There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #3 – Goolie Get-Together by Toadies (1995)

It's 1995, folks, and I've got big problems. I love Saturday morning cartoons and I especially love Saturday morning cartoon theme songs. I have some of the songs in various places in my record collection. I have the original album by The Archies from my youth, and I also have a pair of 7" singles by The Banana Splits that I ordered from Kellogg's cereal boxes when I was five years old. In the mid-'80s, the wisely named TVT Records put out a series of albums called Television's Greatest Hits, that were completely comprised of nothing but TV theme song after TV theme song. I had a few volumes of Television's Greatest Hits, and included on there were a great many scattered songs from Saturday morning cartoons, but still it wasn't what I really wanted. There was just something missing...

It turns out that the "something missing" was a compilation album entirely made up of new renditions of some favorite themes and occasional "in-show" songs from cartoons of my youth, all performed by current bands who may or may not have ever heard the songs they were being asked to perform. (More on that notion later in the piece. A-ha!... Yay, foreshadowing!)

And late in 1995, that very album arrived in the form of a CD and long-form video called Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits. Cartoon Network, naturally, was involved in the promotion of it all, which included an airing – on a Saturday morning, nonetheless – of an 90-minute-long show (with commercials; the album itself it 65 minutes in total) featuring videos for the songs on the CD. Producer-composer Ralph Sall supervised the project, and brought in a lot of big names from the alternative and punk music worlds to take part. Somehow, most of the pairings of musicians to cartoon theme work out surprisingly well. At their worst, they are merely passable with nothing truly egregious to my ears (Collective Soul sounding like they are staring straight ahead having to do the theme to The Bugaloos; face to face basically walking through the Popeye theme); at their best, the matches seemed to have been made in some form of pop culture heaven.

The Ramones riffing perfectly through Spider-Man., with Joey closing the song by singing the last syllable of the hero's name as "Ma-yan". (No, not Mayan...) Helmet thrashing forcefully through Gigantor. The Reverend Horton Heat picking his demented way through that complicated and heart-pounding Jonny Quest jazz score before switching gears halfway through to get all yokel goofy by singing Stop That Pigeon! And do you mean to tell me that honey-throated Matthew Sweet didn't sing the original theme song to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? You could fool me. I'd ask if we could go back and insert Sublime's dub remix of the Hong Kong Phooey theme onto the original cartoons, but it would mean wiping out Scatman Crothers' swell voice, and I couldn't bear a world with any less Scatman Crothers than we already have.

Deep in the Saturday Morning album, I discovered its true revelation. At the time, I and the rock radio world were in love with an eerie, hard-hitting song called Possum Kingdom from a band in Fort Worth, Texas called Toadies. (Not the Toadies...) Truthfully, when I first heard Possum Kingdom, the vocals reminded me so much of Robin Zander's way with a song that for about a month, I thought Cheap Trick was making a comeback. (The dynamic between rhythm section and guitar was very different than Trick's, so it couldn't have been. But still...) When I found out for real who the band was, I rushed out to buy their album Rubberneck, and if I haven't listened to the album around a thousand times, I must be pretty close. It is in regular rotation (if I really have a regular rotation anymore) on my music devices and computer, and I also follow the band's new stuff to this day.

But somehow, even with how much I enjoy Toadies' music – and with singing along to the repeated "Do you wanna die?" part of Possum Kingdom, a song that has served as the template for a hundred rumors – the band's cover of Goolie Get-Together just might be my favorite song by the group.

But first, for the uninitiated. the Groovie Goolies...

The success of transplanting the squeaky-clean students of Riverdale High from the comic pages to television meant that Filmation's The Archie Show (1968-69) would bounce around for another decade in one form or another. The show would stretch into The Archie Comedy Hour for 1969-70, and add Sabrina the Teenage Witch to its cast, giving her a showcase in her own segments within the hour. The following year, Sabrina got a title spin-off while the rest of the Archies carried on in their own series in other forms. But Sabrina shared the 1970-71 season with a gang of gag-spewing monsters called The Groovie Goolies. Once that show was a hit with the kiddies, in the following season, the Goolies split to get their own show for a single season, while Sabrina (like Archie before her) carried her own series for several years.

I said the Goolies had their own show for a single season, with only 16 half-hour episodes produced, but they were all over the Saturday morning schedule throughout most of the '70s in some form. It is always amazing how few episodes there are of some series that have carried on for decades sometimes. The Jetsons was a single-season show in 1962-63 with only 24 episodes produced, but that one season was shown for years on end. It wasn't until the mid-'80s that Hanna-Barbera finally produced another season of new stories, even with its continued success with a succeeding generation. Likewise, Jonny Quest ran its mere 26 episodes starting on September 18, 1964, exactly one week after I was born. If you are thinking, "Hey, Rik was a Saturday morning baby. No wonder he loves cartoons so much!", then you would be wrong. Jonny Quest premiered on a Friday night, facing a prime time audience with a focus on reaching adults, just as The Flintstones and The Jetsons did before it. That the kids lapped it up was pure gravy. By 1967, with the Saturday morning cartoon market finally in full bloom (it started small in the early '60s and built up stronger each year), Jonny Quest finally reached its long run before an audience mostly made up of kiddies, including myself.

Back to the Goolies, I probably watched every incarnation of every Archie series as a kid, and while the show is a little harder to watch today, I really loved the Groovie Goolies back then. Part of the appeal, of course, was my natural inclination towards monsters of all types. The Goolies were less of a family like the Munsters and Addamses, and more like a monster club operating out of a castle (Horrible Hall) on a desolate clifftop. That sounds ominous, and the trappings are meant to invoke a certain amount of spookiness, but the Goolies were just pure silliness. Even the name "Goolie" has been altered from that of "ghoul" – which means "An evil spirit or phantom, especially one supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies." [Oxford, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ghoul.] Hardly the fare of Saturday morning TV where there were likely censorship boards who looked out for these sort of things, and I suspect the softening of "ghoul" to "gool" renders the original definition a more babyish appearance and sound.

