Ghoul House Rock: Zacherle's Monster Gallery

By WALLACE McBRIDE

Rewind to 1984. A tape of DAWN OF THE DEAD is quietly spooling in my Betamax as age-inappropriate gore splatters across the screen. It's a beautiful sunny day, and I should be outside instead of sitting on the couch, eating chili dogs and watching blue-faced Pittsburgians pretend to kill each other. As one zombie with a conspicuously large cranium walks into the blades of a helicopter, I look down at the sloppy plate of food in my lap and wonder why I don't feel any revulsion at what just happened.

I was 12 years old at the time.

It was a fleeting concern. Years later, Quentin Tarantino would explain away this seeming lack of empathy by rightfully pointing out that violence, like singing and dancing, is just something you expect from movies. It's not real and we instinctively know this, which is why it takes great filmmakers to make us feel anything during a movie. Happiness. Fear. Sadness. Humor. Sure, you might be surprised by a character's sudden death in a film, but it's not like you actively go into mourning for them. Your subconscious keeps your emotional response in check no matter how sincere those feelings might seem.

So, yeah. When the "flattop zombie" was scalped in DAWN OF THE DEAD, I knew it wasn't real violence. It was more in line with a magic trick than anything else. I even knew the name of the magicians responsible: George Romero and Tom Savini. While somebody who never read an issue of Fangoria might have found the sequence disturbing, horror fans knew better. It was all part of the show. If you're going to be offended by something as innocuous as a horror movie, you're probably going to have a goddamn exhausting life.

Skip ahead to last night. After spending almost an hour flipping through my many, many options on Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, Midnight Pulp and Shout, I realized my tastes in horror movies had re-calibrated themselves. My wife was at work, my kid was in bed and I could watch anything I wanted. But everything just seemed too extreme, for lack of a better word.

Me watching horror movies as an adult.

Life has a way of accumulating taboos, whether you want them or not. In retrospect, it seems impossible to expect anyone to go through life without that "gore and chili dogs" perspective gradually eroding. There's a reason horror movies are designed primarily for young people. Unless they've had a particularly unfortunate life, the void between life and death seems so vast that the other side appears forever distant. For me, that gulf has not only diminished ... their edges are even beginning to rub against each other like badly aligned teeth. (For the record: Chili dogs are also 1000% more terrifying to me as an adult.)

Some of this can be partly blamed on the three-year-old child living in my house. When you spend your days worrying if your kid's next stumble will lead to stitches, the kinds of traumas inflicted in horror movies will put your empathy into overload. For me, a movie like HALLOWEEN now plays out like a Greek tragedy of parental failure. It's just not that much fun anymore to watch teenagers get dismembered by faceless maniacs. (I'll have "Things a Psychopath Says" for $200, Alex.)

Which leaves me with a bit of a problem in this, the season of my people: How the hell do you celebrate Halloween without bingeing on horror movies? It's too important a holiday to fake my way though, like Christmas. But last night's channel surfing left me a little worried that adulthood - that jowled, many headed beast - had taken one more thing away from me.

And then I remembered Zacherle, the late horror television host. I fell in love with Zacherle at age 6 when my parents gave me a copy of Ronco's "Funny Bone Favorites." Buried on that collection of novelty songs was Zacherle's "Dinner with Drac" from 1958. (Zacherle died last year at the ripe old age of 98, and had only recently retired from making festival appearances.)



Zacherle, sometimes billed as "Roland" or "Zacherley," hosted "Shock Theater" in Philadelphia from 1957-58 before moving to New York City to host "Zacherley at Large" for a year. He was a guest host for "American Bandstand" during the 1960s when Dick Clark was absent, made appearances in everything from CAPTAIN KANGAROO to Rob Zombie records, and was an all-around swell guy. While the competition is stiff, I'd argue that he's the best horror host in television history.

