Two cool albums riding the crest of the late ’50’s/ early ’60’s Hitchcock wave, these records have both been reissued several times over the years. I know I’ve had the “Ghost Stories for Young People” album from age 5 on, and haven’t grown tired of hearing it to this day. John Allen did an excellent job of both writing & narrating the stories, and I can’t tell you how many of these lines I still quote without always consciously realizing it (so the next time I’m at your house yawning as I say “maybe I’ll just spend the night here” you’ll know where it comes from) — directed at kids it manages to be playfully scary without dipping into overt cuteness. Now “Music to Be Murdered By” is a completely different animal altogether; it’s aimed at adults & adeptly uses the Jeff Alexander Orchestra to interpret a variety of standards with “spooky” themes (“I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You”, “Body and Soul”, etc), with Alexander penned originals like the “Alfred Hitchcock Television Theme” thrown in for good measure. Today I’m sure it’d get called “Lounge Music”, but I guess that still leaves the “To Be Murdered By” option open, so I won’t kick.
While his name and likeness sold them, Hitchcock’s involvement on both albums mostly consist of spoken cameos before each track (which I suppose is more than the simple branding he lent to his “Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine” and “Presents” style anthology books), and these intros find the droll character he had perfected by this point in full flower. As a kid it was my introduction to his persona, and I was fully smitten. And I really wanted to take Vanishing Lessons.
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This is a live recording from the first time (of what would eventually be many times) that I ever saw Naked Raygun, and it’s fair to say that they blew me away. I’d only heard the “Flammable Solid” single and a few tracks off the “Code Blue” tape at this point, and I guess I really didn’t know what else to expect (though I certainly DID expect “Surf Combat” — when it starts you can hear my friend Larry shouting “YEAAAH!” and then turning to me with a “Let’s go!” right before we ran into “the pit”). I knew there was a Big Black connection, but (aside from THEIR track on “Code Blue”) had mostly only heard “Steelworker” by them a few times on my local college station & that was little help.
Naked Raygun were opening here for Iron Cross (also recorded, I’ll post it eventually), and were added to the show a little late — effectively filling in for Heart Attack who had cancelled. Few people in the crowd seemed to know who they were, but they did two short sets (sadly during the second one my tape runs out before “New Dreams” is over) and everyone I talked to walked away really impressed. In retrospect this was something of a transition point for them (I’m told by my friend Randy that “everything off of Basement Screams was pretty much dropped from their live performances about a year later with the exception of the occasional inclusion of Potential Rapist”), but mostly what I can tell you is that I was sorta shocked when they pulled a sax out for a few songs (hey, I was 15 and still really just a hardcore kid for the most part). By the way, what you’re not hearing here is the totally crummy interview I did with them after the show for my zine “Room 101”. Even at the time I knew it was bad, and I didn’t even run it. You’ll live.
So here’s the only flyer I have left that mentions the show:
and a detail that links to the goods themselves:
Naked Raygun “Live At The VFW#18 in KC, MO Aug 11, 1984” (192 kbps)
Here are a pair of cool albums released in the early ’60’s that were spun out of some other projects with the same name. To quote some of the info I found around the internet:
(The) magazine was a tie-in to a syndicated radio feature. “The Frightened” was one of several proposed radio features that were packaged by Lyle Kenyon Engel. The project never really got off the ground and it is not clear how many, if any, were actually aired. The vignettes in this series were written by Michael Avallone and read by Boris Karloff. Each issue of the magazine contains one of the vignettes, neither individually titled or bylined. Several years later Karloff’s readings were released as a phonograph record and the texts were published as a book by Avallone.
and:
The music that runs underneath Boris’s voice slowed down and twisted about is Tom Dissvelt and Kid Baltan’s masterpiece recording of “Song of The Second Moon”, reissued as “The Elektrosonics-Electronic Music” (Philips)
There’s more data out there (Google it on up), but that’s the long & the short of it. Containing some nice creepy stories read by one of the most soothingly spooky voices ever to work in the realm of horror, these were ripped off of a pair of very clean copies that a pal of mine graciously loaned me. Enjoy!
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Here’s a 7″ that I’ve had since I was 10 years old. There were about 4 of these things on different colors of transparent vinyl at the local Salvation Army, and though the label was blank they seemed to have a whole bunch of tracks banded out on them. What great songs could be on those grooves? Such a mystery! Since they were only a dime apiece I bought the full set figuring on the coolest score of my life, but when I got home it turned out that each one was the same exact thing: a promotional single of radio spots for the Air Force.