The main characters were Frankie, an obvious nod to the famous monster of Frankenstein; Drac, the scariest of the bunch (even some of his closeups kind of get to me today), but who serves as the primary and mostly congenial host of both Horrible Hall and the TV show; and Weirdo Wolfie, a slang-spewing hippie-werewolf hybrid who who wears shorts and sandals and rides a skateboard. There a couple dozen other supporting characters who pretty much run the gamut of monster archetypes, outside of a zombie, which would fall into the ghoul category for kiddie television and pretty much off limits. (Also, the zombie renaissance was just in its earliest stage as Night of the Living Dead only came out roughly two years earlier.)

The Groovie Goolies show was also very current in its style, as it mostly operated like a kid version of the immensely popular Laugh-In, then still enjoying its original run on TV. There was little in the way of connective tissue from one scene to the next, with little to no plot at all. Largely, the show was one blackout gag after another, broken up by a couple of musical performances in each episode. There were even specific sequences devoted to Laugh-In-style gags – Weird Window Time – but then the rest of the show would be one joke after the other. Other segments would theme schoolhouse lessons and bedtime stories, but they really were just more scenes for a series of quick gags. Like viewing old episodes of Laugh-In today, the hit-to-miss ratio of the Goolies show is pretty heavy on the miss side, but then again, the Goolies get an excuse for being designed to appeal solely to 7-year-olds. I dearly loved the stupid jokes as a kid, and I can easily soak them in now in the same way that I look back at my old Topps monster trading cards and still have fun reading the lame monster jokes. Or even listening to old Lenny Bruce "Mama, Mama" jokes...

Then there was the Goolies' music...

As I said, each episode of the Groovie Goolies contained two songs. The first song would be "sung" by an all-star monster band that contained Frankie, Drac and Wolfie. Frankie played the drums and xylophones using bones for drumsticks, Drac played a pipe organ a la The Phantom of the Opera, and Wolfie strummed a lyre-designed guitar. However, most of the poses and animation were used from song to song, so is little to no attempt toward having either their lip movements or musical actions match whatever song was being played. In fact, there is so much reused footage that occurs from show to show that you can probably shuffle the episodes, select four or five, and it is likely you will have seen all of the actual animation used for the entire series.

There were several other bands that played within Horrible Hall, which is why I said it feels more like a club where all the monsters hang out than anything. One of the other bands would usually be seen "playing" the second song in each episode, though sometimes the vocals for those second songs would sound exactly the vocals for the main monster band (though not in all cases, such as with the mummies, who had distinct vocals at times). As to those other bands, they were: The Mummies and the Puppies (featuring, quite literally, three mummy musicians and four dogs who also play along; the name is an obvious rock reference and shouldn't need elaboration); The Rolling Headstones, which are three gravestones that somehow play musical instruments; a three-skeleton group called the Bare Boned Band (too bad The Grateful Dead was taken); and finally, the Spirits of '76, a patriotic trio of colonial ghosts.

Now, the theme song to The Groovie Goolies was very well-known to me, as it would be eventually to my two little brothers as well, as they grew up with year after year of some version of the show. Here's how the original tune went in this clip from the show...

But there were several other tunes from The Groovie Goolies that stuck in my head as I came out of childhood and grew to be, well, nothing but a larger child. The chief earworm in the group was the howling call of "... and Weird-o Wolf-ie!!" which sprang from a song about the main monsters on the show called Frightening Frank, Dangerous Drac and Weirdo Wolfie aka The Monster Trio. (Sadly or not, I am still prone to saying that phrase at any given moment should something trigger it in my memories.) Another strong contender for my favorite as a kid was the song Chic-a-Boom. I remember the puppet theatre that my father built which had enough room for all three of us to stand inside it. As a result, we would often turn the construct around and use it as a full stage on which to pretend to play rock band. I recall very clearly we Johnson Boys singing along with "Chic-a-Boom! Chic-a-Boom! Don'tcha just love it?" many times on that stage or just when we played in general. And I always really liked songs like Monsters on Parade and The First Annual Semi-Formal Combination Celebration Meet the Monster Population Party... look, if you are going to have a place full of every type of monster, you had either be ready for either a parade or party... or both. And you can bet there will be songs that come out of it.

The truth of the matter is that I could pick any of the thirty-plus songs that were played on The Groovie Goolies show and place them on one of these mixtapes, and no one would blink about it, nor would I. The show was about monsters that (mostly) sang about monsters or monster-related activities. But the song that stuck with me the most over the course of the past 40 years was that damned catchy theme song. However, which version should I use. The actual show version of the theme song is less than a minute long, which just never felt long enough. The album version released in 1970 – which featured three guys in really bad monster makeup on both the front and back covers, but still had images from the TV characters too – has a much longer version of the TV theme (at 3½ minutes) and it is one of the rockier songs on the record, even if it is really only a country rock rave-up that turns into a sing-along. But it was the only version I had for a long time. And I didn't know I needed another one.

Enter... Toadies

When Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits came out, I went hardcore into pushing it on my friends. It became part of an all-night animation fest that I held at my apartment in 1995, in which the plan was to end up on Saturday morning having to watch the promotional special while we all ate breakfast cereal. This is after we spent about a dozen hours watching all manner of Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, and other cartoons through the night. (Most slept through a chunk of it, of course... we were all working people and many were college students in those days.) The reaction to the show itself in the morning was tepid at best, mostly because it was ruined by host Drew Barrymore and her friends doing the same thing we were doing, by breaking into the middle of the individual videos in the special with their own giggling and dopey commentary. Dammit, we were trying to do that, Drew! Get your own animation festival! Or at least one that doesn't intrude upon mine! I know the intent was to be post-post-post-everything and oh so cool by laughing at popular culture and nostalgia, but all it really did was piss off the people who legitimately wanted to hear the music (and possibly buy it). And for Drew Barrymore-hating me, it just made her look like that much more of a self-absorbed asshole.

