Behind the Track Halloween Special: "Monster Mash" — Bobby "Boris" Pickett

Everybody can do the voice.

You know the one. Down low in the throat, half mad scientist, half Boris Karloff: "I was working in the lab, late one night..." Say it at any Halloween party in America and three people will answer you before you reach the end of the line. The song is only three minutes long, and more than sixty years after it was recorded, it still shows up every October like it pays rent.

Here's the part I love: the man singing it wasn't really a singer. He was an actor who could do a voice.

Bobby Pickett wanted to be in movies. By day he went to auditions in Los Angeles; by night he sang with a band called the Cordials to pay the bills. One night, doing the Diamonds' "Little Darlin'," he delivered the little spoken monologue in the middle in his Karloff impression — the voice of Frankenstein's monster himself. The crowd went nuts for it. His bandmate Lenny Capizzi took him aside and told him the truth: forget the rest of the act, Bobby. That voice is the act.

So Pickett and Capizzi sat down and built a song around it. The dance craze of the moment was the Mashed Potato, so they made a monster version of it — the Monster Mash, danced with the same footwork and big stiff Frankenstein arms. A producer named Gary Paxton, who'd already had a novelty hit with "Alley Oop," agreed to record it after the major labels wanted nothing to do with it. Paxton put it out on his own little label, Garpax, in August of 1962.

The whole record was made out of spare parts, and I mean that as the highest compliment. The backing singers — Johnny MacRae, Rickie Page, and Paxton himself — were billed as the Crypt-Kickers, after the band in the song. The sound effects were pure kitchen-table engineering. That creaking coffin lid? A rusty nail being pulled out of a board. The bubbling cauldron? Somebody blowing through a straw into a glass of water. The rattling chains? Chains, dropped on a tile floor. Pickett didn't just do Karloff, either. Listen close and you'll hear him do Bela Lugosi's Dracula — "Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?" — and a Peter Lorre–style Igor for good measure. Three horror legends in one three-minute record, and Pickett played all of them.

Now here's a piece of music trivia you've probably heard, and it's wrong — which is exactly what this series is for. People will tell you Leon Russell played piano on "Monster Mash." He didn't. Pickett himself cleared it up: Russell showed up late to the session, and by the time he arrived the song was already finished. He played on the record's flip side instead. One of the most repeated "facts" about the record, and the man who sang it spent years politely correcting it.

The record hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 20, 1962, and stayed there two weeks — landing, perfectly, right on top of Halloween. Over in England, the BBC banned it. Their verdict: "too morbid." A song about monsters throwing a dance party, too morbid for British radio.

And then the song did what its subject matter would suggest. It refused to stay dead. It crept back onto the charts in 1970. In 1973 it came all the way back — number ten in America, and number three in Britain, where the BBC's ban quietly became the best advertising the record ever got. That same year the 1970 reissue was certified gold, a million copies sold. In 2021, nearly sixty years after Pickett recorded it in a shoestring session, "Monster Mash" climbed back onto the Hot 100 again. By a recent count, it still earns around a million dollars a year in royalties. Pickett even cut a Christmas sequel that same first year, "Monster's Holiday," and it charted too — the man had one idea and it worked in every season.

So why does this one last when a thousand other novelty songs are forgotten? I think it's because there's no meanness in it. The monsters aren't coming to get anybody. They're throwing a party. The mad scientist's big move at the end of the song is to open the doors of the castle and invite "you, the living" to come join in. It's a Halloween song with its arms open. That's rarer than it sounds, and I suspect it's why grandparents, parents, and kids can all do the voice.

Speaking of Halloween: it starts early around here this year. Tonight at 8, right here on the blog, I begin a Countdown to Halloween — the five most haunted houses in the places I live and work, one each night through Halloween. Consider the Mash your invitation. The party's at my castle all week.

Want it on tap? "Monster Mash" is in my rotation on Amazon Music Unlimited — and if you're not on Prime yet, you can try it free and take the music along with it. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Prefer to watch or listen? This post is also a video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Smew4heMMlE