For some, myself included, Zacherle is pure, undiluted Halloween. And you can take a hit off that spooky bong whenever you like, thanks to his recordings. In my opinion, his first album remains his best. Released in 1960, "Spook Along With Zacherley" is a darkly hilarious album that features a lot of clever wordplay:

I'll send a small box of small pox
A large tub of hubbub
Your own noose for home use
A crate full of hateful

For some strange reason, "Spook Along" managed to omit "Dinner with Drac," which shows up on Zacherle's second album, "Monster Mash." (That album became a bone of contention for Bobby "Boris" Pickett, whose label took so long to get his own "Monster Mash" LP in stories that Zacherle's beat him to the punch by a few months.) But "Spook Along" is more consistent in both its choice of songs and its sketches. The radio spot for "Ghoul View Cemetery" is the best Rankin-Bass cartoon that never happened, while "Zacherley For President" feels like a better idea than ever. "Put a vampire in the White House just for fun!" Sign me right the fuck up.

The album also straddles a lot of musical conventions, both new and old. Because of his work on radio and television, Zacherle and his producers were in touch with the youth market, which allowed him to inject a little rock and roll and teenage vernacular into his songs. But the tracks also keep one foot in the kinds of playful ballads of the 1940s, creating a hybrid that was hip ... but not too hip. Revisiting Zacherle's music is more like revisiting Universal's best monster movies than it is the music of its time. "Spook Along" often feels older than its years, but in a good way. Much like Dracula, Zacherle is a ghoul eager to catch up with the changing times. Luckily for his fans, the big Z was more successful in achieving his goals.

In 1963, Elektra re-released "Spook Along With Zacherley" on its Crestview Records subsidiary and gave it a makeover. While the track list was unchanged, Crestview drafted none other than Jack Davis to create the art for the newly re-christened "Zacherle's Monster Gallery." For whatever reason, the "Spook Along" edition became the one that's lingered in popular culture, even getting a CD release in 2001. In August, though, Real Gone Music put the album back into circulation, this time with the Davis art and the "Monster Gallery" title. Pressed on orange and green "pumpkin" vinyl, the release is limited to 1,000 copies.

I ordered a copy of the pumpkin vinyl a few weeks ago, which was probably the first sign than my ambiguous feelings about Halloween were drifting to more innocent times. Although my respect for THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is undiminished, these days I'd rather spend the holiday with the likes of Zacherle. It's the perfect sort of escapism I need this time of year. After all ... life sucks and we're all gonna die, so you might as well have a little fun before the bouncers toss us out.

Ghoul House Rock: Monster University Pajama Party

By WALLACE McBRIDE

Once upon a time, Halloween's greatest anthems had an unforgiving, inflexible life cycle. Each year around Oct. 1, the likes of "Monster Mash" and "Purple People Eater" would begin trickling to local radio stations, allowed to run free for a few weeks before being promptly stuffed back into their cages by program managers on Nov. 1. That's the cultural tradition, anyhow.

But something interesting started happening during the 1970s. During one of the scheduled, unsupervised releases, music that was thought to be nothing more than a seasonal holiday began breeding with rock and roll. Thanks to acts such as Alice Cooper, Ramones, The Damned, Blue Oyster Cult, Misfits and The Cramps, "horror rock" began to expand its tentacles outward from October, eventually mutating once-seasonal music into a perennial orgy of the damned. Yay!

Case in point: The Von Hoffman Orchestra's 2010 release, "Monster University Pajama Party." While mainstream acts have created their own distinct monster mashes, the Von Hoffman Orchestra crafted a near-flawless love letter to the kinds of Halloween novelty songs of the 1960s. The "orchestra" is actually the work of artist/writer/musician Mike Hoffman, who also created the cover art. If you visit his website you'll see the guy is supertalented.

There are a number of releases in his "Monster University" series, but "Pajama Party" is easily my favorite. From the slinky seriousness of "Island of Dr. Moreau," to the adorable creepiness of "Icky Feelings," the album isn't so much a pastiche of '60s Halloween  novelties as it is a distillation of them. The album has such an irreverent sweetness to it that it could also double as a children's album, though those children would have to be especially smart to understand its many references.

Speaking of references, "Pajama Party" has not one, but two tracks dedicated to DARK SHADOWS. The first is the chipper "The Ballad of Barnabas Collins," which deals with the problematic nature of our vampire anti-hero and his troubled relationships with Willie Loomis and Julia Hoffman. The second, "Dark Shadows," takes a broader view of the series and reaches the optimistic conclusion that we'll all be watching it "until the sun explodes." Both tunes take jabs at the show's inconsistencies, but it's done with love.

