I’ve saved my favorite Caedmon/ Price LP for last. I honestly couldn’t tell you how many times I checked this out from the Lawrence, KS public library as a kid (for the record, I checked out a great many of the Halloween albums on this blog from that library in the 1970’s, and can place a good deal of my infatuation with this medium of spooky entertainment squarely upon the shoulders of whoever did the buying for the children’s “holiday” vinyl section there). Side one of this album in particular was fascinating to me, as it contained recipes and incantations instructing the listener on how both “To Become A Werewolf” and how “To Raise The Dead”; rather highly desirable abilities to my nascent brain. “The Smoker” also caught my fancy, and I’ve never forgotten the advice about touching every tree in a forest so as to throw hunting dogs off one’s scent — you know, should the need ever arise. Give this fine album a download and perhaps you’ll pick up a tip or two here as well.
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Another fine Caedmon/ Price collaboration, this one focuses solely on stories (and incantations!) dealing with witches. To briefly quote the liners: “On this dangerous record, best listened to on a moonless night in a dark room with the hand of someone you trust close by to hold, you’ll encounter witches of several sorts from several lands.” Great stuff.
Oh, and a word about the sound quality here: my copy of this record is a fairly static-laden affair, so for side one I’ve opted to use an earlier rip in my collection that was encoded (by someone else) at a lower bit rate than what I usually try to share. In an effort to somewhat improve upon that rip however, I’ve separated the tracks out with the proper titles and included the album art in the tag files. For side two I used my LP copy as the source, as the files in the other rip were incorrectly labeled (they were actually from side two of the Caedmon/ Price “Graveyard of Ghost Tales” record shared earlier here), so please consider this fair warning for some of the pops & clicks which you’ll surely encounter.
…to quote the liners once more: “Caution: the stories and recipes in this package may be hazardous to the weak-minded! Use only as directed, and keep away from fire, an element fatal to witches.”
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..more sonorous storytelling from the Vincent Price/ Caedmon alliance, this time focusing on Edgar Allan Poe (with several of the tracks having recently been reissued on a comprehensive Poe CD, along with a great number of other excellent tales hypnotically recited by Mr. Basil Rathbone).
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…and almost as if to magically reply to Bubblegumfink’s request, here’s the next volume in my Vincent Price Caedmon postings.
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A number of requests for the classic Vincent Price Caedmon recordings have convinced me to begin posting them in dribs & drabs (I’d been kinda casually waiting out of respect for a few other folks who strike me as the real obsessives here). Anyway, the breakdown of this excellent series (and this excellent volume in particular) is well covered by the great site TheSoundOfVincentPrice, and a smattering of the stories (as well as many other fantastic readings from Caedmon’s library) can be found scattered around on a few more modern CD collections; all of which I recommend for your late-night creepy-tale enjoyment.
And now on with the show…
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This is some great 60’s novelty R’n’B/ Surf Instro style music (the guitar tone on “The Four Monsters” sounds like Nokie Edwards!) with vocal snippets throughout each song centered around various classic monster themes (lots of Bela Lugosi & Peter Lorrie impersonations, natch). Every tune was composed by pop heavyweight Milton DeLugg (w/ aid from orchestrator George Brackman), and while they’re technically more “advanced” compositions, are totally recommended for fans of the Frankie Stein & His Ghouls series. I’m also pretty sure this fellow has made the rounds on the ol’ internet before so hopefully I’m not stepping on any toes here, this rip is from a cd-r so my sourcing info is limited.
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Between this ad:
…and this post of “Richard Taylor: Nightmare” (Major Records M-36, 1962), you ought to be able to figure out the scoop here; yes it’s more of the fantastic world of low-budget monster magazine-ad records from the early 1960’s! There are two more in this series (“Horror” & “Fright”) that I’ll get up before long, both so that the complete set is once again in circulation and so that everyone has more than enough time to plan their “eerie midnight ghoul parties” (for which ads of the day assured the public these LPs were “perfect” for). As always if anyone has alternate rips I’d love to hear them — I’m sure there are a few more floating around & I’d be more than happy to swap mine out if better versions exist.
…and hey, just for the hell of it, here’s one of the original ads for the series again again (again):
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Richard Taylor: Terror! (192 kbps).
An album of spooky-themed Novelty Pop from 1959 (with a hit single that even mentions “Kookie Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb”!), this was a studio collaboration between the late Bob McFadden (a gifted voiceover actor whose list of accomplishments is impressive indeed) & pop-poet phenom Rod McKuen. Many of you have probably heard one or two of the songs here, or are at least familiar with their descendants (“The Mummy” was most excellently covered by The Fall on 1997’s “Levitate”, and “The Beat Generation” served as partial muse for Richard Hell’s “Blank Generation” circa 1974), but for some reason, superfine as it may be, the whole album has never received the full-on deluxe reissue treatment. Well, guess what? This post isn’t gonna completely get the job done either — my rip is missing their version of “Hound Dog” & sadly it was only encoded at 128 kbps. However in the service of archiving that glorious moment in time when it was possible to score a hit single through the simultaneous mocking of monsters and beatniks, it’s a damn good start. Like, “help”.
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Here’s a weird LP from the late 70’s; a vinyl pressing of a syndicated Christian radio show loaded with complete & utter misinformation about the history of Halloween, as told by comedian & discredited “Ex-Satanist” Mike Warnke. If you can make it through the whole thing (there’s a lengthy stretch of lame comedy thrown into the middle section) you’ll find some prime material for sound bites, and a bizarre almost alternate-universe vision of American culture as seen through the eyes of the (still-active) Warnke.
If you’re actually looking for a more historically accurate history of Halloween (in particular the tracing of its development as a socialized ritual in America), an unlikely source provides some of the better info I’ve found: Ben Truwe’s “Halloween Catalog Collection” from Talky Tina Press. As you might guess it’s primarily a compendium of vintage catalog pages from Halloween novelty sellers, but as Mark B. Ledenback notes on the back cover, it also “includes some ground-breaking research on the history of Halloween as observed in the United States”, complete with vintage newspaper accounts of mischief & merrymaking from the first half of the 20th century. If you’re looking for more detail (the history section in Truwe’s book is all within the under 20 page intro), David J. Skal’s “Death Makes A Holiday” or Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s “Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History” probably aren’t bad places to start.
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