Happy Halloween From Thurl Ravenscroft!

First, I need to get some housekeeping out of the way. Here is last year's Halloween post, with links to all of 2008's spooky stuff. This year, in addition to the stuff this week, I've posted 20 versions of "Season of the Witch" and ten more versions of "I Put A Spell On You." If the stuff I've put up this week is too goofy, and not horrific enough for you, why not try this post, with a cowboy ghost story? Or this post about crazed murderers? (Speaking of murder, there's no Stag post today, sorry. Stagger Lee Saturdays will return in one week.)

Now that that's out of the way, ladies and gentlemen, may I present a collection of spooky music from this blog's patron saint, Thurl Ravenscroft.

Last year I posted several different recordings of Thurl (and other people) singing "Grim Grinning Ghosts," the theme song to The Haunted Mansion. All those from Thurl are included here, but if you want the other versions, you should go there and download the newly reupped zipfile.

This also has clips from a lot of the LPs Thurl recorded for Disneyland records, including excerpts from the Pirates of the Caribbean story record, the Jungle Cruise record, and the gem of this collection, the newly rereleased Story and Song from The Haunted Mansion (where the buy link sends you today -- in addition to Thurl, the record features a pre-Happy Days-but-post-Andy-Griffith Ron Howard). You'll also hear from Spike Jones and, naturally, The Mellomen. I even threw in a track from the soundtrack to The Hobbit.

I usually upload individual files along with the zips, but not today. I've actually taken a few minutes to sequence this out, so just get the whole thing, all right? It's only 30 MB, and about 30 minutes long. Happy Halloween, everyone!

Zipfile

Buy The Story and Song from The Haunted Mansion from Amazon

Aye, Pirate Week :Tim Curry and The Muppets - A Professional Pirate

Psst! Avast there! It be too late to alter course now, mateys.

Aye, greetin's, friends. Welcome t' Pirate Week har on She'll Grow Back. Ahoy, in celebration o' International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I'll be pro'idin' some nautically-themed music all week. So keep your ruddy hands inboard -- that be the best way t' repel boarders!

Aye, as tis' Sunday, har's one o' the silliest thin's we'll lis'en at all week. Tis' Tim Curry and The Muppets, from Muppet Treasure Island. The song be written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, who also enscribed "On Broadway" and "We Gotta Get Out O' This Place," among others. Arrr, as the soundtrack be impossible t' find, the buy link today steers ye t'wards the movie.

Download with care -- thar be squalls ahead, and Davy Jones waitin' for them what don't obey. Aye.

Tim Curry and The Muppets - A Professional Pirate
mirror 1 -- mirror 2
Buy from Amazon, Matey -- Buy from Deep Discount, Arr

Hayden

I saw Hayden (No. Nope. Uh-uh. That's the one!) live in Atlanta about ten days ago, and I haven't written about it yet. So here we go.

The opening band, Everest, were absolutely wonderful. I'm not giving you any of their songs, but this link to their MySpace page will let you stream six of their best. A few songs in, I was trying to think how to describe them, and came up with Wilco-influenced-by-Sweetheart-of-the-Rodeo. Then, their very next song was a note-perfect Byrdsian rendition of "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere." (Sadly, I can't find a recording of this online anywhere.) The older gentleman at our table said seeing them was like being in California in 1969 -- in reference to their Neil Young influence. Atlanta LOVES Everest -- expect them to headline at a nice-sized venue on their next trip through.

And speaking of people Atlanta loves, there was a good crowd to see Hayden, over a hundred people. I was amazed, since he's not exactly well-known around here, and also darlings of the blogosphere Vampire Weekend were playing not 500 yards down the street.

(This picture isn't from the Atlanta show, but it gives you a good idea of the stage setup, and the enormous backdrop, which is a drawing of the room the new album was recorded in. Click to embiggen.)

Here are a few of the songs he played live for us, all of which I'm very fond of. I'm happy to say that he played "Lonely Security Guard", the tale of a security guard fond of origami, and I'm not too proud to admit that in my excitement, I went "whoo" a little. (It's not a song that gets a lot of "whoo"s, I'll bet.) He sang "Trees Lounge" pretty early on, early enough that I hoped (in vain) he might also sing "Bad As They Seem," the other song related to that film. Both outline the plot of the film, and the dilemma of its protagonist. "Hollywood Ending," with its singalong chorus, got a nice cheer from the audience (and my concert companion, who before the show was not a Hayden fan but was converted.) Some guy in the back requested "Woody" (a song about Hayden's cat -- the spoken intro is from his live album) which seemed to surprise Hayden no end, but he sang and played it anyway.

The show was incredible, and I could literally give you six more songs I loved his performance of, but I'll stop here for now. Tuesday, come back and you can read about how my crush on Cat Power turned into full-blown love at The Tabernacle.

Zip file

Stagger Lee Saturdays - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Elvis!

Here's a combination of what may be my favorite rendition of Stag ever, with what is certainly one of my least favorites. They contain the same themes -- sex, cursing, and violence (which, granted, go well with singing about Stag) -- but the execution is quite different.

Nick Cave takes most of his lyrics from a 1967 transcription of Stag found in The Life: The Lore and Poetry of The Black Hustler. Elvis pulls his lyrics out of his, by this time, drug-addled brain. Cave's version is violent, and tough, and perverse. Elvis's is scatological and ... well, immature.

But what else do they have in common? Well, right now I'm reading Gershon Legman's Rationale of the Dirty Joke, and in the introduction, he mentions this style of humor (and even attribution to true-life people):

"[War comics and spy novels, like violent Italian pulp novels and folk-ballads]... do not present their materials as jokes or made-up stories at all, but as factual relations concerning the violent and insensate actions of real persons, generally named, and implied to be historical, such as Blackbeard and Rasputin.
What is suggested here is not that all these stories are necessarily true ... What is meant is that these stories and individuals do personify what the tellers and singers well know to be real but inexplicable peculiarities of human behavior, which they are attempting somehow to fit into a rational view of the world, whether as horror or as humor. [This process of making horror innocuous] represents an effective and time-tested folk method of dealing with the unbearable abnormalities of human conduct..."

In other words, when Stag tells a bartender to kiss his ass, and eludes the police through sheer badness, he helps us ameliorate our own fears and demons. (I'm not comfortable with what this means about Elvis's personal demons being exorcised in this performance, really, but I've always thought of him as a big goofy kid anyway.)

Next week, we hear the textually unrelated version by Ike and Tina Turner, another favorite version of mine.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Stagger Lee
Elvis Presley - Stagger Lee (live 6-29-74)
Buy from Amazon -- Buy from Deep Discount