Also among my favorite songs on the album is its closing track, "Alma Mater." This is the literal anthem of Monster University, performed with Hoffman's terrific baritone as he encourages all the young monsters marching into "science, commerce and law" to do their best in life ... even if that "best" might result in a lot of terror for everybody else. The song actually makes me nostalgic for my own college years, which were comparatively boring and monster free.

Even though there's a rich tradition of Halloween-related parodies, those represent the only duds on "Pajama Party." Featured on the album is a somber parody of "California Dreaming," which somehow manages to be even more maudlin that the version by the Mamas and the Papas. It pauses once more to cover Rick Derringer's "Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo," re-titled here as "Halloween Hootchie Koo." I tend to skip these tracks when listening to the album, but the rest of the songs are so good that it doesn't really matter.

"Monster U, we love you."

Ghoul House Rock: A SPOOKTACULAR IN SCREAMING SOUND

The monsters of Hollywood’s golden age disappeared because they stopped being scary.

As obvious as it sounds, this fact is rarely addressed by fans of the genre. It feels almost sacrilegious to even type those words, but it’s true … the average U.S. citizen in the post-war years had little to fear from werewolves, vampires and their likes. The horrors of World War II shattered all taboos, oftentimes with such terrible results that they still can’t be discussed in polite company. Victor Frankenstein couldn’t compete with Auschwitz, Unit 751 or the ruins of Hiroshima.

So, it shouldn’t be surprising that these monsters quickly became fodder for humor. ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN proved to be the swan song for Universal’s original monsters, leaving Bela Lugosi to match wits with the likes of Milton Berle, Paul Winchell and Red Skelton.

Instinctively, I’m very protective of these classic characters. It's my gut response to offer some kind of critical defense of America’s growing bemusement with horror during those years ... a few words to frame this cultural shift in a way that paints these characters in a more heroic light. But my instincts here are wrong, though. We weren’t laughing with these monsters, we were laughing AT them. It couldn’t be another way, because those classic movies were never joking.

Exhibit A.

Things haven’t changed since then. Dress a child up as the Frankenstein monster and you’ll get a lot of ooohs and aaaahs from grownups. Dress that same child up as Leatherface and those responses will become a lot more muted. The classic monsters are safe. They’re so safe you can even let them babysit.

But I’m actually OK with that. I can’t explain why, but I’m perfectly comfortable with Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf-Man as both symbols of legitimate horror, and as quaint Halloween party decorations. I think their occasional failure to disturb is a strength — not a failure — of the characters. Which is why something like the 1959 album “Spike Jones in Stereo: A Spooktacular in Screaming Sound” doesn’t offend my every sensibility.

The album might even be the greatest recording of its kind, thanks in no small part to Spike Jones. As with Ernie Kovacs, Stan Fregerg and Steve Allen, Jones was one of those comedians perpetually ahead of the curve. His contemporaries spent much of their careers just trying to catch up.

And there’s no filler on “Spooktacular,” either. When the "monster album" boom hit a few years later, many producers leaned heavily on covers (“Monster Mash,” “Purple People Eater,” etc.) to help fill albums. Jones cut 10 lean, original tracks for his 1959 offering. And he brought along some amazing talent. While their names might not ring any bells, few people alive during the last 50 years have not heard their voices:

Paul Frees got top billing in the cast, and rightfully so. If you have a few hours to spend, take a look at his massive list of credits at IMDB. His most famous role is that of Boris Badenov on the original ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE, but his resume suggests he had a few clones running around. Because there’s no way one guy had time to do that much work, right?

Thurl Ravenscroft also lent his booming voice to the production. The guy’s voice is as unreal as ever, and his vocals on the track “Teenage Brain Surgeon” makes it the best song on the album. Ravenscroft’s list of credits is as thorough as Frees', so its unsurprising that they occasionally overlap. But you probably know him best as the voice of Tony the Tiger, as the singer of “You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” or from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Haunted Mansion” rides at Disneyland.

