Every October, the coffin lid of Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s career used to creak open and out would come his one, cobwebbed, hit. The Monster Mash, a novelty song about a monsters’ dance party, sold over four million copies, charted three times, and 60 years on remains the most popular Halloween tune ever.
“The whole thing was a complete fluke,” Pickett told me in 2005. “I never even wanted to be a singer. I was an actor.” He said he’d got the movie bug as a kid growing up in Somerville, Massachusetts, where his dad managed a local theatre. “I loved the horror films.”
When he moved to Hollywood in 1961, Bobby Pickett’s budding résumé included a penchant for celebrity impersonations – the best of which were scaremeisters Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. As he hustled around for acting jobs, he picked up extra cash on weekends by singing at an Italian restaurant with a group called The Cordials. “We literally sang for our supper – spaghetti on Friday nights,” Pickett said with a laugh.
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One of the songs they covered in their set was Little Darlin’ by The Diamonds. For a lark, in the middle of the song, Pickett would recite a monologue in his Karloff voice. “The audience loved it,” he recalled. So much so that fellow band member Lenny Capizzi suggested they should write a whole rock’n’roll song about monsters. “Lenny said: ‘Novelty records sell!’” said Pickett.
He continued: “So one day, in the summer of 1962, he and I wrote this song about a monster who gets up off his gurney and does the latest dance craze, which I thought should be The Twist. But Lenny said: ‘No, it’s Mashed Potato Time by Dee Dee Sharp.’ That was a big number one. So we called our song The Monster Mashed Potato. We shortened it later, but that was the original title. The whole thing took about two hours to write.”
Capizzi suggested they take it to Gary Paxton, best known for producing Alley-Oop by the Hollywood Argyles. This was a moment for Paxton, an eccentric music-biz character, right up there with Kim Fowley and Phil Spector.
During our conversation, Pickett told me a story about a now-forgotten novelty record Paxton had produced called Elephant Game, by Renfro & Jackson. When a local radio station refused to play it, because it was “too black”, Paxton organised some cheerleaders and a live elephant pulling a Volkswagen Beetle convertible to parade past the station in protest. He got arrested after the elephant began pooping in the street. But he did build a solid discography, later working with The Association, Tommy Roe and Paul Revere & The Raiders.
Of course, Paxton loved The Monster Mash as soon as he heard it, Pickett remembers. “He said: ‘This is a hit! I want to produce it!’”
They recorded it in one session at Gold Star Studios. Although a novelty song, it had a hard-swinging groove. Why? The backing band, dubbed The Crypt-Kicker Five, included Leon Russell on piano and Mel Taylor, drummer for The Ventures (dig that fill borrowed from their classic Wipeout). Then there were the sound effects. For the coffin opening, Paxton pulled a nail out of a piece of wood. For the bubbling cauldron, he and Capizzi blew straws into glasses of water.
“And to top it off, the three female backing singers were The Blossoms, with Darlene Love,” said Pickett.
When I asked Pickett why The Blossoms repeatedly sang ‘wa-ooh tennis shoe’ during the bridge, he laughed. “I never did know why they did that.”
The Monster Mash was released August 25, 1962. By October it was No.1 on the Billboard singles chart.
“I thought it was a lark, something horror movie freaks would enjoy,” Pickett said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Aside from its catchy chorus and daffy charm, could there have been another reason it hit so big? “Well, it was the height of the Cuban missile crisis,” Pickett said. “So maybe it relieved people of the tension.”
The BBC banned the record upon its original UK release. “They said it was ‘too morbid’,” Pickett recalled. “But then it became a hit in England in the early seventies.” It did prove to be something of a perennial, charting again in the US in 1970 and 1973, and getting reliable airplay every October.
Pickett had a No.29 hit with its Christmas follow-up, Monsters’ Holiday. But over the years, spin-off singles Monster Swim, It’s Alive and Monster Rap failed to scare up any further chart action. He told me that his biggest champion was Dr. Demento, the underground radio personality who helped make Weird Al Yankovic a hit.
“Dr. Demento plays anything I record,” Pickett said, “which is a wonderful thing. He considers my discography to be important, so that makes me feel like it is.”
As for Pickett’s acting career, it peaked with a low-budget cult film called, appropriately, Frankenstein Sings! Meanwhile, Capizzi went on to be a successful screenwriter, with Must Love Dogs and Silver Linings Playbook.
Bobby Pickett passed in April 2007 at the age of 69, but he remained active until his final months. An environmentalist, he wrote two spin-off songs – Monster Slash, protesting against the exploitation of the rainforests, and the global warming-related Climate Mash, which envisioned George W Bush and Dick Cheney getting down with zombies and vampires at a party thrown by Exxon Mobil.
Over the years, The Monster Mash has been covered by everyone from the Beach Boys to Alvin & The Chipmunks to Bruce Springsteen. It also appeared on an episode of The Simpsons. In the end, Pickett’s “fluke” song was the trick that kept treating. He told me: “The Monster Mash paid my rent for over 40 years!”