Monster Mash

Bobby Pickett was, by his own account, a lifelong devotee of horror actor Boris Karloff long before he had any professional reason to be. That devotion is the entire premise of “Monster Mash”: Pickett, performing the song’s spoken verses in a dead-on Karloff impression, cast himself as a mad scientist whose creation springs to life and teaches the other monsters in his crypt a dance craze. He and singer Leonard Capizzi wrote and recorded it with a backing band they christened the Crypt-Kickers in less than an hour – a novelty record built fast and cheap, with no particular expectation that it would outlive the season it was aimed at.

It outlived considerably more than that. Released August 25, 1962, on producer Gary S. Paxton’s independent Garpax label, “Monster Mash” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that October, timed almost perfectly to Halloween. The BBC, less charmed, banned it from broadcast that same October for being “too morbid” for the airwaves – a ban that held for 11 years, lifting only in 1973, when the re-released single immediately climbed to No. 3 on the UK chart on the strength of an audience that had apparently been waiting the whole time.

What’s kept “Monster Mash” in rotation for six decades isn’t songcraft in any conventional sense – it’s a novelty record, built on a vocal impression and a dance-craze gimmick, with no ambition beyond landing the bit. But landing the bit turned out to be a durable skill: the song requires no context, references nothing that ages out of relevance, and asks nothing of a listener beyond showing up for one specific holiday once a year, which it has now done for longer than almost any other record in American pop history.

Greatest of All Time. The only Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 to survive an 11-year foreign broadcast ban and return to the chart on the other side of it.

Hero image: Bobby “Boris” Pickett, 2005, by Leslie Gottlieb, licensed under CC BY 2.0.