Regardless of stupid interruptions, the Saturday Morning special did have some pretty groovy videos within it, Most often, the best videos were the ones where the songs were already the more successful translations from past to present. The Violent Femmes' video for Jet Screamer's classic Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) (from The Jetsons) was favored over most of the other, with the jumpsuit-wearing Femmes pretending to play in front of rear-projected Jetsons footage and looking like they having a great, goofy time while also looking just about as uncomfortable and out of place as they did when they made a cameo on an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch a few years later. Helmet does a fantastic video for Gigantor, and the appearance of the band (in muted color) playing in front of the black and white cartoon explosions from the cartoon make their video arguably the most dynamic of the bunch. Liz Phair looks like she is genuinely having a ball doing The Banana Splits theme, all while wearing a go-go dress. Juliana Hatfield was pretty much born to sing Josie and the Pussycats.  And as always, the Ramones have the superpower of being... well, the Ramones, and thus they are able to team up with a certain web-slinger to make sure that their video for Spider-Man becomes a hell of a good time.

And then we come to Toadies covering the Groovie Goolies. But first the video...

Toadies
Goolie Get-Together
(Written by Linda Martin and Janis Gwin)

[Chorus 1]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

[Guitar solo]

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together!

[Chorus 1 repeat]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Everybody shout!!!

The words to Goolie Get-Together are devastatingly simple, but after all we are only being invited to join a bunch of monsters at a party. You don't want to make the invitation too complicated or nobody will show up to the gig. The single verse is repeated twice in the song, and there are two variants on the chorus; the first one is only repeated at the tail end of the song, and we get version 2 of that chorus thrice overall. Also note that while the song is titled Goolie Get-Together, the words "Goolies get-together," with the name of the group pluralized, is actually sung in the song (and appear on the official lyric sheet that way too).

It is the performance by the band Toadies that is the remarkable thing here. While, of course, the recording of the song took place in a studio (Planet Dallas), the sound of the song has a true live feel to it. I have heard full, actual live albums that sound less "live" than this track. Adding to this feel is the video, which is one of the few (if not the only one) in the special that incorporates stage footage of the band actually performing the song they are covering in the special. The footage is edited into the video, naturally, so you don't see an unaltered performance; instead, in the MTV style, it is chopped up and lightly tossed with footage of the Goolies mucking about and causing all sorts of chaos. The Toadies stomp about on stage and work the song hard, while the screen seems to ripple and flash as if being threatened by a lightning storm.

And in the song, lead singer Todd Lewis imparts almost as much passion into singing about a cartoon monster party as he does to singing about coming from the water, swearing he won't backslide and become the hypocrite he seems to fear becoming, or convincing a girl to self-immolate to join him in the afterlife. Dare I say he brings the song actual gravitas? He makes it sound like his band really is performing at Horrible Hall and have committed to coaxing a crowd inside to join in all the ghoulish, silly fun. You can almost feel the sweat and hum of the club, and as Lewis grips his guitar and dives into another chorus, you think, "Yeah, I wanna join the Goolies at their get-together..." The song hypnotizes me nearly every time into believing that I am at that clubhouse, ready to become one of the crowd. It's the best rendition on the album, built out of what might be one of the lightest, simplest songs covered on it.

Even Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) has more lyrical depth to it than Goolie Get-Together, and half the song is just "Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah" sung relentlessly. Getting back to what I said at the beginning about the bands participating in this album not necessarily being fans of the songs they are covering, I had the pleasure of being allowed to hang with the Violent Femmes in the green room of their show during one of their appearances in Anchorage, Alaska. Singer-guitarist Gordon Gano asked me if there were any particular songs or rarities that I would like to request that evening, and I said, "Maybe it's a longshot, but Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah?" Gordon gave a sly smile, shook his head, and said, "Man, the last time we played that song was when we recorded it for that album." 

He told me later that he really didn't know the song or the show growing up, and that they selected the song from a list of potential songs for the album. I asked him to play T. Rex's Children of the Revolution instead (which the Femmes had released as a single off their third album, The Blind Leading the Naked, in 1986). They did, and I was happy; it was really a killer show. But the crowds would really go nuts if they ever did play Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah.

If only they understood the power of the animated side...

There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #2 – "Laughing Over My Grave" by Ray Stevens (1958)

Boy, you think that you know a guy...

For a long time, I thought that I knew Ray Stevens. Just before I turned ten years of age, I delighted in a ridiculous song that played on the radio constantly called The Streak. Stevens' strange novelty tune was the #1 song in the nation, and streaking – that is, running buck ass nekkid through an area in which one normally didn't run buck ass nekkid – was the big craze of 1974.

Streaking was everywhere in those days. My little brothers streaked around the house, giggling like little maniacs. (Sadly and scarily, there is photographic evidence of my own turn at childhood streaking through our household as well, but it was from several years earlier. Once more, I beat a trend.) Tuning into the news on a regular gathered one the latest on streaking at public venues. Time and again, crazy people showed up at sporting events to run across the field of play completely naked. The "art" of streaking even made it to the Oscars that year (one of the earliest ceremonies I remember watching). The appearance of a nude weirdo zipping across the stage afforded host David Niven which a prime opportunity at droll commentary: "Isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings."

Most ironically, the image of the streaker was especially alive on the radio. Singer Ray Stevens – who was by then very well known not just for a series of novelty record hits since the early 1960s (Ahab the Arab, Harry the Hairy Ape, Gitarzan) but for his serious, spiritual, Grammy-winning song, Everything Is Beautiful, which proved to be his first #1 Billboard hit. Stevens attacked the charts in '74 with a truly goofy song featuring the odd combination of "Action News" reports, spot interviews (the same guy over and over), fake audience laughter, and a nonsense phrase ("Boogity-boogity") into an international sensation. (The song topped the UK charts as well.)

