Resurrecting Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s ‘The Original Monster Mash’ LP
by Colin Fleming
Late in its run, there was an episode of the television program Cheers in which the mischief-making patrons of Gary’s Old Towne Tavern pranked everyone’s favorite group of barflies at Sam Malone’s cellar bar by rigging the jukebox so that Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash” played incessantly.
Many people can probably relate. Pickett’s 1962 seasonal smash is ubiquitous at Halloween. If your life depended on escaping the holiday without once hearing the number, you’d soon find yourself moldering six feet under in some prime real estate for a graveyard ghoul. Jokes about this very ubiquity are themselves unavoidable, as if the song were a form of torture to inspire Edgar Allan Poe.
These jibes lack the wit of Pickett’s hit. The song is dead clever—pun somewhat intended—with a snappy panache to the lyrics that smack of, dare one say it, a clever intertextuality. It acts as a musical intermediary between the pop culture archetypes—so prevalent many decades later—birthed by the initial run of classic Universal monster movies (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man), and that amenable spirit we all carry with us for good-time hauntings, trick or treating, Halloween costuming and what the Victorian ghost story writer M.R. James called pleasing terrors.
Bobby “Boris” Pickett in an early promotional photo
But let’s say you’re having a Halloween party. If you love “Monster Mash,” you could create a mega-“Mash” loop, but that’d be like sitting down and gorging yourself on 20 3 Musketeers bars. A little “Mash,” like a little nougat-rich candy, goes a long way. Plus, there’s no need to drive one’s guests screaming into the night as though the Creature from the Black Lagoon has made his way up through the toilet.
Consider, though: A hidden-in-outright-tunefulness aspect of “Monster Mash” is its impressive narrative quality. The song tells a story. Only the chorus repeats. Each verse is like a fresh chapter; the piece flirts with being through-composed. Impressive stuff, for a so-called novelty number. We think that the latter term indicates limitations. A novelty tune can only amount to so much, but there were enough of these undertakings in the early 1960s that artists began to get creative with those ostensible limitations that were also paradoxically liberating.
Attempting to cash in on the success of “Monster Mash,” which topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in October 1962 and went on to chart five more times, as recently as 2023,, Pickett, who was born Robert George Pickett in Somerville, Mass., in 1938 and died in L.A. in 2007, repaired to the studio in late 1962 to wax what was called The Original Monster Mash, the album’s cumbrous title a result of horror host John Zacherle—the same fellow who’d introduce the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East in February 1970—putting out his Monster Mash album, which naturally included a cover of Pickett’s staple-in-the-making.
This is the lone long-player from Pickett and his backing band, cheekily billed as the Crypt-Kickers, and these dead old boys could certainly make the earth box shake. The album stretched—you get 16 songs at a total of nearly 40 minutes, which was anything but the norm for 1962, when LPs tended to be 10 minutes briefer, but apparently “Boris” had much he wanted to get out of his desiccated system.
Picture sleeve for the original “Monster Mash” 45
And for good reason, too, because almost all of it is of a piece with the famous single that gave life (death?) to the enterprise. The songs make judicious use of the various music fads of this medial era following the petering out of Elvis and before the rise of the Beatles. The scene was very scattered, distended, you might say, which wasn’t necessarily bad. In a sense you knew what was coming, but in another you didn’t, because someone was always trying to start the next mini-movement.
Weirdly enough, a bunch of those fads had staying power—the Twist, the Hully Gully, the Stomp. Pickett was in the right spot at the right time, because the voices of the two biggest stars of the classic Universal horrors from the 1930s—Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi—also had a knack for sticking around. They still do. People who have no idea they’re listening to a Lugosi impersonation, for example, understand that it’s meant to be the “Dracula voice.”
There may have been some wishful thinking involved in this 1995 movie ad
Pickett’s recasting of those voices in his convincing array of vocals gives the record storybook juice. Karloff-inflected mad scientists squabble with a Lugosi-infused Dracula, hunchbacks and the Wolf Man, as the bogeys jostle for respect, attention, functioning as both quasi-friends and shadowland rivals.
Related: When Halloween introduced us to Michael Myers
Pickett was in on the writing of most of these songs (“Monster Mash” was co-written with Leonard Capizzi), and you can tell he liked a story. The overall assemblage feels like an avant-garde novelette that might have been produced by the likes of Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms if he’d been exposed to the Golden Age of Monsterdom and turned loose to do some spoken word story-making over the backing of a crack band, which is what the Crypt-Kickers (who counted Leon Russell among their number) were.
Watch John Zacherle introduce Pickett, who performs “Monster Mash” live in 2006
This is more-than-competent rhythm and blues and doo-wop, with a brace of jam session jazz and its meat-and-potato sax solos. Close your eyes—but not too long, lest you render yourself vulnerable to advancing bloodsuckers—and you can practically imagine the likes of Little Willie John or Arthur Alexander belting out some of these tunes until you get to a passage about the Wolf Man getting his tail stuck in the haunted castle’s gate.
Related: Gary S. Paxton, who produced “Monster Mash,” died in 2016
Throughout the record, the Count hypes up his career, which is actually pretty funny. He plays impresario in “Rabian—The Teenage Idol,” quarrels with the Karloffian singer of “Monster Mash” in “Monster Mash Party” about who the real talent is, and finally performs his much-ballyhooed “Transylvania Twist”—which doubtless you recall being referenced a certain somewhere else—as a kind of “take that” throw-down of the novelty music gauntlet.
There’s the added practical bonus that you can let the record keep playing at your party and no one is likely to get sick of it, especially as the whole thing is somewhat hip. This isn’t dumb-person Halloween music. It’s ingratiating and sly, perfect for kids and adults alike, but for different reasons. Granted, hardly anyone knows it exists, thanks in part to the big number that everyone knows exists, but don’t let that stop you from knocking on the door of this proverbial last house on the street, because you’d be missing out on some prime goodies.
Watch Bobby “Boris” Pickett on American Bandstand, lip-syncing the “Monster Swim”
Bonus Video: Yes, Pickett actually recorded a tune called “Monster Rap,” and of course, we have it…
The Original Monster Mash LP is available in the U.S. here, in Canada here and in the U.K. here.
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