Not that I was complaining really; right away I was intrigued to find the same basic jingle done up in multiple musical styles (Rock! Country! Disco!) for what I assumed to be different markets. Following the jingles were these lame little skits (a guy calls “Space Age Computer Systems” for a job interview & is laughed at, a cartoon-voiced extra terrestrial named “Kobak from the planet Zircon” laments the fact that as an alien he can’t enlist), which mostly confused me — this stuff makes people sign up for the Air Force? Then the bizarro closer: Lorne Greene appears as Commander Adama from Battlestar Galactica and compares the futuristic technical advances found on his TV show spaceship with those available to you RIGHT NOW on Earth as a member of the US Air Force. Huh? At age ten I already sorta suspected that I was too old for Battlestar Galactica — who the hell were these ads written for?
Still I’ve been well served by my 40 cent purchase I guess; over the last 27 years I’ve used those singles as filler on comp tapes, last-minute gag gifts, decorations to hang up on my walls, and things-to-shoot-at-with-a-BB-gun. How one copy managed to survive all this I don’t know, but since it did I assume that it was just waiting for a chance to jingle its way into your heart.
UPDATE: There’s a great thread here about Century Records, focusing primarily on its relation to the ’60’s garage rock world. Check it out.
US Air Force “Promotional Radio Spots” (192 kbps)
Part of an almost bootleg-looking series that popped up in the mid ’80’s, the “Haunted House Music Co” line shared a similar format from record to record: Side One conveyed the larger concept while Side Two concerned itself with a hodgepodge of separately banded sound effects that sometimes related to what was listed on the back cover and sometimes didn’t. From packaging on down they’re totally budget in scope, but for me their B-Grade quality adds heavily to their effectiveness with some genuinely ghoulish atmosphere coming through the speakers. Of this trio only The Ride of the Headless Horseman contains a story with a spoken narrative; Haunted House and Night In a Graveyard seem more than content to paint their themes as sound collage alone (a later CD that would seem to pair House and Graveyard is actually a completely different animal, you can hear it here).
The (almost always blurry) back cover info is pretty cool too, claiming that the recordings were made “Live in Transylvania Studios”, “Live on the Estate of Count Dracula”, and (get ready) “Live in the Village of Sleepy Hollowville at the Ichabod Crane Studios”. Continuing the theme, the record company info is listed as “Haunted House Music Co., 2 Crypt Way, Eerie USA” with various pressings containing much smaller type below detailing a few different addresses for “Golden Circle Inc” (most of the other releases on the label seem to have been of the budget/ early-recordings-of-now-popular-artists variety). Oh, and there’s usually a REALLY blurry Dolby Digital logo tacked on somewhere just for good measure. Reeking of delicious Halloween audio cheapness, these titles must proudly number among the last of their kind before the rise of the compact disc. Not bad as death rattles go really.
Haunted House Music Company “Haunted House” (HHST 10-31AB, 1985) (192 kbps)
Haunted House Music Company “Night in a Graveyard” (HHST 10-31BB, 1985) (192 kbps)
Haunted House Music Company “The Ride of the Headless Horseman” (HHST 10-31CC, 1985) (192 kbps)
The second of two MAD LPs released on Big Top, this gem was written and produced by Norm Blagman & Sam Bobrick, and performed by Jeanne Hayes, Mike Russo & The Dellwoods (seems that the sax solo on “It’s A Gas” was even played by Mr. King Curtis!). A few of these songs were also issued as cardboard records in the mag in ’62 (a tradition that continued with Eva-Tone sheets til the 80’s. I can still sing every damn version of the 1980 “It’s a Super Spectacular Day” flexi thanks to a foolish decision to tape record all 8 endings in a row. Man, it took forever to get that last one.)
Back to 1962, this vinyl rip is from a friend (at 160 kbps), but since I’ve been playing it over & over this weekend I figured the time was right to share it all the same. There’s some catchy Teen-Pop/ R+R on here, and I’m sure that the social anxiety humor (roundly eclipsed by more counter-cultural forces a little later in the decade) served an important function for weirdo youth. Oh, and it’s phunny.
