Monster Mash, Bobby Pickett’s 1962 LP headlined by the #1 hit title track, is getting a vinyl reissue just in time for spooky season. The album, credited to Bobby (Boris) Pickett And The Crypt Kickers, will be out on glow-in-the-dark green vinyl on September 13.
Leading off the album is “Monster Mash,” the perennial graveyard smash that topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in the fall of 1962 and has been a fixture of pop culture ever since. Fourteen more ghoulishly fun songs round out the collection, including “Transylvania Twist,” “Graveyard Shift,” and the “Monster Mash” sequel “Monster Mash Party.”
Pickett and Leonard Capizzi, his bandmate in a nightclub band called The Cordials, wrote “Monster Mash” in 1962 to parody the many dance crazes that were sweeping the nation, such as The Twist and The Mashed Potato. Capizzi had seen Pickett entertain a crowd one night with his eerily accurate impression of Frankenstein and The Mummy star Boris Karloff, whose voice was already closely associated with the spookiest time of year. He encouraged Pickett to run with it for a full song’s worth of Halloween imagery. For one line, Pickett switched over to an also-impressive impersonation of Bela Lugosi, as Dracula rises from his coffin to wonder, “Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?”
Pickett knew he had a hit on his hands. He took the song to Gary S. Paxton, the artist behind prior novelty hit “Alley Oop,” who came on board as producer. They recorded “Monster Mash” with an all-star band that included pianist Leon Russell, The Ventures’ drummer Mel Taylor, and backing vocalists The Blossoms, led by Darlene Love, who was still a year away from recording a different kind of holiday classic, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”
The “Monster Mash” single was released in August and was atop the singles chart by October. It has continued to be one of the definitive songs of the Halloween season, even in the UK, where the BBC initially banned it for being “too morbid.” By 1973, when “Monster Mash” made a big British comeback, the broadcaster relented, acknowledging that Pickett’s signature hit was timeless Halloween fun.
Order Monster Mash on vinyl now.