Loulie Jean Norman and horror host Zacherley promote "Spike Jones in Stereo" in 1959.

Completing the vocal trinity here is Loulie Jean Norman, who is credited on the album as playing “Vampira.” Her list of credits might not be as lengthy as her co-stars, but they’re no less significant. You can hear her voice in the themes to “The Carol Burnett Show,” the Tokens song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and provided the signing voice for Diahann Carroll’s character in PORGY AND BESS.

Oh, and that’s her you hear singing in the original theme to STAR TREK.

NOTE: The vinyl edition of "Spooktacular" has been out of print for quite a while, but the MP3 version of the album can be downloaded from Amazon HERE.

Ghoul House Rock: FRANKIE STEIN AND HIS GHOULS

The music of Frankie Stein and his Ghouls is cooler than it has any right to be. Between 1964 and 1965, the “band” cranked out no fewer than five full-length albums. By all rights these records should have been little more than white noise, the kind of generic elevator music that blared from teenage radios in movies and television whenever the producers didn't feel like ponying up the dough for a legitimate song.

But there's something special about the Frankie Stein series. Something surprisingly focused, haunting and aggressive. Which has led fans to sometimes speculate about the identities of the anonymous musicians that made of the ersatz band. If Frankie Stein was a real person, he’s been suspiciously quiet in the years since his band’s albums were hastily released. And there might be a good reason for it, if even a fraction of the rumors about the musicians involved with this project are true.

The “Frankie Stein” albums were released by Power Records, a subsidiary of the children’s specialty label Peter Pan Records. Power would later strike a chord with its young audience during the ‘70s when it licensed movie, television and comic book properties for its famous “book and record” sets. Years earlier, though, it was still struggling to find an identity, which lead the company to create some … unusual products.

For example: the 1966 album “Batman and Robin” by The Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale. It’s since been established that there were no “Dan & Dale,” and that the band was actually made up of the legendary Sun Ra and members of the Blues Project. It was a quickie album meant to capitalize on the first wave of Bat-mania. The music had little to do with the Caped Crusaders, but it’s likely the young fans buying the album didn’t care.

“Batman and Robin” was produced another music legend: Tom Wilson. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, his list of credits absolutely will. During the 1960s, he produced such acts as Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Velvet Underground and the Mothers of Invention. He’d been working with Sun Ra since the 1950s, which is probably why he was able to persuade the man to pick up a quick paycheck on a silly Batman knockoff.

The album was the product of Synthetic Plastics Co., a toy company located in Newark, N.J. Coincidentally, Synthetic Plastics Co. also produced the “Frankie Stein” albums. Which is where the rumors about the album’s creation get interesting. While nobody has ever taken credit for their work on them, rumor has it that Wilson produced these albums (all of which might have been recorded during the same session) with a roster of musicians that might have included Duane Eddy and Max Greger, members of the Blues Project and, possibly, Sun Ra, himself.

Or maybe it didn't include any of them. Who knows?

Here’s how Frankie Stein  was credited on jacket of the band’s album “Monster Sounds and Dance Music”:

The monster maestro (Frankie Stein) is a graduate of the mausoleum of music at the University of Paris Green … He plays guitar with three hands and conducts with the other two. He is DEAD serious about his music. Many critics have hailed him as “hideous” … “ghastly” …“horrormonius”… etc. etc. etc.

As far as mysteries go, the real identity of “Frankie Stein” isn’t in any danger of displacing D.B. Cooper as America's Favorite Mystery Man. The albums were popular novelty records, but novelties, nonetheless. Many — if not all — of the participants might have had good reason to keep their identities a secret at the time. Cutting records like the “Frankie Stein” series was the musical equivalent of pornography for many musicians, though I suspect nobody has fessed up in recent years simply because they haven’t been asked.

As with many of the albums from the era, vinyl editions of the Frankie Stein and his Ghouls are hard to find — and a little pricey, to boot. While the music has since been released on compact disc, the collections are a little frustrating. “Ghoul Music” and “Shock! Terror! Fear!” were released as a double-album set, while an anthology titled “Monster Melodies” collects an additional 30 tracks. I haven't added up the track lists to compare them to the original releases, but wouldn't be shocked it a few songs slipped through the cracks during the conversion process.