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Here’s the complete run of albums by Frankie Stein and His Ghouls, a fictional studio creation designed to profit off the “Monster Kid” generation of the early 1960’s. The Frankie Stein formula was as simple as it was brilliant; cool low budget horror cover art, creepy sounding song names with a suggested dance listing after the title (“Hully Gully, Frug”), and spooky sound effects laid on top of the actual music (which was a potpourri of twist & beat numbers that sometimes had frightful compositional overtones & sometimes didn’t). Just fucking perfect.
Ripped from the cleanest LP copies I could find, I highly recommend the whole set. Ideal for dance parties!
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Frankie Stein & His Ghouls “Monster Sounds And Dance Music” (Power Records 342, 1965) (192 kbps)
Another Beatles rip-off record, but this one honestly isn’t that bad. Yes, I’ll say it: The Buggs might even be pretty good. Sure we get the obligatory “She Loves You” & “I Want To Hold Your Hand” covers (as well as stray covers of other contemporary songs retitled so that, like almost every song on here, they include British locations in the name — “Just One Look” becomes “Soho Mash”, for example), but my faves are what I take to be originals. “Mersey Mercy”, “Liverpool Drag” & “London Town Swing” are truly pretty charming if you like that peppy early “Beat” sound, and on the whole LP only “East End” really sucks (well, and I guess “Swingin’ Thames” isn’t going on any mix tapes of mine in the foreseeable future either).
This one is pretty common in both Stereo and Mono editions, so it must’ve sold a lot at the time. Tracks by the Buggs also showed up on the Coronet compilation “At The Hop” (with the Four Seasons, Charlie Francis & Barbara Brown), and I’ve read somewhere that there was a followup album, but I’ve never seen it.
To wit: “In this album you will hear the original Liverpool sound recorded on location in England by the Buggs, a fast moving, well paced group that we are sure you will like.”
The Buggs “The Beetle Beat” (192 kbps)
I’ve got a number of these “Beatle rip off albums” which emerged as the first wave of Beatlemania was hitting the US. Basically Beatle sound-alike (or in some cases, not so sound-alike) cash-ins that were designed to fool the less attentive members of the public (read: little kids or their hapless parents), they were released on budget labels with ambiguous and/ or misleading cover design that tossed in exotic buzz words like “Liverpool”, “Mersey Beat” or just “England”. Then when the consumer got home and dropped the needle down, they’d be confusingly greeted by a made-up group ineptly covering a song or two by the “fabs” and 20 more minutes of throwaway filler that ranged from “pretty close” to “guh?”.
For my money, “Beattle Mash” has the best cover of the whole slew (I don’t know if you can tell how out of focus it is, or how little this helps disguise the age of these guys), while the group themselves (referred to on the front as “The Liverpool Kids”, in the liners as “The Liverpool Moptops” and on the label as “The Schoolboys”) mostly stick to churning out lame recycled frat rock and twist riffs, pausing now and then to slip in a not-very-rewritten rewrite of an actual Beatle song. Or as the back cover puts it:
…these four men, who with a group of excellent musicians, have adopted the style of BEATLING, the hottest craze in show business on either side of the Atlantic. [snip] Our interpretation of the style by our own talented group will give you the great pleasure you are looking for.
So I hope the great pleasure you are looking for finds you today, because I have little doubt that it eluded the original purchaser of this record.
The Liverpool Kids “Beattle Mash” (192 kbps)
Wake up to this 7″ promo collection of various Snap Crackle Pop related songs released by Kellog’s in 1983. The lack of really kid-friendly graphics or song titles (side two is just broken down into genres) makes me assume that this was mostly intended for industry or radio use, but maybe it was a premium? I came across my copy used so I can’t say for sure. UPDATE: A friend of mine assures me that it WAS a mail-in premium and that he distinctly recalls saving Rice Krispies boxtops to get his copy.
Of course it was the promise of a cereal song being done in the style of “New Wave” as-seen-through-the-eyes-of-corporate-marketers that forced me to buy it, and I really wasn’t too disappointed. The end result is something like Meat Loaf meets the Motels (or “Billy Joel gets into a car crash with Quarterflash and Richard O’Brien writes them the ticket” if you prefer), and it comes complete with the classic st-st-stutter that skinny tie enthusiasts around the globe simply couldn’t get enough of.
Snap! Crackle! Pop! Rice Krispies
Wakin’ Up
Snap! Crackle! Pop! Medley
Rock & Roll
Western
New Wave
Kellog’s “Snap Crackle Pop Tunes” (192 kbps)
