Easy Listening Nightmares

So old they’re scary!

Photo by Luke Southern on Unsplash

One final Halloween list, this time from the 1950’s-60’s, a time usually associated with “beautiful music” or “easy listening.” These songs, however, are anything but beautiful (or easy).

• Voo Doo Drums
  Charles Albertine had teamed up with swing bandleader Larry Elgart for a number of records, including “Bandstand Boogie,” later used as the theme for American Bandstand. Here they get into the kind of exotica that attracted mid-century space-age pop listeners.
  https://youtu.be/h52XF-8SGRo
• Return of the Zombie
  Billy May is best known today as the arranger for Sinatra’s three “travel with me” albums. This time he is on his own, from the album “Big Fat Brass.” May adopts the “crime music” approach rather going with than something more eerie.
  https://youtu.be/TuwXajwMLOw
• Main Theme from Jack the Ripper
  I had this 45 as a kid. Not terribly scary (except to me at the time). Arranger Pete Rugolo scored the music for a number of crime TV shows, and this cut from a forgettable B-movie about the infamous serial killer is (like the above arrangement by Billy May) more in that tradition than the usual horror scores of the time.
  https://youtu.be/R1V_xhDWKBI
• Jack the Ripper
  The flip side of the above 45 starts with a finger-popping-daddy proto-rap by Nino Tempo then degenerates into amazingly horrible (but not horrifying) lyrics (“Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack chased poor Mary to her flat / Mack the Knife had nothing on this mixed-up cat”).You have been warned.
  https://youtu.be/za70cbd5PJ4
• Lunar Sleep
  In 1953, Albertine and Elgart created one of the most avant-garde “popular” albums of the era — tuneless and atonal — “Impressions of Outer Space”; “Lunar Sleep” is a typical “song” from that extraterrestrial outing.
  https://youtu.be/IDMR3OwRjlg