31 Days of "Spooky" Music Day 31: Grim, Grinning Ghosts

      Well, here we are. It is Halloween and we are at the end of my 31 spooky songs that you should have on your Halloween playlist. While I have said earlier in this series that this is not a ranked list, today is the exception being easily my number one song (I have at least 10 versions of this song on my playlist). It is the only theme park ride song that I know by heart, it is the one, the only Disney's The Haunted Mansion's "Grim, Grinning Ghosts".

     With music and lyrics by Disney legends Buddy Baker and Xavier "X" Atencio, "Grim, Grinning Ghosts" is just a fantastic and versatile piece of music. Heard in one form or another in every part of the mansion (well, almost all. There is not music in the Stretching Room) from the slow, somber tones you hear when first entering the foyer and hearing the Ghost Host welcome you foolish mortals into The Haunted Mansion to morose chiming bells in the hallway leading to where you board your Doom Buggy. From the festively creepy, slightly off-key waltz in the ballroom to the fully voiced, ghoulishly joyous party version of it playing as you make your way through the graveyard after falling/jumping/being thrown out of the attic window. I love every version of it, and every image of the ride that just hearing it brings to mind.

       This song is actually the only thing I didn't like about "Muppets Haunted Mansion", and it's not that they did a bad version of it, or that it did not make an appearance in the special, but that they did not do a full Muppets cover of it, instead opting to cover "Dancing in the Moonlight" for some reason at the end instead. I mean: what the Hell, Disney?

     I think for most people, the song brings to mind the graveyard's Singing Busts when they think of the song, and that may be partly because they sing it in the clearest, least accented (to a Californian anway) version, and also because Disney has used this version on official soundtrack releases before:

     You know, the thing is not just the vocals in that particular version of the song, and this is meant to be a list about the music more than the visuals, but just look at how much life the performers gave object that have no actual movement to them. Really stop and appreciate the facial acting going on here; the exaggerated expressions that really make them so memorable.

     Of course there is no better way to really appreciate the various versions of the song in the ride than to listen to all of them. We may not be able to go on the ride, but there is this fantastic soundtrack to the whole ride from the foyer to the exit crypt:

     We have this silly version from an old Disney Sing-A-Long VHS. I will be honest: this is not one of my favourites, but it is still worth watching once.

     Then we have cover versions of the song. I have stated earlier in this list that the soundtrack is the only real redeeming feature of the 2003 "The Haunted Mansion" film, and one of the highlights of this is this Barenaked Ladies cover of the song:

     There are of course other covers as well, like this one from The Friendly Indians.

     Possibly interesting facts: this is the same group that performed the theme song for the USA series "Psych", and the lead singer, Steve Franks, is the creator of that show (I wonder how they got to do the theme....).

     Another call back to earlier in this list is an appearance here by The Pyronauts with their cover called "The Ghastly Stomp". It was hearing them play this song that made me originally buy a couple of their CDs.

Which I realize may itself just be a cover of the same song by a group called The Ghastly Ones, but I still like it:

       Naturally any song so iconic is going to have some pretty interesting remixes as well if you want versions you can really dance to:

     This one is a recent discovery for me, but I really like this one, and appreciate the amount of work that went into making it:

     And that's gonna wrap this series up. Those were 31 pieces of music that I think at least deserve a shot at being on your Halloween playlist.

     I hope you found this series interesting or entertaining, and I wish you a Happy Halloween!

     

31 Days of "Spooky" Music Day 30: The Living Dead

      Okay, so maybe, just maybe, I did not think this series of blog posts out fully before I started writing it, and maybe I did not do something smart like write out the thirty-one pieces of music I wanted to have on this list before I started writing it. Maybe that is part of why this is not a ranked list, and seems kind of random, and maybe that's why today's piece is the third appearance by No More Kings on this list, which is not to say that all three of these songs do not belong on this list.

     The issue is certainly not that I do not have more than 31 tracks on my Halloween playlist, there is more music on there now than can actually be played in a single Halloween night, but some of them are different versions of the same song (at least 3 versions of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", 3 of "The Phantom of the Opera", 2 "Gravity Falls", etc), and it grows each year ("Wellington Paranormal" is a new addition this year, as I was unaware of the show's existence prior).

     Still, there are more than 31 different pieces, even discounting remixes and covers, but while some songs may be good enough to actually play on the list, are they good enough to make it into a list of 31, or do they fall into the "Rock Lobster" category? 

     "Rock Lobster" category? 

     Yes, "Rock Lobster" Category.

     That term refers to the song by the B-52's that I have seen show up on countless Halloween compilation CDs despite if being about the beach and sea life and not at all anything even remotely to do with Halloween, or ghosts, or monsters, or death, or anything even remotely creepy! Why does it make it onto Halloween discs? I assume it is because the vocals and synthesizer in it do sounds like they belong in a spooky song. I expect that if I originally heard this song in a foreign language, I would think it was something creepy, and so I put songs in the "Rock Lobster" category if they either have what sounds like a Halloween-adjacent title or have a spooky sound despite the lyrics not being spooky.

