TERROR TRAX: A Lucky 13 for Halloween

TERROR TRAX: A Lucky 13 for Halloween
By Matt Ashare
 

SCARY MONSTER OR SUPER FREAK: Bowie, 1980

The advent of on-line digital music sites like Spotify and Soundcloud has made it ridiculously easy to program a playlist for just about any occasion. But half the fun of creating a perfect mix — at least for me — has always been about the process: the painstaking perusal of dozens of potentially appropriate tunes that can, if you're lucky, lead to dark, half-forgotten corners of a record collection; the mental trips off the beaten path to at least a couple of tracks that may just surprise a few friends; and, as deadline looms, the agonizing decisions that go into picking one tune over another as the winnowing out process takes hold.
    Halloween tends to be one of the more fecund opportunities for mixing things up, so to speak, because flirting with the dark side has been part of rock 'n' roll's DNA going all the way back to Robert Johnson's notorious deal with the devil at the mystical crossroads where good meets evil. So, while it's easy enough to settle for the stock scares of perennial favorites like Bobby "Boris" Pickett's novelty single "Monster Mash"— not to mention the themes from The Addams Family and/or The Munsters — there's a lot more fiendish fun to be found in fashioning a personalized, idiosyncratic Halloween playlist, whether it begins with the clang-and-bang of AC/DC's "Hell's Bells," or the playful innuendo of Bow Wow Wow's version of the Strangelove's 1965 hit "I Want Candy."
    Here's my list of 13 picks for this year's All Hallow's Eve, any one of which could easily be the starting point for dozens of other potential playlists. . .

1) Nina Simone, "I Put a Spell on You" (1965). These days, the original 1956 version of this tune by r&b shouter Screamin' Jay Hawkins tends to get more play than Simone's smoother, smokier, and, yes, spookier jazz-inflected cover, which was the title track of an album she released in 1965. And that's no surprise: Hawkins, who was famous for emerging from a coffin on stage, pretty much made a career out of playing this Halloween favorite to death. No disrespect to Hawkins, but Simone's more nuanced, orchestrated take on the tune has just the right balance of heated thrills and cold chills to ease into an evening of tricks and treats. Plus, I do love a good cover. . . "I Put a Spell on You" live

2) Sonic Youth, "Hallowe'en" (1985). If you only know the band from their post-"Goo" incarnation, then this may seem like an abrupt segue from Simone. But early on – and 1985's haunting Bad Moon Rising was essentially the band's first studio album – Sonic Youth were as interested in exploring ethereal tones and fractured textures as they were in generating discordant feedback and churning distortion. Bassist Kim Gordon handles the vocals here, narcotically reciting what appear to be stream-of-consciousness lyrics about something kinda creepy, leaving Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo to create quiet tension with spare guitar chordings. I generally avoid any Halloween song with "Halloween" in the title – and there are plenty — but the apostrophe earns this track an exemption. "Hallowe'en"

3) Pixies, "Wave of Mutilation" (1989). Not only were the Pixies one of the crucial bands who provided a bridge between the post-punk experiments of Sonic Youth and the explosive dynamics of Nirvana's Nevermind, but they did so with an abiding love for sci-fi surf riffage and frontman Black Francis' twisted fascination with the macabre. It's never really clear what the "wave of mutilation" he's conjured up here embodies, but if it's fear of the unknown he's going for, he nails it. "Wave of Mutilation"

4) Rob Zombie, "Living Dead Girl" (1989). Sure, there are plenty of Rob Zombie/White Zombie tunes to chose from this time of year. But this b-movie, disco-metal throwdown, from Zombie's first solo album, Hellbilly Deluxe, has everything you could really want from a good gross-out — "cemetery things," "hunchback juice," and, of course, a "living dead girl." "Living Dead Girl" video

5) Ozzy Osbourne, "Bark at the Moon" (1983). Sadly, the Ozman didn't get around to recording this headbanger until after the death of his original guitarist, Randy Rhoades. But you really can't beat the demonic laughter that follows the first chorus, or lyrics like "Howling in shadows/Living in a lunar spell/He finds his heaven/Spewing from the mouth of hell," or the cheesy wolfman suit he's wearing on the cover of the album. "Bark at the Moon"

6) Kiss, "Creatures of the Night" (1982). It's hard to go wrong with Kiss, especially if you stick to their first six albums — before they started dropping original members and toying with taking the make-up off. I enjoy going out on a limb from time to time, so this Halloween I'm taking a bit of a longshot with thr hard-hitting title track from their 10th studio disc, recorded after two original members (drummer Peter Criss and guitarist Ace Frehley had been replaced, even though Ace is still pictured on the cover). "Ohhhhh, we're creatures of the night. . . yeah!" "Creatures of the Night"

7) Concrete Blonde, "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" (1990). Yeah, I'd pretty much forgotten about this group of LA rockers, who got their start on Sunset Strip's hair-metal scene in the ’80s before transitioning to alt-rock lightweights in 2001. But then I remembered this stomping piece of hard-rock candy and, while zombies do appear to be taking over of late, vampires are still very much in vogue. . . "Bloodletting" video

8) Bauhaus, "Bela Lugosi's Dead" (1979). While we're on the subject of vampires. . . This nine-minute-plus epic by the British band more or less created the idea of goth-rock. Like an undead Bowie, Peter Murphy deploys a dark, stoic croon as he repeats "I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead," and recites dark poetry over a stark backdrop of ticking-timebomb drums, and an echoey descending guitar riff that circles ominously around him for pretty much the duration of this gloom tune. "Bela Lugosi's Dead" original single

9) David Bowie, "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)" (1980). It wouldn't be fair to include Bauhaus, who famously recorded a note-for-note cover of "Ziggy Stardust," without also bringing Bowie into the mix. By 1980, the man who fell to Earth was looking less like a scary glammed-up monster than a white-faced super creep, but the art-damaged, new-wave-y title track from the last entry in his "Berlin Trilogy" seems to be more about the rabid fans who'd get all made up like Herr Stardust and swarm like zombies to his concerts in the ‘70s than anything else. Or maybe it was his comment on goth-rockers like Bauhaus. . . Either way, it does the trick. "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)"

10) The Cramps, "TV Set" (1984). Ok, so it's also hard to go wrong with the Cramps. Whether you're looking for werewolves, creatures from the black lagoon, or zombie dances, their catalogue pretty much covers all the horror-film basics. The self-proclaimed "hottest thing from the north to come out of the south" fused punk attitude and garage-rock trashiness into a brand of psychobilly that was less about speed and thrash than finding a ghoulish groove. This track, from the band's debut full-length (Songs the Lord Taught Us), finds the late Lux Interior in psychotic reaction mode, placing parts of his dismembered beloved inside a TV set so he can watch her, I suppose. Enough said. "TV Set"

11) Misfits, "Skulls" (1982). Another charming love song, this Misfits classic from the horror-core band's debut Walk Among Us, finds a young Glenn Danzig (long before he dropped the Glenn), shouting in that deep growl of his, "I want your skull/I need your skull," against a noisy backdrop of chainsaw guitars and pounding drums. It's a fast blast of zombie-inspired punk that's the perfect lead into. . . "Skulls"

12) Social Distortion, "The Creeps (I Just Wanna Give You the)" (1983). Social Distortion frontman Mike Ness has mutated over the past three decades into a Johnny Cash-meets-the-Clash, hard-bitten survivor. But when Social D first emerged in ‘82, he was wearing black eye make-up, singing with a touch of a British accent, and doing his best to give anyone who wasn't in on the joke the creeps. This revved-up homage to the fear punks once had the power to inspire works quite well as a scare tactic for any ocassion. Trust me. . . "The Creeps"

13) Frank Sinatra, "That Old Black Magic" (1961). Sinatra dug this tune by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer so much he recorded it twice: once as a ballad during his Columbia years, and then again as a swinging number when he moved to Capitol in 1961. Think of it as a classic way to wind down things down sometime before dawn breaks and it's time for the creatures of the night to find a safe haven until next this time next year. "That Old Black Magic"