There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #1 – "The Rockin' Ghost" by Archie Bleyer (1956)

When I was a kid, I was told that Steve Allen was a genius. I was told this by Steve Allen himself. And I believed it.

In the ‘70s, the first things I knew about Steve Allen were those tidbits that my parents told me about him. He was a comedian, he started The Tonight Show in the 1950s and he also wrote the show’s theme music. (Being told this, I thought for years that Allen had written the music for the Johnny Carson version of the show, when in fact, that was Paul Anka.) After their input, I had to figure Allen out on my own, gathering information from his numerous guest appearances all over television. I would have to admit that I was usually entertained by him. Mr. Allen would take part in skits on variety shows or act in small roles on dramas and sitcoms, and I always liked him. He would show up on the Dean Martin Roasts and throw out a bunch of insults in the network-acceptable style and I would laugh along, whether I got the jokes or not. I thought Steve Allen was a pretty swell guy.

It was his appearances on talk shows like Carson, Cavett, or Griffin were where you could get to know an artist a little more personally. It was on talk shows that I first heard the term “renaissance man,” and it was always in conjunction with Steve Allen’s name. I would learn that he had written thousands of songs and put out dozens of albums. He had written numerous books, none of which I had ever seen in a bookstore. (But then again, I wasn’t looking for them there, was I?) And time and again on many of these talk appearances, I would be reminded that Allen was a true genius and, yes, a renaissance man.

The moment where the genius label really stuck in my mind with Steve Allen was from watching a show on PBS called Meeting of Minds. Created and written by Allen, Steve served as the congenial host to three or four historical figures each episode (played often by well-known Hollywood actors, including Allen’s wife, Jayne Meadows... yay, nepotism). Allen and the historical figures would cross the barriers of time to discuss all manner of subjects, always pertaining to the areas for which each respective figure on the show was famous. The show was smart, very informative, and Allen was quite wise to never allow a character to get too far from their own quotes when discussing their beliefs and philosophies. I not only watched the show on my own when it aired on PBS, but even watched a few episodes in Social Studies at school, as I had a teacher who thought the series was a marvelous teaching tool.

How could I not be impressed by a man who supported his own bid as a genius by surrounding himself with those of a like mind from past centuries? Steve Allen seemed a pretty sharp cookie to me. By all accounts, he probably was the genius that he and his wife liked to convince everyone he was, but then I discovered his one fatal flaw... He liked to disparage rock ‘n’ roll lyrics.

Allen used to do a bit back in the 1950s during rock ‘n’ roll’s original heyday with various songs, where he would read out the lyrics, sometimes doo wop-oriented so that the lines were comprised of nonsense syllables, and make the tongue-in-cheek case for rock ‘n’ roll being the reason that there were no longer any great poets at large at the time because they were all employed as lyricists. Given that this time was also that of the beat poets, and that Allen's musical playground seemed to belong at least tangentially to that of cool school jazz, I can't imagine he had not been exposed to the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others of the time. Sure enough, he not only had Jack Kerouac as a guest on his show in the late '50s, but he also recorded an entire record album with the man, where Jack read his own poetry while Allen tinkled along on piano. I'm not trying to say the beats and rock 'n' roll were inexorably entwined (they weren't; the beat movement was an intellectual exercise chiefly created by elitists, whereas rock 'n' roll was its exact opposite), but there was enough crossover in attitude that some common ground was quite apparent.

And yet, Allen was a real square, daddy-o, when it came to the rock 'n' roll of his time. It didn't matter that he premiered many famous rock artists on his shows; he accepted them as acts, but like to put them through the ringer, especially Elvis Presley. His disdain is most apparent in a clip from his show where he reads the words to Sweet Gene Vincent's seminal rockabilly hit, Be-Bop-A-Lula. Allen launches into the lyrics, but somehow gets the actual title to the song incorrect each time he pronounces it, saying "Be-Bop-A-LUBE-A" instead, over and over. That single slip of a syllable reveals the errant man behind the genius label, a man who decided to take a swing at a supremely easy target but displayed his own prejudices and ignorance at the same time. Not that his audience of the time cared; they laughed along all the same, each one probably attempting futilely to come to grips on their own terms with the teenage delinquent madness that was overtaking pop culture in the late '50s.

Back to the late '70s...

I did not see any of Allen's 1950s performances of this routine until years later, but I did grow up seeing him perform variations on his popular music bit on several shows in the '70s and early '80s. He went after Donna Summer's Hot Stuff when he was given a new shot at a variety show in 1980 (that only lasted 6 episodes, which is possibly telling that his style no longer matched that of the times). Most memorable to me was his appearance on the Sha Na Na show, which my brothers and I watched fairly religiously on Saturday afternoons when it aired on KTVA, our local CBS affiliate. Surrounded by the members of the famous band actually named after the lyrics within the song he was roasting (which was meant to be ironic on some level), Allen set about reading off the words to Get a Job, a '50s doo wop stable originally released by The Silhouettes. He would steadily and emotionlessly read out each “mum mum mum,” "sha na na" and “yip yip yip” to make his case, and then solemnly closed his book almost like a hymnal when he was finished.

