This week's sporkful: Halloween videos and Misfits songs

So many of these musical things end up coming back to Lisa in some way. We were chatting and I told her that I was doing a week of Misfits songs followed by a week of Halloween songs. I wanted her to know because she introduced me to the Misfits, but also, she loves Halloween. She had shared my original frustration from last year, that people get stuck on the same two Halloween songs over and over again, when there are so many.

She has a Halloween playlist of 170 songs, which is amazing. That was one thing that became very clear this year; I can afford to be choosy. There really is a lot out there, and I can reject ones that I don't particularly care for, and if I want to do it again next year, I can do it without repeating.

In an ironic twist, I did end up using "Monster Mash", but the Misfits version instead of the Pickett one. I have nothing against the Pickett one, but it gets overplayed, along with "Thriller".

One thing that was important to me was that for Misfits week I covered every lead singer, so we had Danzig, Graves, and Only. With "Monster Mash" I am not sure who was singing, but there is a good story here.

There was a Rankin/Bass (speaking of things I love) Halloween special, Mad Monster Party. It was released on video in the late '90s, and the Misfits did a "Monster Mash" promo. That should have been Michale Graves. It came out on an album, Project 1950, in 2003. That should have been Jerry Only. I'm not sure where the video I linked to came from, because it used clips from Mad Monster Party, but I suspect it is Only.

I know Glenn Danzig is the more iconic one, but my favorite songs are from the Graves period, and I gravitate towards him. Looking for which songs to include though (so many options!), I feel like they all sound pretty similar. Some of that may be a conscious decision to perform in the same style. I do think it's worth appreciating how such a distinctive band is so much more than any one singer.

So "Monster Mash" was probably Jerry Only, and "Land of the Dead" definitely was, and Danzig was "Astro Zombies" and "Die Die My Darling". For Graves I used "Helena", "Descending Angel", and "Saturday Night", but he was also featured on one other song, which leads to a key transition.

Snow White's Poison Bite may be the most logical successor to the Misfits, based on content and tone and so many factors. Most of their songs are Halloween appropriate in one way or another. They also have a song featuring vocals by Michale Graves, "Zombie Romance". Listening to it, there are ways in which it reminds me of "Saturday Night" and ways in which it sounds like "Will You Meet Me In The Graveyard". Therefore, it became the perfect bridge.

I ended Misfits week with "Saturday Night", which is a natural because it was the song that first brought me to them, and is still my favorite, and started the videos with "Will You Meet Me In The Graveyard", and "Zombie Romance" was the bridge. Perfect!

And then it was truly more Halloween videos than songs. Many of them were songs that I resisted last year, because while the videos had Halloween themes, they worked independently of the songs.

For a Halloween video mix, it would totally make sense to include Fall Out Boy's "A Little Less Sixteen Candles, A Little More Touch Me", with its vampire turf wars; "Doing It All For My Baby" by Huey Lewis and the News, with its send up of old school horror movies (especially The Bride of Frankenstein); "J Train" by Reggie and the Full Effect, which shows Dracula's Bachelor Party; and Keane's "Disconnected", an homage to Giallo films. However, you would probably not choose those songs for a Halloween party where it was only audio. For my purposes, they worked.

Working on both levels was "Dracula's Tango" by Toto Coelo, which I found after last Halloween, and was sorry to have missed. That was this year's "Werewolves of London", where you wonder why DJs don't pull it out every single year. Finally, we ended with the live version of "Dead" by My Chemical Romance. The Black Parade costumes are meant to look military, but somehow the jacket decorations remind me of a rib cage enough that when pale guys with dark eye makeup wear them, it is just skeletal enough that if they are singing a celebratory song about death in Mexico, that says Dia de los Muertos to me.

(And, if you want to go with a death theme, we can keep coming back to this band over and over again.)

I had thought it could be good to finish up with an AFI video, because I was seeing them that night, but none that I saw felt right. My final list felt great.

I don't know if I will do this next year. I may not need to, or I may be doing something else because I am keeping up the songs of the day. I had sort of been thinking about it anyway with the bands I review. I want them to get more exposure (usually), and maybe people who didn't read the review might still click on a song or video.

Also, I am really proud of my Guitar Sampler playlist, and yet there were still songs I left out when I was listening through the comments, that are worth listening to, and perhaps obscure, but I needed the one playlist to be manageable.

Right now I am going through the guitar sampler and adding the three bridge songs that did not make the list will get me right through December 1st. I may methodically work through the other blog posts from the Greatest Guitar Songs comments, or start mixing in just whatever strikes me. I'm not sure exactly how it will go, but there are so many good songs in the world, and I know so many of them. I want to share them. So that's what's happening.

Misfits Week - October 17th through 23rd