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mental_floss Blog It Was a Graveyard Smash: The Story of The Monster MashRobert George Pickett, the lead creator of the song, grew up in a movie theater in Massachusetts where his father was the manager. Unsurprisingly, he became infatuated with the films shown and developed a lifelong desire to star on the sliver screen. This childhood experience also gave him a chance to practice celebrity impressions, and his best impression was of Boris Karloff.
Upon turning 21, he immediately moved to Hollywood to live his dreams of stardom. While his acting career never really took off, he did get involved with rock music and started playing with a doo-wop group called the Cordials. During performances, he would often bust out his Karloff impression, much to the pleasure of audience members.
One day in 1962, band member Lenny Capizzi encouraged Pickett to do more with his impression than a silly skit during performances. The two men then started working on a humorous dance song based around the narration of a Boris Karloff character. Originally, they thought of working with the twist, but that dance craze was out of fashion, so instead they opted to make the song work with the Mashed Potato. They titled the track the “Monster Mash” and recorded it under the band name “The Crypt Kickers.”
To enhance the setting of the tune, the band added in a number of sound effects, such as rattling chains and a creaking coffin. Because the recorded the track themselves, they had to do these effects themselves and the coffin noise was made by pulling a rusty nail from a board, the bubbling cauldron was created by bubbling water through a straw and the chains were just chains dropped on the floor.
Aside from the main Boris Karloff impression, Pickett enhanced the song’s imaginary star power by adding his impression of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula when he asks, “Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?”
While the boys knew their record was a hit, the record labels disagreed. Every label they shipped the song to rejected it. So the record producer, Gary S. Paxton, printed one thousand copies and then delivered them to every radio station he could find. The stations loved it and within eight weeks, the song was at the top of the Billboard charts, peaking on October 20. These days, it still receives a quite a bit of airplay every Halloween.
How could I forget "Night On Bald Mountain"? Thankies for the other suggestions, editec....I had not heard of those composers before, except for Bach.