I recall some brief discussion in our house between my parents over whether it was appropriate for me to be so obsessed with the song at my tender age, but like all such arguments regarding free speech in our family, I won out eventually. I would have sung along with The Streak whether it was on the radio or not, so why not just have a good laugh? Within the next couple of years, my brothers and I obtained a copy of a K-Tel collection called Looney Tunes, and featured amongst its 24 tracks was Ray Stevens singing The Streak. I still loved the song, but I suddenly had 23 other goofy titles to completely memorize and so it tended to get played a little less than the others. My Old Man's a Dustman, Dinner with Drac, Haunted House, Little 'Eefin Annie, Alley Oop, Transfusion, They're Coming to Take Me Away, Hello Muddah Hello Fadduh, My Boomerang Won't Come Back... too many great tunes for me to concentrate on a single one, especially one that I had already sung a thousand times.

And yet, there was one song on the collection that got a special amount of attention regardless. It was The Hustlers singing their rendition of the singalong classic Shaving Cream, in which the threatened implication of the word "shit" at the end of every verse would be replaced with a long "Shhhhhh..." sound and then "...aving cream/Be nice and clean/Shave everyday and you'll always look keen." (The song has had something of a revival this year as the regular intermission act on the new version of The Gong Show.) If you thought there was discussion before between my parents regarding an entirely clean song about people running around nekkid, just think about what this one did. And yet, once again, free speech took the day.

Cut to a couple of years later, my parents were divorced, and my father had his own place... well, a house that he split with an old buddy from work. He had his own record collection as well, and one of the first albums I remember was a compilation from 1977 called The Many Sides of Ray Stevens. When my brothers and I discovered this double album, it pretty much became the most played LP in my dad's house when we were over every other weekend. Well, the second record in the set, that is. We had little use for Sides A and B. The reason for the Many Sides in the title was to imply that Ray had a serious side as well as a more goony side. Really, the set should have been called "The Two Sides of... But Ray Would Like You to Forgot the Second One and Concentrate on the First One" Those first two sides were composed of recognizable Stevens hits like Everything Is Beautiful, his relatively recent (then) countrified smash version of the standard Misty, Turn Your Radio On, America Communicate with Me, and then a bunch of other nicely sung but fairly bland songs.

But on the second record in the compilation, nine of the ten songs were pure Ray Stevens goofy gold, and just made for me and my brothers. This is where I really got to dig into his classic novelty tunes. In addition to the four mentioned already in this piece, I got my first taste of Bridget the Midget (The Queen of the Blues), Freddie Feelgood (and His Funky Little Four-Piece Band), the fabulously (and then record-breakingly) titled Jeremiah Peabody's Poly-Unsaturated Quick Dissolving Fast Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills, and my surprising favorite of the group, The Moonlight Special. I was then getting regular late-night viewings of Wolfman Jack on The Midnight Special, and so finding a song that sent up the show with a character named "The Sheepdog" – who howled along in his intros to the musicians – really got me laughing hard. Stevens also had his own version of The Coasters' Along Came Jones, which was OK, but nowhere near the original (which I got to know intimately on that same Looney Tunes compilation from earlier). Stevens had a whole lot more silly songs that could have closed out Many Sides (I wish Santa Claus Is Watching You was included) but they chose to go with another serious song called Nashville, which is a very pleasant song even today, but which kind of ruined the comedy rush for me as a kid.

After that point, apart from his great chicken-clucking In the Mood single, Stevens kind of disappeared for me. I got into rock 'n' roll as a teenager and didn't look back. I still saw him hit the charts from time to time, especially when MTV started. I would get occasional glimpses of a Stevens video for his latest single on one video show or another, since every network and channel seemed to have started up their own pocket versions of MTV at the time. Goofy tunes like It's Me Again, Margaret or The Mississippi Squirrel Revival would get caught in my sights from time to time, especially if they ended up hitting The Dr. Demento Show (which I listened to avidly for years and years), but I never had any real impulse to follow through with getting one of Ray's newer albums.

This is a good thing, because the one aspect that I surmised from his continued single releases was that he was more intent on building his country music following than he was continued fame on the pop charts. His humor seemed to be growing ever more cornpone, sometimes to sub-Hee Haw levels, and that pursuit just didn't interest me. Eventually, I heard Ray remake a couple of his earlier hits, but his voice was deeper and the updated comedy came off as too stilted. Adapting the old material with new jokes just didn't wear well on my ears. I did appreciate that he continued to release new novelty records on a regular basis, mixing them with his "straight" stuff, but I just wasn't his crowd anymore. For funny songs, I had "Weird" Al, who had (and still has) a much higher ratio of quality to fluff.

We are going to leap a whole lot of time to the past couple of years, where on a whim, I decided to check out what ol' Ray had been up to lately. Sadly, his comedy has grown almost completely reactionary, as befits his political leanings. Intent on making clumsy party points in his dotage, he now has songs that will seek to make statements by prefacing them with lines like "...But if Obama gets his way..." And I get enough of that shit from certain members of my family. I don't need it on my iTunes, especially when the songs are simply knee-jerk responses to things propped up by Fox News and the alt-right that were only meant to rile up their homegrown audience in the first place.

As to whether he actually voted for Volde-Moron or not, I have not seen definitive proof, but many of the songs Stevens has been releasing of late seem to prop up various horrid talking points echoed by the Angry Orange. And so it seems that Ray and I would probably be unlikely to ever be friends if we ever met. It's sad, because I still do love many of Mr. Steven's older songs – and will continue to play and sing along with them (even Ahab the Arab, which pretty much introduced the notion of white Americans saying "Ay-rab" instead of "Err-ub"), much in the way that I will never get Bill Cosby's standup albums out of my system. Plugged in since youth and I cannot divorce myself from them. Besides, there are probably even some gems hidden in Ray's discography that I would find interesting if only I took the time to search for them.

