this woman, who in '65 is still a fan and not yet a performer.

*"Them" are mostly studio musicians here, including a young Jimmy Page on guitar.

Rock Your Baby: Johnny Preston: "Cradle of Love"

When I saw that I had to write a post about the follow-up to, of all things, "Running Bear" by Johnny Preston, I was not exactly surprised nor thrilled; this is exactly the kind of song that is a big hit, then gets forgotten by and large and is later revived years later by people who remember it in the first place, mainly by rockabilly fans, who were called Teddy Boys in the UK.

Why does this song affect me so? It's not because it's all that sophisticated - the cradle of love is something, however, that is located at first in a tree, which reminds me more than forcibly of a dream I once had...

...a dream where I was in a tree and it was night, still and cool and black, springtime; and I was up in the tree in what seemed to be a bed. I was alone, but I knew I wasn't going to be alone for long, as under the moon (which gave off enough light, without being full) I could see someone determindedly coming towards me, walking along what seemed to be a rather twisting path at times. But mostly I remember being in this bed in the treetop, the very light breeze and sense of something about to happen...

Which means I have to go all Paglia here and say that while this nursery rhyme song seems all trite and cliche and obvious at first, it does hit on some truths that are fundamental, or at least are fundamental if you grow up knowing these rhymes. I may not appreciate the last verse wherein Jack pushes Jill into said cradle of love (but this is 1960, when women were women, men were men and so on) - but the rocking and rocking in the cradle is an essential thing for people their whole lives it seems, and while a cradle in a treetop might seem, well, dangerous, being in love is a huge leap as well, in some cases not just a figurative leap but a literal one. And it is always a leap worth making, as my subconscious mind more than told me in the spring of 2005.

When I'm Out In The Street I Just Feel All Right: Max Bygraves: "Meet Me On The Corner"

Courting: it’s not a word that gets used much these days, but in the 50s I can well imagine it was still the term used when a couple were getting to know each other, the one actively pursuing the other, forever needing and wanting some kind of special place and moment and above all, privacy. In a Britain that was still in utilitarian mode, where everyone (save for those who could move out and students living in residence) lived at home. (Come to think of it, even at Oxford or Cambridge there were strict rules about who could visit, and when.) Thus, the easy appeal of this song – the only way to have any real time to yourself with someone else is to – paradoxically – go out at night and meet the loved one under a lamp post, once the streets were quiet, perchance to go to the fish & chip shop, the cinema, the record store – or maybe just walk slowly down a street nearby, window-shopping and talking moonily about this and that. All the free or near-free pleasures of urban life are implied in this song, as well as freedom, at least for a short while, from home and work. Bygraves, in the break (where he sounds like a certain American we'll be hearing from soon), tries his best to sound like something else – some major smooching – might also be in store; his voice is a little too jovial to believe anything more is going to happen, and the tenor of the song implies that nothing else is expected of him, or her. Courtship is a delicate process of give and take, moments of gradual learning and compassion; none of those can really breathe unless there is a certain place and space to be yourself, free to walk and talk as you please. Not all had this freedom in ’55 (it could be the couple just meets at the corner and doesn’t go anywhere, after all), but you can sense even through the Bygraves' imperturable shield of happiness that a new generation is itching to get out and be free, in all ways.