Halloween Playlist Vol. 1 – Witchcraft & Bad Trips

“Dark Shadows Theme” (Robert Cobert)
This is the perfect introductory track for any and every Halloween playlist. Robert Cobert (appropriately born on October 26, 1924), composed this ghostly, iconic, shivering score with trembling theremin for the Gothic TV show Dark Shadows in 1966. It conjures images of the clammy Collinwood mansion and stormy, windswept seashores.

“It Came in the Night” (A Raincoat)
Opening with a bell tolling and ghoulish laughter, followed by wolf howls and carnivalesque keyboards, this track (used to memorable effect in the 1979 version of avant-garde, experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit Moon) is campy, catchy, and playful. It brings back all those childhood memories of dressing up as a monster and trick-or-treating.

“The Witch” (The Rattles)
Released in October 1970, this is a fuzzed-out, wah-wah pedal blast of German hard rock with cackling laughter and fierce female vocals that shows just how fun and freaky popular music was in the early 1970s.

“The Witch Queen of New Orleans” (Redbone)
A big hit in October 1971, this funky groove with rumbling, soulful vocals from the Native American Redbone is a tribute to the legendary voodoo master Marie Laveau- it was No. 21 on the charts in the US and No. 2 on the charts in the UK!

“Swamp Witch” (Jim Stafford)
Florida-born (January 16, 1944) and Branson, Missouri-based country singer-songwriter Jim Stafford is famous for comedy songs like “Spiders and Snakes” and “Wildwood Weed” and his fleeting marriage to Bobbie Gentry. But, by far, his most memorable moment, is this summer 1973 Top 40 hit. A spooky song about “Blackwater Haddie” who lived where “strange green reptiles crawl” and “snakes hang thick on the cypress trees like sausage on a smokehouse wall” in Okeechobee.

“The Witch” (Mark Fry)
British musician Mark Fry (born November 4, 1952) is renowned for his rare LP Dreaming with Alice recorded with a loose collective of Italian players in Rome in 1971 and released in 1972. “The Witch” is one of the standout songs on the album–an acid folk hypnotic jam illustrated with flutes and sitar.

“Goddess of Death” (St. John Green)
The 1968 St. John Green record is the dark side of psychedelia, from the conflagration and dragon on the album cover to its songs about canyon women, cemeteries, damnation, death, the devil, and mutations. A funereal organ oozes paranoia as the lead singer demands an answer to his question and his band members repeat the refrain, sounding like tormented zombies.

“We walked into the cold silence
Being careful not to step on those who had passed out there in previous times
Or the rotted bones of those who could never return
And I ask:
Why are we here?!”

“South Texas” (Cold Sun)
Recorded during the Manson Family murders summer of 1969 and released in 1970, the guitars and organs are hazy hallucinations while the druggy vocals and warped lyrics wander you through the desert on a bad trip soundtrack. According to the band’s flashbacks, the track was “inspired by a weekend in South Texas with 2 girls from Corpus Christi and a big bowl of peyote salsa and a drive-in Mexican restaurant with these great big fried tortillas. There was a motel crawling with these tiny geckos. Geckos have voices. Peyote is more AUDIO oriented than any other drug, as far as I know.”

“You have seen the eyes of the gecko
Staring out watching from the crack in the wall
You were thinking of going right through
But it’s outside, it’s not you
It’s a swarm of night climbing dragons
Crawling out searching
Just walking across the ceiling”

“Come and Buy” (Crazy World of Arthur Brown)
Another bad trip psych-out, this is the caterwauling centerpiece of Arthur Brown’s fire-obsessed 1968 debut. Vincent Crane’s cinematic orchestrations and Hammond organ and Arthur Brown’s acid-damaged lyrics (sounding like a maniac in a straitjacket in a padded cell) make this a horror show highlight.

“I Walk On Guilded Splinters” (Dr. John, the Night Tripper)
The creepy closing track from Dr. John’s late night voodoo ritual debut Gris-Gris, this song is a spooky soundtrack to floating lost in the swamps with the snaky clarinet, soulful background female singers, tribal percussion, and Dr. John’s sinister lyrics casting a spell surrounding you from which you can never escape.

“J’suis le grand zombie
My yellow belt of choison
Ain’t afraid of no tomcat
Fill my brains with poison
Walk through the fire
Fly through the smoke
See my enemy
At the end of the rope
Walk on pins and needles
Just to see what they can do
Walk on guilded splinters
With the king of the Zulu
Roll outta my coffin
Drink poison in my chalice
Y’all feel my malice”

“Black Juju” (Alice Cooper)
The only track from their (in)famous 1971 record Love It To Death written by bassist Dennis Dunaway, this is evidence that the band should have let him contribute more to their sounds since this is a creepy, organ-driven vamp influenced by (but much darker than) The Doors and Jim Morrison with Alice Cooper digging up bodies in a graveyard.

To be continued tomorrow…

by Mark Lager

*Listen to this playlist on Mark Lager’s radio show ‘Thursday Trips’- streaming online Thursdays 7-8 P.M. (Mountain Time) at: http://www.primcast.com/radio/610946