     So do I put "Rock Lobster" songs on this list? Does Weezer's "Haunt You Every Day" really count as "Spooky"? What about Shiny Toy Guns' "Ghost Town"? 

     What about other novelty songs that haven't made it so far? "Purple People Eater?" "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"? "Li'l Red Riding Hood"?

     Then there are all the other theme songs that are on my list, but do they belong on this one? The themes to "Blade Runner", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Army or Darkness", "Halloween", "Friday the 13th", and "Harry Potter" are all on my actual playlist, but if I had to cut it down to 31, would any of them make it?

     Anyway, yeah, it's hard to narrow it down to just the 31 I want to share with you, so I figured why not go with something you may not have heard before, and that is why our penultimate song on this list is another No More King's song.

     According to Wikipedia, "The Living Dead" is from their album "III", which I find weird because I have it off of a disc called "1973 "Linton Edition"", which seems to have the exact same track list as "III", and I actually cannot seem to find any reference to the CD I have, which was purchased through the official No More Kings site, online at all. Which is weird.

     Anyway, "The Living Dead" is sung from the point of view of a zombie apocalypse survivor who has reached a point in his post apocalyptic existence where the shambling corpses of former humanity just annoys him due to how much noise they make.

     This song gives me some real Billy Joel circa "My Life" vibes, but I don't know if that is intentional or not; it very easily could be.

     I promise that this is the last zombie themed song on this list... being that the next part is the last one, that should be an easy promise to keep.

31 Days of "Spooky" Music Day 29: The Cockroach That Ate Cincinatti

      Today's choice is a silly love letter to horror movies that blends a lot of the stereotypical sounds from old horror and science fiction film soundtracks with lyrics paying homage to those very films. 

     The song itself is not actually about a giant cockroach eating a city, but about the singer watching a film about said creature, and their general love of those films, "If the subject is horror, I've got to see more or I won't be contented all night". As someone who used to really love horror films (I am not as into horror as I once was, perhaps a side effect of the inevitability of death coming ever nearer, or maybe just a reaction to all the real horrors in the world), I can completely relate to the singer's sentiments.

     I grew up watching some of the films that likely inspired this song, like "The Fly", "The Food of the Gods", "The War of the Worlds", "Ben" (actually specifically mentioned in the song), "King Kong", Godzilla", and so on. 

     Now the song is from 1973, and there are a couple... shall we say culturally inappropriate references in it that have not aged well over the last half a century, and those may be hard turn-offs for some people, but, and this may just be my privilege showing, I accept those as part of what you are going to run into whenever you are exposing yourself to creations from the past.

     You know what I just found out while writing this? There was a film released in 1996 called "The Cockroach That Ate Cincinatti". Sadly, it does not appear to be about a city-devouring insect, but I thought that it was an interesting discovery. 

     Also interesting (to me anyway) is that the song's performers seem to have released it under two different names. I  have it as being by "Rose & The Arrangement", but it seems the same recording is also released as being performed by "Possum".

There does not seem to be an official video (and given the age, I would not expect there to be), but this one has accompanying visuals that I find very appropriate (although "The Exorcist" is a bit too recent to fit in with the films the song is about):

31 Days of "Spooky" Music Day 28: "The X-Files" Theme

      "The X-Files" is a bit of a rarity. it is a genre series that ran for a long time (arguably longer than it should have), but was also firmly set in a reality like our own. There was no traveling through time like "Doctor Who" or space like the various "Star Trek" series, just these two FBI agents trying to solve the mysteries of monsters, ghosts, and aliens in our own world, and on network TV to boot (none of this syndication stuff that shows like "Friday the 13th: the Series" had to work with).

     Easily as iconic as Mulder or Scully is the show's theme song. Just play the first few bars of it (or even just the whistle), and any fan of the show will know it as well as they would other iconic themes like "Star Trek", "Star Wars", or "The Twilight Zone". It's a calmer theme than some of the others on this list, but then "The X-Files" was frequently a pretty slow-moving show. 

     Calm or not, the theme still perfectly sets you up for whatever eerie experience the show was about to serve up to you.

     Here is the theme as it appeared in the show's opening:

     Of course if you want something you can dance to, there's this: 

      Or this:

     Or there is the official Dust Brothers remix from the "Fight The Future" soundtrack:

     Want something a little prettier? How about the theme played on violin and piano:

31 Days of "Spooky" Music Day 27: Thriller

     Okay, so let me start by saying that I totally understand that for a lot of people Michael Jackson is off the menu, and I get that. I am not going to have a long discussion about what he may have done and why he may have done it, so if you want to bail on this post now, I do not blame you; there will be another song tomorrow, and I hope you'll swing back by then.

