The True Story Behind "The Monster Mash"

I hate the song, but this is a great story from Billboard that explains how this bloody song is still around fifty years after it was first released.

Fifty years since its initial release, Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash" has long since entered the pantheon of holiday evergreens, the Halloween equivalent of "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer" or "Frosty The Snowman." This is in itself an impressive feat. The song's chart history is equally notable: After spending the last two weeks of October, 1962 -- just in time for Halloween -- at number one on the Billboard chart, the song re-charted in 1973 and hit the Top 10 once again -- except this time, it was in early August! As weird and inexplicable as that factoid is, however, it is not what inspires me to write about "Monster Mash.

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.

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