So, what about the mixtape?

Now, one might think that my reference at the beginning of this piece to "you think you know a guy" might refer to Mr. Stevens' current far right leanings. You would be very wrong. After all, I suspected from the glimpses I had of Stevens in recent years, especially already knowing his main audience, that he was exactly the sort who would fall for the snake-oil jive of the current administration. He bent over and they have had him time and again. And I am not surprised by it at all. That's where a good portion of his older audience is now as well. Who wants to stop a good rogering once it has started?

What I was really referring to was the genuine joy and surprise I had in finding one of those hidden gems in his discography that I mentioned, in particular, a certain genre of song that I was very surprised to find he had recorded in his early years. The song I am adding to my mixtape today – Laughing Over My Grave – pretty much keelhauled me when I first heard it. Dating to 1964 (as far as I can tell), when it was released as the B-side to one of his "normal" novelty singles, Bubble Gum the Bubble Dancer (which didn't chart), Laughing Over My Grave is a revelation on more than one front, especially if you have even passing familiarity with Ray Stevens' catalogue.

First, it is a surprisingly soulful, bluesy number with a large dose of eerieness, which allows Ray to purely "sing" more than he often does on his earlier stuff before he broke through on the pop charts with his completely straight-laced composition, Everything Is Beautiful. His voice, however, still has that rock 'n' roll growl to it as he snaps out the lyrics. Second, while the song is paired with an outright novelty number, and is also within that subgenre as well, Laughing Over My Grave is not outwardly funny. There is not a true, intentional joke within the lyrics or the final production, even with Laughing in the title and the additional of maniacal jags of shrieking madness throughout the song. Laughing Over My Grave is a straight up murder ballad, told from the point of view of the victim of a love affair gone truly, truly insane.

Such a simple murder at the end of a gun may also not seem like normal Halloween fare, but the fact that it is a murder ballad and the macabre twist of the story being told while the singer lies "dying in a pool of blood" certainly lends a spookier mood to the song than it normally warrant. Especially surprising is that it comes from the generally happy go lucky, nonsense heavy Ray Stevens just after he has already attained some small measure of fame.

The song starts out as seeming like just another silly tune. To the beat of a slowed down mambo groove, an eerie mood is set instantly by the inclusion of what seems either like a recorder or a slide whistle making a ghostly intrusion. But that same eerie mood, probably due to the instrumentation, and given the fact of who sings the words, makes the listener expect the song is going to have a goofy twist near the end, that will make everything sunnier. And you couldn't be more wrong...

Laughing Over My Grave
(Ray Stevens)

"When she looked at me just now,
I had a horrible feeling.
It made me shiver at the thoughts
Of what I might have driven her to.
I know I've cheated and lied,
I know I just used her,
And now I'm suddenly afraid
of what she might be planning to do.

[Chorus] I can hear her laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!
Laughing...
Laughing over my grave
Over my grave

Now, get that wild, wicked look
Right out of your eye
'Cause baby don't you know 
That I'm too cool to die?
I'm sorry for the wrong i've done.
C'mon, honey,
L-let's just put down that gun!
I'm begging you, please...
At least give me a chance to run!

Well, I felt the floor come up and
Hit me with an empty thud,
And here I lie 
Dying in a pool of blood
I know I've tortured her 
And treated her wrong
And laughed at her misery 
For so long,
But I guess she's the one
Who'll be laughing from now on.

[Chorus]
I can hear her laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!
Burning all the money I saved
And laughing over my grave.

I can hear her 
Laughing over my grave
Raving like a maniac raves!

Burning all the cash I saved... 
[FADE OUT]

And there you have it... Ray, I didn't know you had that in you. Sure, it was recorded a hell of a long time ago, but I just heard it in the last couple of years. What makes the listener understand how insane the murderer has been driven by the narrator is that she apparently spends part of her time "burning all the money" and "cash" that he has saved. Well, I guess that would be insane from his angle... she must be a maniac for doing so, and this really points out how Ray's conservative leanings were there in his music all along (as if I had a doubt anyway).

Which makes me wonder how an updated version of this song would go were Ray to remake it today. He would be singing the same lyrics for the most part and then get to the line where she starts to burn his money. And then he would kick in with this instead...

"...But if Obama has his way...!"

RTJ

The Monkees in Monstrous Peril #3: "I Was a Teenage Monster!"

Last year, we visited the Monkees as they ran amok in a haunted house (Monkee See, Monkee Die) and had to fight off an entire castle of Universal Monster knockoffs (The Monstrous Monkee Mash). But the Monkees had several other flirtations with the supernatural and the macabre in the short run of their popular series, and so let's pick up the ball yet again for this year's Countdown to Halloween for more silly hijinks with one of my favorite groups.

One thing that I really admire about the plots of Monkee episodes (if plots they be indeed) is that they waste little time in jumping straight into the goofiness. After all, the boys have to cram a zillion one-liners, a song or two, flirting with whatever girls are at hand, and lots of scenes of them running about like crazy into a mere 25 minutes. It helps a great deal if they walk into a scenario and all of the major players are ready to get going straight away.

So it goes with I Was a Teenage Monster, the 18th episode of the first season of The Monkees TV show, which aired originally on January 16, 1967. True to form for a horror-centric Monkees story, the episode starts with the requisite castle shot and the brief eerie wail of a theremin, before we cut to the wise-cracking Monkees approaching the front door. Micky Dolenz comments that the place "looks like it was condemned before it was built" and Mike Nesmith backs that up by saying it looks "like a high-rise garbage dump." Mike knocks on the door and the group is met by a man wearing a white lab coat who is quite clearly expecting the band to arrive. He even says so. The actor playing the doctor is John Hoyt, a character actor long familiar to fans of TV from the 1950s through the 1980s, but who started out on Broadway in the early 1930s and began a film career in the late '40s.