At the time, I was wrestling with whether I actually found the antics on the Sha Na Na show funny anymore, my comedic tastes having jumped to George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Steve Martin somewhere in the middle of the show's run. (Call it the Saturday Night Live Influenza...) As a teenager, I was drifting away from the complacency that allowed me to accept the first few years of Garry Marshall's Happy Days as solid entertainment into a rebelliousness that would not allow me to accept the last few sorry (and too self aware) seasons of the show. (The same went for Laverne and Shirley, but I really wrestled with the last couple of seasons of Mork and Mindy, which had the same expected Marshall drop in quality, but did have both Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters making things worthwhile in the fourth and last season.) In the end, my taste for the bland humor of the syndicated '50s greaser show with Bowser and his buddies was waning by the time Allen showed up in 1979.

For me then, around the general time that I was getting hard into rock music myself, to see a man in his late fifties – a man that I had otherwise been convinced was no less than a genius not long before – to take a dive into such an unfunny and out of place bit was astounding to me. I started to doubt his once formerly divine status in my mind. Was he really a genius? How could someone so smart be so utterly blind to how great that early rock ‘n’ roll music was? What was his problem? What did he do when Bob Dylan went electric a few years later and there was a genuine poet at play in the fields of rock? Did he ever do the same routine to All Along the Watchtower or Tangled Up in Blue? But while it seems like overnight now, it took a few times for me to see Allen repeat this routine on other shows (it was one of his standard bits) before I pretty much wrote off Mr. Steve Allen as any sort of a genius.

And so it went until the early ‘90s. Steve Allen was no longer much of anything in my mind; just another actor, like so many others, trying to hang on in a decade far past his prime. He had squandered his genius on pettiness, I thought, though I was the one who had not followed through on my own research. I had not taken into account the man's own discography. I had not sought out any of his records to find out if he had a leg to stand on in this debate. Or whether he had created music equally as insipid (on the surface) as the rock songs he was mocking.

In those early '90s, Comedy Channel (soon to be Central) began running old episodes of his original TV series, The Steve Allen Show, I finally got to see the man in his prime, and I was deeply impressed. He was truly original in his comedy and broke incredible ground with his gags, stunts, writing, and the format of his show. He surrounded himself with incredible, (then) young comedians like Louis Nye, Don Knotts, Tom Poston, and Pat Harrington, and many bits on the show became national water cooler fodder. And as I mentioned earlier, Allen also broke many early rock artists first on his show, despite how he felt about the music himself. Most of all, there was a steady air of cocksureness about his demeanor; the type of attitude that allows a performer to consistently walk a tightrope when performing for the public, often trying new and astounding things before their eye. (However, it is the same demeanor that allowed him to pull his creaky rock lyrics routine in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, so there is a downside to such bravado.)

Let’s cut to today...

Now, I did not want to start my new Halloween mixtape – that I am calling There Must Be Some Mixtape this year – with a full bio of Steve Allen, and I don’t believe that I have gotten anywhere near that at all. Rather, I felt it was important to set the stage for how the man once deeply impressed me in my youth, then broke my heart (and mind) with his truly dopey reaction to another art form, but then started to crawl back into my good graces for the rest of eternity. And that spot within my good graces was all because of one song...

No, it was not This Could Be the Start of Something Big, perhaps Allen's most famous composition of his supposed 8,500 songs, and the one that became (in its instrumental version) the original Tonight Show theme. Over the past couple of decades, I have come into the possession of a few of Allen’s old LPs, and I found out what he preferred over the too childish rock ‘n’ roll of his day. The music is uniformly jazzy and it swings, and the pervading sense is one of '50s suburban cool, even if there was nothing remotely cool about suburbia in the '50s. That is, unless you were three martinis in at a cocktail party, and then you were probably having a pretty good time. And that is kind of where Allen's records end up for me, stacked up next to Ferrante and Teicher and The Three Suns. (And I have a lot more albums by those last two groups now than I do of Allen.)

But nowhere on those albums resides the song in discussion (finally) today... The Rockin' Ghost. For that song, we have to go to another figure, one Archie Bleyer, a bandleader whose career began in the 1930s and ran up until his days as a record executive in the mid-1960s. Bleyer's band had a few big hits, like the original version of Hernando's Hideaway (which peaked at #2 on the charts) and a cover of the Ames Bros.' The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane (which hit #26). He became Arthur Godfrey's right hand guy in the late '40s and started his own label, Cadence, in 1952. With Cadence, he broke the Everly Brothers, who went on to massive success, and he was also the first producer to record Link Wray, though he only ever released the amazing, feedback classic Rumble before send Wray on his way to other label.

