It’s Halloween, 2014, and I’m sitting on a forged couch, steering the music because it was and remains the best place to hide during a party.
I admit that things were also spooky back then. That Malaysian Airlines plane had just disappeared. And of course President Obama had the gall to wear a tan suit on television. But we were still a few months before the horror that was to come, the one that began with a golden escalator ride and has wound up with a bizarre, swaying, “Ave Maria” listening party.
Remember also that the Spotify algorithm was still young and focused back then. And it was blissfully ad-free.
It offered us up this:
It wasn’t the “Monster Mash.” This one was by Don Hinson & The Rigamorticians.
You can tell it’s different from the real “Monster Mash” straight away. For starters, the haunted house door creaks a lot longer on Hinson’s cut. And where a sense of joy prevails in the original, the Bobby “Boris” Pickett one, Hinson chooses a path of pure camp. His Dracula voice is actually better than Pickett’s, but his backup singers sound as if they are singing via a truck stop telephone.
Another dead giveaway is Hinson’s additional Igor joke during the outro: “Easy Igor, you impetuous young boy. How many times must I tell you, I don’t know how to fix your back!”
You might recognize this version if you heard it. At last count, Hinson’s version of “Monster Mash” has over two million streams on Spotify, a number sure to grow in the coming days, as it does every year. Obviously, Halloween hangs heavy over the legacy of an album like Monster Dance Party, which has been kept alive mostly by A.I. generated playlists on both Spotify and Youtube. (Last year it was re-released by a Belgian record company specializing in “rare vinyl oddities, sleaze, obscure kiddie trash, and out of print rarities.”)
The real “Monster Mash” still brings in an estimated $1 million annually, from streaming outlets, its use in commercials, film, and TV, as well as from licensing fees for the many compilation albums and cover songs. The song was popular from the start, and remains so today. It makes sense why Hinson wanted to cover it in 1964, just two years after the first one came out.
So began my descent into Monster Dance Party, a fall that started a decade ago and which I’m concluding here, this Halloween, simply because I cannot keep carrying it around any longer.
There’s a box in this room that’s full of old birthday cards and letters and copies of my friends’ books and poems.
It’s also full of a worrying amount of Don Hinson memorabilia.
If it helps, think of it as a crypt.
At first, I was guided by these two things:
I desperately wanted to know if the Wrecking Crew played on this, recorded and released as it was by Capitol Records in 1964. This falls firmly in the prime years of Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell, and Leon Russell, and let me tell you that nothing in the world would have made me happier in 2014 than to discover that members of the Wrecking Crew were also members of The Rigamorticians. (To be honest, I’d still be pretty stoked to find that out.)
It turned out that prior to the album, Don Hinson worked for a radio station in Des Moines, where I was living at the time. This felt like a good sign, a beckoning to keep on digging. Plus, if I ever wanted to sell this story, presumably to some outlet with an interest in and budget for coverage of novelty Halloween records from fifty years ago, I could probably do it here. Iowa clings hard to its contributions to popular culture, however far removed and unknown they may be. $50 sounded about right. I've worked for less.
For a few months, I spent an unredeemable amount of time digging through the cobwebs of websites for long dead local radio stations. Talk about mausoleums.
I was looking for Don, or traces of Don wherever I could. I could find some Iowa time, and then time spent out west where he worked in radio and cut Monster Dance Party. It looked like Branson, Missouri loomed at the end. That’s where the paper trail dried up at least.
But anybody whose tenure at the Des Moines station coincided with Don’s was either already dead, or, after contact, deferred me to someone else who had also died or was otherwise unreachable.
Things were getting spooky.
Finally, I got this email about a year after I first heard Monster Dance Party:
So it was true: it had wound up down in Branson for Hinson, and he’d joined the great Monster Dance Party in the sky. This began a brutal streak for me, one that continues to this day, a streak of finding out about things and people just after they’ve died.
That email killed my pursuit of Hinson for a while. I was sad about being late in catching him, and that another rare copy of Monster Dance Party had been lost to the prying hands of time. (For the last few years on the website Discogs, I’ve watched vinyls of this thing go for well over $200.)