The Monkees try to introduce themselves, but the doctor, last name Mendoza, doesn't even shake their hands. The band is confused, because they thought there was a party going on at the castle for which they were to provide the entertainment, but the doctor has seemingly tricked them into coming. He has other plans, you see... he wants the Monkees to... TEACH!

Mendoza convinces them to help by saying they are to teach a youngster, for whom "we have such HIGH hopes!" Before the first minute has even passed, the mood is interrupted by the doctor's assistant, who leads the doctor downstairs into the castle's laboratory. Referring to the doctor as "master," the toady named Groot (that's right... Groot) informs the doctor that "everything is in readiness," to which Mendoza replies, "Good! Good! We shall create the greatest rock 'n' roll singer in za world!" (Mendoza has a slight accent.) The doctor pulls aside a sheet that is draped over a huge slab, and on that slab is revealed a huge monstrous creation, much akin to Frankenstein's monster.

The monster is played by the late Richard Kiel, the acromegaly-plagued 7'2" actor who was exceedingly memorable in a wide variety of roles throughout his career. For me, this has been somewhat of The Year of Kiel at the movie theatres, as I not only got to see him in his arguably finest moment as Jaws, the steel-toothed villain who battles James Bond in 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me, on the big screen again this past summer, but I also saw him play the titular caveman Eegah when that film was shown during the recent live tour for the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 series. And here I get to see Kiel once again (albeit only on my computer), essaying a comedic take on his usual role as a heavy, with a much more mod-looking, shaggy haircut than a monster usually gets in these sorts of affairs. (Most definitely a sign of the times in which the episode was filmed.)

Oh, but first, we have to play the Monkees' opening theme song...

After the theme song and a quick plug for Kellogg's cereals, we dive right back into the story. Mike questions the doctor about teaching rock 'n' roll, and Mendoza reacts, "That's right! Rock 'n' roll really appeals to the little monsters!" Asked if the youngster is the doctor's son, he says "Yes, you could say he is my own... flesh and blood" and then laughs uproariously at his own comment. The doctor decides that the boys need to meet "his son" and toddles off to prepare the meeting. Mike, ever cautious, stops Davy and says, "You know there are overtones to this that I don't like!" but Davy says, "Don't ya get it? Flesh and blood... it's a joke!" Both laugh in the manner that the doctor did before, but then both turn to the camera and grimace, knowing full well that the band is once again in deep trouble.

In the basement lab, the band asks to see the little monster, and the doctor obliges, once more pulling the sheet off the slab. The boys are horrified – Micky cries out, "The little monster... is... a little monster!" – and try to come up with reasons why they should leave right away. Peter, meanwhile, goes up to the creature to study him more closely. Mike tells the doc, "You can't really expect us to teach a monster to sing?" but Mendoza reasons that "He's not a monster... he's a machine." Mike's quick retort is "Well, we can't tutor a computer!" But Peter cuts in, "I find it hard to believe that he's dangerous" and the monster opens his eyes and groans deeply. Peter tickles the creature and says "He wouldn't hurt a fly!" and the monster puts on a smile and groans again.

The other three try to leave but the doctor stands in their way, claiming that "Science must be served!" Mike says that he "can't risk the lives of me and my men... for such a foolhardy experiment... and for such a pittance of a sum of a hundred dollars!" The doctor doubles their money and the next shot shows the four Monkees wearing lab coats – Davy and Micky even have crazy wigs on their heads – and each one holds a beaker containing some chemical or another. They say in tandem, "SCIENCE MUST BE SERVED!"

The doctor claims that his "android" already knows how to sing, and when he claps his hands, the monster goes, "Goo-ra! Goo-ra! Goo-ra!" The doctor explains it as "an old Transylvania folk song." Asked to translate, Mike offers up, "Jimmy crack corn and I don't care!" The doctor unbuckles the monster, which makes the Monkees nervous, and Micky expresses worries that "his pants will fall down," not wishing to make the doctor think he is actually scared. The doctor leaves his creation with the boys alone, and the monster reaches out his enormous hand in friendship. Micky, Mike and Davy all shake the hand in unison nervously, but when Davy sneezes, the monster says perfectly politely, "Gesundheit!" The boys are shocked to hear this and it calms them down temporarily, but then the monster follows it up with a huge roar which makes them freak out anew.

Peter, however, really likes the monster, and as many things with Peter go, his reaction reverts to that of a child. "You said that if I made dinner every night and made my bed, that I could have a pet!" and the boys agree that such was the deal. Mike says, "Alright, but the first night you don't feed it, back he goes!" Micky has other things on his mind, wondering aloud about how amazing it is to think that this monster was created in the very lab in which they stand, but absentmindedly almost knocks an entire beaker full of some concoction onto the floor. Luckily, Mike catches it in time, and says, "You almost dropped his mother!" to which the monster looks sadly.

Later, in the music room, the boys try to work with the monster to turn him into a rock 'n' roll star. They decide to name him, to which Mike offers up "Frankie Frankenstein." "I can see it now in lights... all... around... the mausoleum." Davy rejects the name for a singer, because he "doesn't even sound Italian." Micky taps the monster with his drumsticks, and the monster spits out a very clear, non-monster-like "Don't do that!" He decides to change the monster's look, starting with "a Beatle haircut," and the monster's hair switches to a mop-top, "then dark glasses," and he is suddenly wearing dark, rectangular-lensed wireframes, "some groovy clothes," his outfit changes, "and a guitar." The monster strums the instrument awkwardly, and Micky asks Mike how he looks. "He looks like a long-haired, near-sighted monster with a guitar."

The Monkees decide to teach the monster how to move onstage, but when he swings to the left, he sends Peter and his bass flying away, and when he switches to the right, Davy goes sprawling with his tambourine. Micky has the monster try the drums, telling the creature that the trick is to "very gentle... veeeeerrrrry gentle." On the count of three, the monster jabs the drumsticks straight through the skins on the tom-toms while kicking a hole through the bass drum. "Some style!" says Micky, "Where d'ya keep your brains?" The monster smiles widely and holds up his hands, snapping the sticks into pieces as he does.

A little bit later, the monster is shown strumming the guitar and yelling out, "Goo-ra! Goo-ra!" again. The boys, still trying to escape the castle, decide that he doesn't sound half bad and tell the doctor they will be back in the morning to work on his voice. The doctor says the mountain road is too treacherous at night, and calls Groot to prepare their rooms for the night. As the boys split the room, the doctor has the monster play "Goo-ra!" again and seems pretty pleased with the result. Once the boys are gone, the doctor talks to Groot about the rest of his plan... to switch the voices of the Monkees into the monster. Groot asks how this is to be done, and Mendoza says, "It's very simple. We merely unite the frontal lobe with coaxial conduits and force the cerebellum to proliferate to the reflexes. Do you understand?" to which Groot replies, "All except the last part, master!" 'What last part?" "The part after 'It's very simple...'"

In their room, the Monkees continue to try and look for a way out of their predicament. Micky opens up the closet door and finds a gorgeous, blonde woman standing there. They ask who she is and she tells them she is "the doctor's beautiful daughter." When she is asked what she has to do with "all of this," she replies, "Nothing. I'm the sequel." They close the closet door and Mike expresses worry that "200 dollars isn't going to do us any good if we're dead." Micky says, "Yeah, we should have asked for 250."

They decided to try to calm themselves down with a little television viewing. The program on the tube is a mad scientist movie where the doctor is discussing an operation with his doctor. Davy tries to stretch out on a couch, but he falls through the back cushion and disappears through a trap door. Mike calls out to him and realizes that his friend has gone missing. He sits down on a chair against the wall, but the wall spins around and Mike disappears, replaced by a second empty chair. Micky then seeks out Mike but is pulled feet first through the curtains. Finally, Peter has a bag thrown over his head by Groot the henchman.

In the laboratory, the four Monkees find themselves strapped onto a large, rectangular slab with helmets on their heads attached via electrodes. The doctor tries to assure them that this sort of experiment need not be fatal, but then shocks himself when he is handed two wires. Soon, the experiment begins, but while the machinery starts pulsing, Davy expresses concern over getting a headache. "Oh, don't worry," says the doctor, "there won't be any headache. But you won't be able to make a fist for three weeks!" and then he laughs crazily again. Davy continues to panic, and the doctor tells him to relax. He turns to the camera in the manner of a medicinal advertisement and states, "My electricity gets into the bloodstream seconds faster than aspirin." The doctor shouts out ever more ridiculous orders to Groot: "Turn the coaxial knob to full!" "Set the input output to whatever!" "Move the quasar to mellow!"

With such orders, even the bound Monkees are starting to doubt the science behind the experiment, but then the doctor throws the last switch. There is a series of four explosions, one behind each Monkee on the large slab. He orders the boys to sing, and Micky starts out meekly and unsure of himself with "Here we come... walkin' down the street...," Mike joins in on "We get the funniest looks from... everyone we meet..." and then Peter comes in on "Hey, hey, we're the Monkees." Davy joins the rest on the rest of the chorus, and the monster listens with great interest, taking in every note. Finally, the monster's voice seems to start up like an old cranked Victrola, and the sound coming out of his mouth is that of the four blended voices (along with the music) of the Monkees themselves. In the middle of the room, Doctor Mendoza and Groot dance together in victory while the Monkees, still strapped to the slab, look on with shocked faces.

Mike warns the doctor that he will be sorry when the police hear about it, but the doctor has a plan for this as well. He hypnotizes the boys by holding a device to their heads, one at a time, and telling them "You will remember nothing" to which they each reply "I will remember nothing." However, he goes one body too far and does the same thing to Groot, whom he then slaps and says, "Not you!" He then discusses with Groot their final experiment for the next day: whether the monster can fool an entire audience.

The next day, as said, the Monkees are preparing their instruments onstage for the experiment. Mendoza asks the boys how they are feeling, and they all seem to be feeling fine but very confused when the doctor refers to an experiment. They attempt to start playing Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day, but the instruments are all out of tune and none of their voices can get anywhere near harmony. The doctor demands his money back, saying that the band told him that they were trained musicians. Mike coughs up the dough and hands it over and the band, still under hypnosis, try to depart. But the doctor stops them, wishing them to see his new discovery, The Swinging Android. The monster steps onto stage in his "cool" regalia and starts to strum his guitar. He plays the same song perfectly and exactly like the Monkees.

Afterward, the Monkees are confused as to why the monster played and sounded exactly like them. Suddenly, Micky remembers something about a laboratory, and then all of them start to be flooded with memories of what happened to them. They check the closet where the doctor's beautiful daughter was kept, and Micky tells her, "Your father stole our voices and gave them to that monster. Now what do you think about that?" The girl is shown reading a script with the Monkees logo emblazoned across the front of it, and says, "Just wait until the sequel. A vampire turns Davy into a werewolf." Micky closes the door on the creepy girl, whining "I don't wanna hear it!"