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WALLACE McBRIDE is an award-winning South Carolina journalist, and creator/editor of THE COLLINSPORT HISTORICAL SOCIETY website. He was once used as a human shield by Michelle Phillips, owns a complete run of HOWARD THE DUCK comics, and talks too much about DARK SHADOWS.

Ghoul House Rock: MONSTER RALLY, 1959

There’s a playful hint of menace in MONSTER RALLY, a novelty album released by RCA Victor in 1959. The listener is warned from the start (the title track promises “you’ll be lucky to get out alive”) that the sideshow has become the main event, and that traditional standards of decency are going to be a little ... twisted. Example: murder is perfectly acceptable, but just don't park like an asshole (as the song "Flying Saucer" advises us).

It’s a wonderfully visual album; one that conjures images of a nightmarish stage production that’s equal parts grand guignol and THE MUPPET SHOW. Leading the cast of cretins are Hans Conried and Alice Pearce, two actors who specialized in the ludicrous. One of the busiest (and best) voice actors ever, Conried was born to chew the scenery. When left to his own devices he could have squeezed a few laughs out of “Paradise Lost” without changing a line of the text.

Sadly, Pearce died in 1966 at the age of 48. Despite her relatively short list of credits, she might actually me more recognizable than Conried: Pearce played nosey neighbor “Gladys Kravitz” for several years on BEWITCHED.

Conried and Pearce make a strangely compelling couple on MONSTER RALLY. While Conried is the ringmaster of this fiasco, Pearce brings a rare sense of femininity to the proceedings. There were a lot of “monster kid” novelty albums recorded during the late ‘50s and ‘60s, and almost all of them were dick soup. While Conried’s presence had a way of making anything better, Pearce is the secret weapon on MONSTER RALLY and keeps it from becoming just another novelty record.

The song writing is pretty strong here, as well, but it’s difficult to say exactly who did what on the album. Nine of the songs were written by Joel Herron and Fred Hertz. At the time, Herron was the musical director of The Jimmy Dean Show; while Hertz was a radio and television writer/director. The remaining three songs on MONSTER RALLY are re-workings of popular novelty songs: Phil Harris’ “The Thing,” Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater” and “Close the Door,” originally recorded by The Stargazers. While these covers won’t make you forget the originals, they’re used here to good effect, fitting snugly into the “variety show from hell” aesthetic of MONSTER RALLY.

Beyond that, it’s hard to say who else contributed to the project. The liner notes are deliberately coy, citing three recording dates in 1958 that took place at “Castle Dracula, New York.” The album’s musical director is credited as “Frank N. Stein.” Here’s his bio:

“Frank N. Stein is, as you might guess, a pseudonym. We cannot reveal the name of the musical director, as he is wanted on two other planets for a series of escapades too horrible to mention here.”

The story behind the album’s vocal group, “The Creatures,” is equally fictional. The background performers were almost certainly actors and singers working in New York City at the time, but they’re not identified by name in the credits.

The cover was illustrated by Jack Davis, possibly the most quietly successful artists of the 20th century. Again, he’s not credited explicitly on the album cover, but his style is unmistakable. It’s worth mentioning that MONSTER RALLY was recorded just three years after the demise of EC’s lines of horror, crime and science-fiction comics, to which Davis was a regular contributor. This cancellation was prompted by new regulations foisted on comics industry in the wake of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearing in 1954 — which saw Davis and his colleagues at EC accused of contributing to juvenile delinquency. So it’s nice to see him making monsters mainstream again so soon after.

As with many of its brethren, MONSTER RALLY is best enjoyed in its natural analog format. Unsurprisingly, the album has been out of print for a long, long time, and is not only difficult to find, but also rather expensive. Hallmark has since made it available as an MP3 download on Amazon for you impulsive types. If you want to cherry pick selections from the album, I recommend the title track, “Flying Saucer,” “Mostly Ghostly” and “(I’m in Love with) The Creature from the Black Lagoon.” They're pretty swell.