Vol. 1, Issue #20 Oct. 27th - Nov. 9th, 2006

Tiger Beat From Hell
By: Wilhelm Murg

Monster in the Trembling Air

Bug-eyed monsters and rock music are both creations from the early dawn of post-modernism. Back when the concept of an atomic apocalypse was still freaking people out, Godzilla and his ilk became the bomb personified, or “monstrafied,” if you like. Even the monsters that weren’t metaphors for world peace were marketed to the same, newly discovered, youth market that was also listening to rock’n’roll music, which was bumping and grinding against the metaphorical penis that became the sexual revolution. Blend all of those factors in with a post-war economic boom and you end up with quickly made drive-in monster movies about the dangers of atomic energy marketed to teenagers who are looking for a cheap place to park, duck and cover, and make out, possibly while listening to rock music. Like all forms of fetish, wires got crossed in the evolutionary jump, which explains the popularity of things like electro-sex and vampires in some erotic circles – but that’s a completely different column.

You can see the monster fixation in the art of rock; classical people did not collect Marx Nutty Mads or Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s ratfink imagery. It’s Herman Munster dressed like a rock star, Billy Lee Riley’s “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,” Hasil Adkins out in the hills of Virginia pounding out songs about cutting of girls’ heads, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins being carried out on stage at Alan Freed’s Rock’n’Roll shows in a coffin, which he would bust out of with “Henry,” the human skull he kept on a stick. The Misfits, according to legend, started out of a high school Italians-only club dedicated to the appreciation of zombie films; their songs have always dealt with B-horror movie images, their death face emblem comes from the movie serial “The Crimson Ghost,” and the “M” in their logo is taken from the “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine logo.

When I think back to the early days of rock music, various singles come to mind; Sheb Wooley’s “Purple People Eater,” Buchanan & Goodman’s cut-in record (where they ask a question and the answer is a line edited from a hit record) “Flying Saucer (Parts 1 & 2,)” The Ran-Dells’ “Martian Hop,” “Dave (“The Chipmunks”) Seville’s “The Witch Doctor, “Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash,” and Jumpin’ Gene Simmons’ “Haunted House.”

The monster obsession was only fueled by the fact that it was relatively cheap to print up “7 vinyl singles, so there’s a whole sub-genre of campy midnight movie hosts hitting the local charts with their own entries into rock history. One of Frank Zappa’s earliest singles was backing up L.A. horror movie host Bob Guy, aka Jeepers, in the single “Letters From Jeepers” b/w “Dear Jeepers.” No less than two masters of New Orleans R&B, Dr. John and Frankie Ford (of “Sea Cruise” fame,) backed up that city’s monster movie host, Morgus, on his regional hit “Morgus The Magnificent.” Dick Clark produced Philadelphia’s “Cool Ghoul,” Zacherle’s record “Dinner with Drac” for Cameo Records and even made it a hit by bringing him on “American Bandstand.” Even Tulsa’s subversive movie host, Mazeppa, aka now-Hollywood actor Gailard Sartain, released a local single, but it’s so rare that I’ve never heard it.

Actually, one of my favorite haunted hits is a little know surf tune by The Crossfires, who went on to become The Turtles; “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The song is moderately rhythmic, happy piece that that sounds like any other cruisin’ for burgers tune of the day, but goes into a wild freeform section with screams and diabolical laughter, then returns to the original theme, then back to the screams and laughter for the fade out. It’s an eloquent instrumental that gets its point across.

By the late-1960s after all the weight of the Vietnam War, the anti-war protests, and the failures of the utopian social reforms that seemed so close at times, you would think the monsters of reality would obscure the ones of the imagination, but they didn’t. The comic world, both those with mainstream distribution, like the magazines “Eerie,” “Creepy,” and “Vampirella,” and Marvel and D.C.’s horror titles, and the underground’s violent titles like “Two-Fisted Zombies,” and “Slow Death” paid homage to E.C. Comics, such as “Tales From The Crypt,” and “Vault of Horror.” E.C. Comics was not only the original martyr lost in the parental attacks on pop culture in the 1950s, it was already seen as the most influential company in America’s comic history. The marketing was aimed at the youth movement, and they turned all of the above into successful publications (the complete E.C. catalogue is going back into print, again, this winter.)

Rock music started becoming a part of horror movies, like the teens rocking on Mount Fuji in “Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster,” which is also the most surreal entry in that series, and one of the most incomprehensible messes of a film, “Scream and Scream Again,” features a rock group prominently. However monsters also started showing up in music films and videos, whether it was John Lennon, first seen as The Frankenstein Monster, in “Yellow Submarine” (The Beatles had also battled monsters as a group in their cartoon series,) or The Monkees, constantly opening the wrong door to find “Reptilicus” behind it – they also battled a giant Victor Mature in their cinematic epic “Head.”

By the time punk came around it became ludicrous; The Cramps created the psychobilly movement, where horror and early rock’n’roll became one concept, hardcore albums looked like their covers were stolen from the pages of “Famous Monsters,” and Bauhaus fired the shot heard around the goth world with “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” a song inspired by the great B-movie actor.

Today a modern horror film isn’t released without some current yahoo band working out their repressed childhood molestation problems in a churning death metal song on the soundtrack, but something was lost in the process. With the campy innocence of early rock’n’roll and atomic-age bug-eyed monsters gone, all we’re left with is something disturbing, not because it’s scary, but because it’s more about metal problems than it is about an actually monster running through town. “Bubba Ho-Tep,” the Bruce Campbell epic where he plays the aging Elvis battling a Mummy, seems almost like eulogy, not only for the days of Elvis, but for the old fashion monster movies. Of course, in our hearts of hearts, we all know the greatest tragedy of the genre is that Elvis never actually made a horror film...but just think of the possibilities.

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