      Having grown up in the 80's and 90's, Michael Jackson is as much a part of my youth as VHS players and the NES, and I would say that the song "Thriller" (or more specifically, the video) was as influential to the direction my tastes would take as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"  or Stephen King. They actually showed us the "Thriller" video (and the accompanying Making-Of) in school. I  must have been in the first grade and they absolutely sat us down in that brightly lit, yellow painted classroom and showed us the full length video for "Thriller".

     I think that part of the point of showing it to us in school was to show us that movie monsters were all fake, and showing us a (honestly still quite interesting) documentary approximately twice as long as the actual mini-movie it was about would demystify how monsters like those are created.

     It is my memory that everyone pretty much liked it (everyone whose parents signed permission slips anyway, it may have been the 80's, but there were stills standards), but I know I did, and it totally set me on the road to my love of zombies to this day (you may have noticed a few zombie themed tunes on my list). Without "Thriller" I would likely have never become interested in "Of The Dead" films, or even the (IMO) lesser "Return of the Living Dead" films, would possibly have never read comics like "Zombie World" or "The Walking Dead", and may never have been inspired to write "Mallville: A Journal of the Zombie Apocalypse" a decade ago. As you may be able to tell, this song is important to me.

     What more could you really ask for in a song? It has a fantastic sound and beat, creepy lyrics, and even Vincent freakin' Price (although that "terrorize y'alls neighbourhood" line has always bugged me). Add to that a video directed by John Landis (another figure with some serious controversy on him, actually) stuffed full of fabulously choreographed zombies and a perhaps less fabulous wolf transformation for Michael Jackson, and you have a song that is still a Halloween classic going on 40 years later (unless of course who are someone who has taken MJ off your personal menu).

     Here is that full length video that I watched as a wee child in that classroom oh so many years ago:

     And here is the making of video:

And here is Vincent Price performing (a perhaps slightly rushed version of) the "Thriller" rap for Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show:

     That laugh though... man.

31 Days of "Spooky" Music Day 26: Goodnight Moon

      Yes, believe it or not, I am choosing another proper song today; not a theme song or a novelty song, and that song is "Goodnight Moon" by Shivaree (not to be confused with the book of the same name by Margaret Wise Brown, or the YouTube ASMR channel). While I do actually have the album "I Oughtta Give You A Shot In The Head For Making Me Live In This Dump" that the album comes from, I , like probably a lot of people, first heard it as part of the soundtrack from the "Kill Bill" movies.

     Tarantino films pretty consistently have solid soundtracks, don't they?

     From the moody guitar to the lovely vocals, the song tells us to the story of a person who is either truly being menaced by evil forces or is just really, really afraid of being alone in the dark. Either way the song belongs on your Halloween playlist, regardless of what you are using it for.

     It's kind of a shame the group was a bit of a one hit wonder, because that first album of theirs is good. I should look for some of their other ones; I am particularly interested in their cover album, "Tainted Love: Mating Calls and Fight Songs" because I really do like covers done in drastically different styles from the original.

    Here is the original album version of the song:     

     And here's a nice live version:

31 Days of "Spooky" Music Day 25: "Doctor Who" Theme

      Okay, so there's nothing particularly "spooky" sci-fi TV heavy hitter "Doctor Who" (although it certainly can be when the writers put their minds to it), but its theme is absolutely iconic and anywhere fro beautiful to forebodingly epic, depending on which version you are listening to.

     I was going to say that this is another song perhaps better suited to the soundtrack for trick or treaters, but I an listening to one of the videos I am linking to below as I write this, and I think you could actually dance to this, or at least some versions of it.

     Like a lot of people, this is a series that I bring up with my from childhood, growing up watching it at 7:30 pm every night on a local PBS station (and they would play a full storyline on Saturday nights, but I generally fell asleep during it).

     If you are interested, my favourite Doctors are Tom Baker (my first Doctor, and the most memorable one of my childhood) and David Tennant (who, kind of like how Johnny Depp just plays some version of his Hunter S. Thompson in everything, basically just still plays his version of the Doctor in most everything he is cast in). 

     And while I am saying divisive things, I'll weigh in on the current Doctor as well. I think Jodie Whittaker is a fantastic actress, I loved her in "Attack the Block" and "Broadchurch", and I think she could be a great Doctor if the writers could just sort themselves out. Matt Smith had a similar problem his first series, but they pretty much sorted it out by his second, meanwhile Whittaker is entering her last year in the role and they still have not figured out how to use her well (all my opinion, obviously). 

     Anyway, enough hot takes. How about some music?

     I was going to find a number of versions of the theme song, but then I found that The 1-CrazyBunny had already combined them into a nearly 40 minute compilation, so let's just put that here:

     In case you don't think the song is dance-to-able in any of its normal forms, here is a version you can perhaps groove to a little better:

     This is not actually on my playlist, but maybe it should be. It's a weird oddity of a song that I have wondered about since I saw the video for "Doctorin' the TARDIS" as a child. I don't know if the song separated from its video really conveys all the weirdness of it though: