Month: October 2016

Although these days we think of Bobby “Boris” Pickett as a one-hit wonder, had you referred to him as one while he was alive, he would have corrected you. “Since I had two hits and a hit album, I exclude myself from that club,” Pickett fired back at a Washington Post reader when asked if he’d ever been to a “one-hit wonder party.”

The brains behind “Monster Mash,” which he wrote when he was just 24, Pickett would spend much of his music career at odds with the Halloween tune’s popularity. Even after recording a handful of chart-topping follow-up singles, raking in 22 acting credits and a feature film writing credit (which, granted, was for a small part of 1995’s Monster Mash: The Movie), he’d still be memorialized as the “Guy Lombardo of Halloween.”

It was an unlikely career trajectory for Pickett, whose real passion had always been acting. Pickett grew up in Somerville, Massachusetts, and as a young boy, he spent much of his time seeing horror movies at the local theater his father managed. After graduating from high school, he served three years in Korea in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Upon his return, Pickett finally made the westbound trek to Hollywood, where he performed in a band called The Cordials and would, from time to time, break into impersonations of famous movie actors. His impersonation of Frankenstein actor Boris Karloff was reportedly a major hit with audiences—and a turning point for Pickett’s career.

That audience response set the events that would lead to “Monster Mash” in motion during the summer of 1962. Cheesy monster movies were all the rage, and bandmate Lenny Capizzi encouraged Pickett to use his Karloff voice to mock them in a new novelty song. Capizzi joined him in the studio and together the two decided to send up yet another red-hot fad: The Mashed Potato dance move (see: Dee Dee Sharp’s chart-topping hit “Mashed Potato Time” from the debut album “It’s Mashed Potato Time”).

The eternal novelty tune took no time at all to create. “The song wrote itself in a half hour and it took less than a half hour to record it,” Pickett told The Washington Post. The accompanying album—simply titled The Original Monster Mash—contained 15 tracks in total and was released through the short-lived label Garpax, named after its producer and musician, Gary S. Paxton.

Though valiant in his efforts, Paxton was turned down by every major label he brought the tracks to. Pickett told Jan Alan Henderson that after this discouraging turn of events, Paxton drove around handing out copies of “Monster Mash” to radio DJs in Ventura and Fresno counties. That’s when things really started to turn around. “By the time Gary got back to Southern California, his phone had been lighting up like a Christmas tree,” Pickett said.

London Records, which had originally shot down Paxton’s guerrilla marketing efforts, eventually helped distribute the album when “Monster Mash” became a ubiquitous force on popular radio. By October 30, The Original Monster Mash had climbed the charts to become the number one hit record in the U.S., where it sold 1 million copies. A happy Halloween treat, indeed.

The rest of Pickett’s music career wouldn’t be quite as fruitful. While quick on his feet to leverage his cultural relevance with the “Monster Mash” follow-ups “Monster’s Holiday” and its B-side, “Monster Motion”—not to mention a couple of appearances on American Bandstand —he remained largely off the grid. He appeared in a slew of television commercials including ads for Lipton Tea, Schlitz beer, and “all the cigarette commercials (which hadn’t been banned yet),” according to Pickett. He also took small acting roles in television shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies (as a lieutenant) in 1967, Bonanza in 1969, and in a little-seen film called Deathmaster—about a vampire who lures in a devout following of hippies—in 1972. He popped up on the music scene again in 1975 with a Star Trek parody called “Star Drek” and, 10 years later, released yet another spin on his debut classic called “Monster Rap.” Neither song would measure up to Pickett’s much-buzzed-about debut hit.

All was not lost, though. Just like the Halloween monsters Pickett lampooned in his songs, “Monster Mash” never truly died. Year after year, that goofy Boris Karloff impression has come back to haunt the world with a new vigor. Nearly a decade after its release, the song inexplicably crept up the charts to the Top 10 (in August, no less). Three years later, in May 1973, it charted again. More recently, Paste reported that, in 2008, it climbed as high as No. 60 on the British charts. To date, the tune has been listened to over a combined 5 million times on Spotify.

“Let’s just say that it has paid the rent for 43 years,” Pickett told The Washington Post when asked whether the royalties from his single would be enough even if he never worked another day in his life. It wasn’t until 1989, under the direction of his longtime manager Stuart Hersh, that Pickett finally licensed the song for film and television use.

As for the secret to the tune’s longevity? The jury’s still out. “What fascinates me about ‘Monster Mash’ is the fact that this record, created to cash in on not one but two then-current fads, managed to transcend them both to stand on its own as a classic of sorts, even as those two fads evaporated into the mists of cultural obscurity,” Grammy-winning producer Steve Greenberg wrote in a Billboard tribute to the Halloween hit.

Hersh disagrees. He tells mental_floss that he believes the only thing dated about “Monster Mash” is the Mashed Potato fad that inspired it.

“There’s nothing in the song itself that’s dated; funny is funny,” Hersh says. “In my opinion, the song was so cute—it wasn’t like [Senator Bobby’s] novelty record, ‘Wild Thing,’ which has been forgotten. It was utilizing Boris Karloff and monsters. The longevity of monster movies and actors like Karloff have helped sustain it.”

Hersh adds that “everyone growing up” goes back to those original movie references, discovers “Monster Mash,” and, in turn, keeps the hit alive.

Which is not to say that the earworm has been met with universal praise. Pickett once said that Dick Clark didn’t particularly enjoy his music. “As much as he was amiable and friendly, [he] was not a big fan of the record. He thought it was kind of silly I think,” Pickett said. On several occasions—including during live performances—Pickett also made mention of his most high-profile nemesis: Elvis Presley. According to Pickett, The King called “Monster Mash” “the dumbest thing he’d ever heard.”

Apart from its ubiquity in pop culture (see: Parks and Recreation, Hotel Transylvania 2, Silver Linings Playbook, True Blood, The Office, etc.), “Monster Mash” found new life in the 2000s as political protest. In 2004, Pickett spoke out against President George W. Bush’s environmental policies, renaming the track “Monster Slash.” He gave the lyrics a good retooling, too: “They did the forest slash / (He did the slash)/ It was brutally brash.” His 2005 rendering, “Climate Mash,” was an effort to combat global warming; it was downloaded almost 500,000 times during Halloween 2005 alone, according to The Guardian.

Pickett never stopped performing. His last performance on record was in November 2006, five months before he died of leukemia. But as long as that graveyard smash gets play around Halloween, Pickett’s memory will live on.

Dating sucks. There’s no two ways about it. It sucks even more if you’re a backward snail—unless you happen to have some very dedicated friends. Scientists at the University of Nottingham are asking the public to help them find a very special date for Jeremy the garden snail, whose unique anatomy has so far made mating impossible.

Most garden snails are dextral—that is, their shells spiral to the right, and the rest of their anatomy follows suit. This works out for them when it comes time to get busy; snails are hermaphroditic, possessing both sperm transmitters and receptacles. They mate by lining up face-to-tail like a slow-moving yin-yang, then exchanging fluids. (Fair warning: this is a lot less cute than it sounds. There are projectiles involved.)

In order for this to work, each snail’s part must line up with its partner’s relevant regions. They find each other in the wild and all get down to it.

Well, all except for Jeremy, who was found on a Nottingham compost heap by a former biologist. Jeremy’s body is a mirror image of the average snail’s. His* shell curls to the left, and his parts don’t line up with anyone’s.

To Angus Davison and other snail researchers at the university, Jeremy’s predicament is more than just a sad situation. It’s an opportunity.

“I have been studying snails for more than 20 years, and I have never seen one of these before,” Davison said in a statement. “We are very keen to study the snail’s genetics to find out whether this is a result of a developmental glitch or whether this is a genuine inherited genetic trait.”

Davison has good reason to suspect Jeremy is genetically different. In a study published in February of 2016, Davison and his colleagues reported finding the gene associated with snail-shell spiral direction. They found that the same gene, called Formin, may also affect laterality (sidedness) in frogs and other vertebrates.

The best way to learn about Jeremy’s genes would be to examine his descendants. But, as previously discussed, Jeremy has none.

It’s not that snails can’t reproduce asexually, Davison says. They just don’t like it. “And from our perspective, the genetic data from offspring of two lefty snails would be far richer and more valuable to us.”

Which is where we come in. Davison and his colleagues are hoping to crowd-source a date for Jeremy. They’re asking snail lovers to keep an eye out for another lefty snail—the yin to Jeremy’s yang.

If the sheer generous pleasure of helping a mollusk find a mate is not enough for you, Davison is willing to sweeten the pot with a taste of fame. “There is a chance, because it is such a rare thing, that anyone who can find and identify another one of these snails may even find themselves named as a contributor on a research paper we publish in the future.”

So: keep your eyes peeled. If you think you’ve found one, you can email Davison directly at angus.davison@nottingham.ac.uk, or Tweet your discovery using the hashtag #snaillove.

*Jeremy’s researcher friends use he/him/his pronouns despite the snail’s obvious assemblage of genitalia.
 
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