If there were two things parents hated in the fifties it was rock and roll and scary stuff. A kid was liable to find his new copy of "Tutti Frutti" plopped in the trash next to a cherished issue of The Vault of Horror if he didn't keep a close eye on his stash! So the two genres have always been inseparably linked in many ways. In fact, you're reading one of those links right now, Hep-Cat!That means there've been a lot of rock and rollers who expressly exploited the rock-and-horror connection. Screaming Jay Hawkins, Screamin' Lord Sutch, Alice Cooper, and The Misfits built whole careers around it. Rockbeat Records dredged up 81 early examples of such discs (plus 13-- heh, 13--audio trailers for movies like The Blob and Creature from the Black Lagoon) for its 2014, triple-CD compilation Halloween Nuggets: Monster Sixties A Go-Go. Never mind that it also included stuff from the fifties and seventies.
Wisely, Rockbeat dropped that erroneous subtitle for its new single-disc distillation of that 2014 set. It too is a mutant mix of fifties (Johnny Fraser & the Regalaires' "It", The Shades' "Strollin After Dark"), sixties (The Keytones' "I Was a Teenage Monster", Larry & the Bluenotes' "Night of the Sadist"), and seventies (Ervinna & the Stylers' "Witch Queen of New Orleans") records. The styles vary too, with a bit of rockabilly (Bobby Bare's "Vampira", Jackie Morningstar's "Rockin' in the Graveyard", probably the best known track here), country-rock (Jerico Jones's "Black Magic"), psych (The Graveyard Five's "Marbel Orchard"), surf (The Phantom Five's "Graveyard", Kenny & the Fiends' "House on Haunted Hill"), garage stomp (The Invasions' "The Invasion Is Coming"), Bobby-Rydell-style corn (Jim Burgett's "Jekyll and Hyde"), and soul (Billy Gholston's "Zombie Stomp" mislabeled as "Graveyard Stomp" by Billy Ghoulston). Three of the trailers make the transition to this shorter compilation too, though failing to program "Vampira" right next to the "Plan 9 from Outer Space" trailer was a real rookie mistake!
The short 48-minute run-time is likely due to this new version of Halloween Nuggets being largely designed around its vinyl incarnation, though I received the CD for review purposes. The packaging is austere without any notes or track information aside from title and artist, and the sound is pretty brick-walled. Still, it's a groovy enough selection of ghoulie tunes.
