With pops & clicks galore here’s one of the many exploitation records cashing in on the Beatle craze of 1964 (fitting I guess, since it was 42 years ago this week that they famously arrived in New York). Despite the cutesy subject matter this is sorta similar to the Frankie Stein & His Ghouls releases on “Power” from the same time period; fairly generic & kid friendly studio-musician “Beat” music complete with a suggested dance listing after the title. No actual Beatle songs are adapted here (though there’s a stray She Loves You-style “whooo” thrown in now and then), but that hasn’t stopped these tracks from showing up on Beatle themed comps around the world. Note the weird similarity between the “Three Blind Moose” song and the rejected Decca audition version of the Beatles doing (Leiber & Stoller’s) “Three Cool Cats”? Yeah, I guess maybe at the end of the day this stuff wasn’t so far off.
Wynken, Blinken and Nod and The Golden Rock-A-Twisters “Dance And Sing Mother Goose With A Beatle Beat” (192 kbps)
Another great 1970’s horror record with Wade Denning’s name attached to it, this LP is directly responsible for kicking off my lifelong enjoyment of Edgar Allan Poe through it’s succinct adaptation of “The Tell-Tale Heart”. As kids my pal Rupso and I would listen to that track over & over in his parent’s basement and work ourselves into a spooked-out frenzy chanting along “I think it was his eye!”.
While there are actually several genuinely creepy moments on this album it was “The Hitch Hiker” that gave me honest-to-god nightmares, and I recall many nights when I didn’t want to leave my bed to turn the record player off after it was done playing. Over a decade later (and several thousand miles away) a friend and I got to talking about spooky stuff from childhood while (ahem) tripping on acid; out of nowhere he suddenly launched into a reciting of the whole damn piece. I almost started screaming.
As a pop culture aside; a few of these stories (“The Miser’s Gold”, “The Headless Horseman”, etc) were also licensed to Post Cereal in the mid ’70’s and released as cardboard flexi discs that you could cut off the backs of Honeycomb & Alpha Bits cereal boxes. Nowadays though, they mostly just show up on ebay and discriminating blog posts.
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Found at a thrift store within a week of my 1992 move to Tucson, I still know pretty much nothing about this record (except that it pops up for sale on line from time to time). When I first played it I thought that the flip (“Sandman of Love”) was a listenable enough example of early Doo-Wop and all, but good LORD the A-side (“Space Love”) just floored me. Otherwordly and somewhat out of tune, it moves with a lumbering tempo that always manages to lure me into a haze each time I play it. Where the hell are you now Bill Watkins? And who was in “Rosco Porter’s Orchestra”?
Bill Watkins “Space Love” b/w “Sandman of Love” (192 kbps)
What we have here is an album of hardcore aural porn from 35 years ago, cynically created & brilliantly marketed by one Mr. Ernie T.
Phil Milstein wrote a fantastic look at this guy’s legacy in issue #18 of Ugly Things which focused on the desirably exploitive output cranked out by the Superstar, Audio Stag, Funky Finger & Controversial Record labels (all helmed by the aforementioned Mister T.), and since the meat of my knowledge (besides just seeing these things around over the years) comes heavily from that source, I’ll just quote part of the Audio Stag portion & then let the mp3 file do the (koff, koff) rest of the talking:
Audio Stag featured aggressively bad actors attacking hysterical vignettes that, like a hardcore porn film, disintegrate quickly into outright fucky-sucky. (snip) Without any visuals, spoken words and sound effects were the only tools the Audio Stag players had at hand to create their hilariously vile little mind pictures, and so these words had to be cranked up to be even filthier than in the average porno flick. (snip) According to the engineer, “we made the sounds using chairs, springs, sponges, things like that. We put ’em on an eight-track loop and faded ’em in according to dialogue… the loop was just continuously running. As soon as we’d get to an action section, we’d add and increase the sound effects, ride the faders up, build up some kind of frenzy. The hard part was pulling them out. If you listen carefully you’ll see that the act is over and the noise is still there sometimes. Very low-budget.”
Inspiring stuff isn’t it? And now a little X-Rated slice of the American Id, circa 1971.
Wife Swapping Swinger’s Orgy Porgy Party (1971) (192 kbps)
(alternate image swiped from 8 Track Heaven.com)
As a kid the Johnson Smith Novelty Company seemed like just about the coolest thing in the world to me, and their ubiquitous ads in most early to mid ’70’s comics really stoked the flames for my nascent love of stupid crap (not to mention total junk). Given that I was also obsessed with all things Halloween, by far one of the most drool-worthy ads for me was this one:
So you can bet that I ordered off for that “Horror Record” as soon as I could scrape together the required cash (along w/ the U-Control Ghost, but that’s another story). When it finally arrived though (as a 7″, not the full LP I’d pictured) it was, like nearly all things ordered from comic books, something of a letdown. I think I’d truly imagined that once I dropped that needle down my entire bedroom would suddenly become a haunted house or something, but if any record could manage THAT trick, this wasn’t gonna be it. To be fair side one wasn’t so bad — pretty much just 7 minutes of the usual Halloween sound effects I’d come to know already — but on side two they tried to piece together some sort of semi-cohesive storyline which is where the whole thing fell apart. The narrator’s attempts at a sinister voice were risibly lame (he stammers a few times & seems to be making most of it up as he goes along), and as something of a horror purist (I wanted your classic array of ghosts, werewolves, vampires, zombies, witches & ghouls) I was morbidly aghast by the end of the thing when the cartoon voiced “Krishtor the Moon Monster” arrives to blow the world up (this after an extended flogging scene!). To be honest though, I STILL played the living hell out of this record and quickly grew to prefer the cheapo feel it wallowed in much more than if they had pulled things off with slicker results (a preference that would screw up my tastes for the rest of my life). Now through the magic of the internet you too can share in the glory of this B-Grade 70’s horror vibe, and as an added bonus I’m sticking up an entire LP released in 1960 that was culled from the identical audio library (it even features the same damn Krishtor scene but in extended/ dorkier form; this time the bit ends with some goofy sounding beatnik guy reciting a poem). Like, boo.
Johnson Smith Novelty Co. “Horror Record” (1973) (192 kbps)
MP-TV “Spook Stuff For Hallowe’en” (1960) (192 kbps)