In the lab, the quartet find the monster strapped back into his normal place, and Micky attempts to reverse the experiment. With the boys moving at high-speed, they try every knob on the machinery, and then strap themselves back onto their slab and helmets. However, when it comes time for Micky to throw the final switch, he can't quite reach it from his position. The machine starts to wind down and they have to start all over again. Meanwhile, the doctor and his toady stroll the halls in triumph, and the doctor can't resist stopping at a magical mirror on the wall. Asking "who is the evilest one of all?," the doctor is disappointed to find out another doctor in Dusseldorf, Germany is the truly evilest one. The mirror, who is voiced by James Frawley, who directed the vast majority of other Monkees episodes (Sidney Miller did the honors here), says, "You are only second best. You vill have to try harder. And don't yell at me; I only vork here."

Back on the slab, Micky figures he has the wiring straightened out now, but Mike says he isn't worried because he "is very fatalistic. I figure either an electrode has my name on it or it hasn't." Micky has by now employed the crook end of a cane to help him reach all of the knobs and switches, but is very nervous about hitting them. He rattles the cane wildly as he hits everything in sight, and the machinery starts to smoke and overreact. The monster starts to speaker like a hippy, saying "Groovy, man. That's not my bag. Don't get uptight." Davy notices the change, and the monster says, "Let's split... go to my pad. That's where it's at. Groovy? You dig?" Mike rolls his eyes and says, "Oh, great. Now we've got a super hippy on our hands."

Micky figures that they have corrected themselves, but we see Mike have a strange reaction and he starts saying, in Kiel's deep voice, "Kill! Kill!" Micky adjusts the dials and pops the switch again. The monster comes loose and immediately says, in a lisping voice, "I would do this room in French provincial!" He follows that up with "The color scheme should be lavender and puce... or this." The monster picks up a vat containing something or other, but Micky takes it from him, saying he has one more adjustment to make. He sets the formula down, but it falls and crashes to the floor, alerting Doctor Mendoza upstairs. He runs down and has Micky taken captive by Groot. Micky yells "Curse you, Red Baron!" in a nod to the popular Snoopy oath of the day. The doctor orders the monster to kill the rest of the Monkees, but Peter stops him briefly by calling him "Andy" (short for "Android").

He tells the monster that the doctor is out to exploit him, "You're only a pawn in his hands, a tool for his avaricious ambitions!" When Mike asks where Peter got words like that, Davy says "It's in the script. On page 28." Peter continues, claiming the doctor wants 60% of his income. The monster says "60 per cent?" and turns on the doctor, who says he only wants 25% and orders him to "Kill that Peter!" But Peter turns the monster around again by simply saying, "He's a bad man!" The monster keeps turning back and forth from Mendoza to Peter over and over again, and the strains of the song Auntie Grizelda being to play. With the music on, the monster starts to dance instead.

As the creatures spins and twirls, the Monkees free themselves from the slab and start to run all over castle while the song continues to play. The monster chases them at one point, but so too do a pack of villagers with torches, who appear from out of nowhere. Micky stops to drink a potion and starts to act like he is being transformed. He turns his back on his friends and the audience, but then turns around and he is fine, if not a little disappointed. Mike flips a switch on the lab equipment, and we see a quick clip from the old crappy Danish monster flick, Reptilicus, where the giant reptile breathes a quick snort of fire. Davy leaps into the monster's waiting arms and at first it looks like a cute move. But then Davy punches him with a boxing glove that suddenly appears on his fist. (At least he barely taps the monster, who lets Davy go without a fight.)

Mike plays the surface of the lab equipment like the Phantom of the Opera would play a pipe organ, but is chased away by Mendoza. Micky plays a rack of equipment and beakers like a xylophone and convinces the monster to take over, which he does happily. The Monkees form a football huddle but stop the monster from joining in, so he and the doctor and toady wait patiently. Davy opens the closet door and finds the doctor's daughter. She grabs him and kiss him. Davy then reaches for a sign that says, "A sequel? You better believe it!" At another point, the monster is seated in a chair while the boys give him a manicure and brush his hair. Reptilicus is shown attacking the Netherlands again for no real good reason but for kicks. The monster sits around a campfire roasting marshmallows with the villagers. Finally, the Monkees capture the doctor and strap him to his own slab as Reptilicus seems to either lie down for a nap or die. The song ends.

In the epilogue, Mike is shown talking to the police on the phone. "That's right, Officer. It's the big scary-looking house at the very top of the hill." He has to stop to ask the doctor for directions, but the doctor has been completely tied up by the other Monkees. He tells them the name of the street is Rosebud Lane, and Mike says, "Rosebud? I thought that was the name of a sled." Micky insists he got the wiring correct and that they shouldn't have lost any musical abilities. "We didn't have any to spare," replies Peter. To put them to a test, Mike and Peter pick up guitars while Davy picks up maracas, but on the count of three, the maracas and guitars shatter into pieces while the amps behind them short out and catch on fire. Cue closing credit sequence.

This is a really fun episode of the Monkees, chiefly for the game performance of Richard Kiel. Yes, he finds himself typecast in the role of yet another monster, but he gets loads of little opportunities during the episode to step outside of the character and act against type. He also gets to dance with great abandon, try on cool clothes, and switch personas more than once. It is actually a pretty full role for the length of a sitcom, and I think that Kiel seems to be having great fun being so silly throughout the show. Hoyt, too, seems to be having a ball playing a part that is really far beneath his talent, but then again, so were many of the parts he ended up playing in his long television career.

As promised by the doctor's beautiful doctor, there was a sequel to this, only the details got shifted slightly. The episode was the already discussed The Monstrous Monkee Mash, which aired almost exactly a year after this episode. While there is a vampire villain who turns a Monkee into a werewolf, Micky is the victim, while poor Davy is selected to become a new vampire instead. It hardly matters; like most of the details within a Monkees episode, they are only there for fleeting reference, nothing sticks forever, and the only important thing was record sales. And being truly, truly silly, something which this episode does in spades. As one expects from the Monkees...

RTJ

*****

And in case you haven't seen it...

Other titles in this series:

#1 "Monkee See, Monkee Die"
#2 "The Monstrous Monkee Mash"