The nice thing about having your own studio is that you can release your own music if you are so inclined. In 1956, Archie Bleyer took a song written by Mr. Steve Allen and Ira Lee (I am unable to find confirmation of which one wrote the music or the lyrics), put it through his own arrangement with his big band, and inadvertently released one of my very favorite Halloween songs of all time... The Rockin' Ghost. In fact, it may be in my Top Five...

The Rockin’ Ghost
(Steve Allen – Ira Lee)

“On a night when you
Are out on a lark
All alone and so
Afraid of the dark
That's the time you may
Encounter your host
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

When the winds are
Blowing up in the trees
And you're feeling
Kind of weak in the knees
Gloom will follow you
From pillar to post
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

Luckily if you
Want him to get going
All you do is say
‘I dig you the most,
Ghost!’

Then you'll notice
He'll be tipping his hat
'Cause he really is
The swingingest cat
When he hears you say
‘I dig you the most’
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[whistle break]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[horn break]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

[horn break 2]

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost

Luckily if you
Want him to get going
All you do is say
‘I dig you the most,
Ghost!’

Then you'll notice
He'll be tipping his hat
'Cause he really is
The swingingest cat
When he hears you say
"I dig you the most!"
(Who?)
The rockin’ ghost!

The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost
The rockin' ghost...

Now, if you were not grooving in your seat, wiggling around and tapping your toes and fingers to The Rockin' Ghost, then there is nothing that I can do for you. If you were not caught up in the smooth vocals delivering those charming lyrics, then you need a blood transfusion and probably some form of brain surgery. You are clearly broken inside. You need to be expunged from the records and put out of your utter misery.

When I first encountered this song a few years ago when I ran into it by accident on a mixtape dropped by someone else on the WFMU website, my jaw dropped. If raised the question that comes to me so often when I find something that so perfectly captures my mindset and my own musical tastes... "How have I lived this far without this song in my life?"

Well, the song was then in my life, but it wasn't until I decided to find some artwork for the song to go with my file in iTunes that I saw the songwriting credits for the song: Steve Allen and Ira Lee. Searching about find several other references to Steve Allen having co-written the song, and so until I find a master list of all his compositions that can prove it otherwise, I am assuming it is the same man. But the style of the music is certainly within Allen's own range, and the cool jazz leanings of both the music and some of the key words within speak to Allen's sensibilities. The phrase "Gloom will follow you from pillar to post," certainly the most deftly descriptive line in the lyrics, certainly has a sense of Mr. High-IQ Allen about it.

The questions that the song leads to further down the line, though, make me wonder at Allen and Lee's intentions with the song. If Allen was such a hater of rock music, why would he try so hard with a title that had Rockin' in the title when so many current songs of the day (1956) were reaching for the audience in the same way? Was it for an easy hit? The song itself is nowhere close to rock 'n' roll, so the title itself is unnecessary in that regard, expect perhaps to set the record purchaser off balance. It could have easily just been called (and more accurately) The Swingin' Ghost, as the song is quite clearly a jazz swing tune delivered by a big band orchestra, and has the horn charts and breezy singing to mark it as such. And yet, The Swingin' Ghost just doesn't quite have the right sound to it, especially when sung in quick succession several times, whereas The Rockin' Ghost does swing a bit more in repetition.

Besides, the real strength of Bleyer's arrangement of the music is that the whistle motif established early on in the song gives a real sense of ghostliness and comedic lightness that play very well with the listener. Leading into this is a pulsing organ sound creating the effect of a spooky walk through the dark. The song builds through a pair of repeated horn breaks leading to the song's climax but never lets us escape from the meeting with the ghost and its odd whistle effect and the pulse of the organ. Compare this to a later version by the popular singing group, The Modernaires, where the whistle is replaced by a lighter flute sound and the organ is non-existent, though the arrangement there leads to a much larger and more traditional big band climax with vocals and horns blaring to the last note. It's still a fun, fine version of the song, but has nowhere near the appeal or the fun of the Bleyer version (even when they pull out a not entirely successful Boris Karloff imitation late in the song). 

But the key side effect of discovering this song was co-written by Steve Allen was that I finally had my real proof that there was a real genius within him after all. The song may not have lyrics sharp enough to pass a lampooning from Mr. Steve Allen himself, but the words flow easily and set the character up in a minimalist fashion that tell us what he is (a ghost, who may appear when you are out on a lark in the dark) and how to get him to leave you alone in a polite fashion (tell him that you "dig him the most" and then he tips his hat and is on his way). What doesn't get imparted is exactly why he is "rockin'" or "the swingingest" but what is a ghost without a little bit of mystery left over? And everything is made perfect when there is that slight pause after the vocalists sing "I dig you the most..." and then punctuate the bridge by almost shouting out the final word, "Ghost!"

And what is a genius without the ability to occasionally get a little too comfortable with that status now and then and really stink up the joint? I saw Steve Allen do that in my teenage years and wrote him off for a while, but then I came around to him again in my later years. And all it took was a little rockin' ghost to float into my ear canal and never freakin' leave for the next dozen years...