Just tell them BORIS SENT YOU!<\/p>\n
It had a white label.\u00c2\u00a0 At least that’s how I remember it.<\/p>\n
My mother bought our earliest 45s.\u00c2\u00a0 She got a kick out of "Big Girls Don’t Cry", "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" and "Purple People Eater".\u00c2\u00a0 But I bought "Loco-Motion" and "Monster Mash".<\/p>\n
It was before the Beatles.\u00c2\u00a0 But we were already addicted to radio.\u00c2\u00a0 I guess we found the stations when we twisted the dial looking for baseball games.<\/p>\n
77 WABC was my station.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, the hipper kids listened to 1010 WINS.\u00c2\u00a0 And WMCA was a city thing.\u00c2\u00a0 But I was positively mainstream.\u00c2\u00a0 It feels good to be a member of the group.\u00c2\u00a0 And on some level, I truly believed Bruce Morrow was my cousin.\u00c2\u00a0 And I was buddies with Dan Ingram and Scott Muni too!<\/p>\n
Buying a 45 wasn’t a casual thing.\u00c2\u00a0 You NEEDED IT!\u00c2\u00a0 One didn’t debate whether it had lasting value, whether you’d listen to it in two years, you needed it NOW!\u00c2\u00a0 It was an itch that needed to be scratched.<\/p>\n
And when one got home from the store, one extracted that thirty cent piece of vinyl from its thin paper sleeve and dropped it onto a contraption that looked positively primitive.\u00c2\u00a0 Not a turntable, but a RECORD PLAYER!\u00c2\u00a0 With a heavy tonearm, upon which you’d place dimes, pennies, SOMETIMES EVEN QUARTERS, to prevent records from skipping.<\/p>\n
And you wouldn’t listen from across the room, but close nearby.\u00c2\u00a0 Close enough that you could pick up the tonearm to listen to the record again.\u00c2\u00a0 And again.\u00c2\u00a0 And AGAIN!<\/p>\n
Oh, eventually you gave the flip side a spin, but it was almost always crap.\u00c2\u00a0 But you didn’t care, because it was about the TRACK!<\/p>\n
Why is "Monster Mash" such a great record?<\/p>\n
Oh, there’s the lyrics, the Boris Karloff imitation, but what infatuates one, what keeps you coming back, is the GROOVE!<\/p>\n
Written and cut almost instantly, "Monster Mash" is a masterpiece.\u00c2\u00a0 And will last longer than every Mariah Carey track ever cut.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a lark, not over-contemplated.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s got the genius of the early sixties in the grooves.\u00c2\u00a0 When it wasn’t for tomorrow, but just today.<\/p>\n
Bobby "Boris" Pickett might be gone, but his record will live on.<\/p>\n
Funny, if you contemplate legendary status, you don’t achieve it.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s only when you throw off restraint, do what feels good unrestricted, when pure inspiration is allowed to flourish, that you create something that reverberates forever.<\/p>\n
I’m listening to "Monster Mash" right now.\u00c2\u00a0 Over and over again, just like back in ’62.\u00c2\u00a0 When I’d just entered the fifth grade.\u00c2\u00a0 When I took the single to Keith’s house, and listened to it over and over while lying on his floor with the radiant heat.\u00c2\u00a0 Funny how when you hear these records you’re not reminded of a time back when, you’re jetted instantly right back to those days, they COME ALIVE!<\/p>\n
Excuse me while I resonate with who I used to be.\u00c2\u00a0 A boy whose life was changed when he heard a sound…<\/p>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just tell them BORIS SENT YOU! It had a white label.\u00c2\u00a0 At least that’s how I remember it. My mother bought our earliest 45s.\u00c2\u00a0 She got a kick out of "Big Girls Don’t Cry", "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" and "Purple People Eater".\u00c2\u00a0 But I bought "Loco-Motion" and "Monster Mash". It was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-the-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-cx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}