But during every Halloween season after, I’d hear just a few notes of the “Monster Mash” somewhere, and I’d fall back again into Monster Dance Party.
Eventually, I found Hinson’s step-daughter, Tami, living somewhere in Texas. It was several years after that initial email, the one that told me that Hinson had died. I guess I wanted to know more about the man behind the voices. The guy doing an impression of Dean Martin, doing an impression of Dracula.
When I called, we talked for an hour about Don, his later years, his role as a father, performing in Branson, and of course, Monster Dance Party. Several times before and during our conversation, she asked me what this was for, why I wanted to know about her dead father now. I’ve just listened back to the conversation, and I can tell you I did not have a passable answer for her then. Still don’t.
She didn’t know much about the record, but said he didn’t make any money from it. She was an adult by the time Hinson met her mother, but she knew he’d worked in radio stations all over the country before moving to Branson. In his final years, she remembered him hosting and performing at variety shows across the Midwest. She said that he was “funnier than all get out.”
Then she told me about Hinson’s friendship with Gary Paxton.
Yes, the Gary Paxton, the original producer of the real “Monster Mash.”
Turns out he’d moved to Branson at about the same time Hinson had in the late 90s. She said that Paxton visited Hinson often while he was in the hospital. She said he always called him “Little Donnie,” and described the two of them together as a “hoot.”
Maybe that’s been the point of all this: to find out that two “Monster Mash” men comforted each other as they headed off toward the graveyard themselves.
Tami wrote a few weeks after we talked, asking if she could send me a box. They’d been cleaning out a storage locker and she said they’d found “some things of Dad’s.”
My mind reeled. I imagined lost, handwritten verses of the “Werewolf Watusi,” a first pressing of Monster Dance Party still in the shrink-wrap, and a detailed call sheet of musicians for the record.
Instead, I received:
a press release for Hinson’s comedy career, which states that “The Don Hinson humor is as old as the smiling mask of Greek theater yet as new as the latest supermarket tabloid!”
twelve pieces of recorded material, including a 45, several cassettes, and CDs. (Most of them are of his stand up comedy, and a majority of those feature a character named The Reverend Herman Ginkfingdingler.)
other professional ephemera, including head shots, a business card, and a compilation of his music, titled: Songs I Learned At Mother’s Knee (and Other Joints).
And one burned CD, presumably from a home computer, of Monster Dance Party, attributed to one Don “Boris” Hinson.
I received that box over five years ago. No further answers have arrived regarding the album, or Hinson. The true identity of The Rigamorticians remains unknown.
Still, I can’t let the 60th anniversary of Monster Dance Party pass without mention. If I don’t bury this thing now, I’m not willing to wait another year to try again. (Plus, I’ve got to put all this Hinson stuff back into that box with my personal keepsakes. For some reason, they’re starting to creep me out.)
I could go through the album track by track and wax on and on about the best cuts on it: “Do The Rigamortis” and “Werewolf Watusi.” I could tell you about the shameless cash grabs and “Monster Mash” ripoffs, “The Monster Swim” and “The Monster Jerk,” or about Don’s drunk Deano impressions on “Riboflavin-Flavored, Non-Carbonated, Polyunsaturated Blood” and “Little Old Grave Robber Me.” But I really encourage you to check out “Phantom Of The A-Go-Go” and the title track, which both sound like Booker T. & The M.G.'s songs, if they were sight read by a half-drunk Muppet Show house band.
Adult life, sans children, is largely formless, lacking easy calendar cues. Spring remains a mystery to me. When it starts. Its parameters. I seem to always miss the approach of Halloween, despite the fact that a large part of my job for two whole months is ordering, unloading, and arranging pumpkins leading up specifically for that holiday. They’re big pumpkins, too. You’d think I’d get the hint.
Still, every year, we get caught without candy. Last year we filled a crate with small pumpkins that my dad had grown and stray gourds that grew up out of our compost pile. Sara made a sign: “FREE PUMPKINS.” We hid behind the door with all the lights out and listened to a lot of delighted kids and many disgruntled parents who would now have to carry a decorative squash around for the rest of the night. In some circles, we’re probably best known as “the house on the corner that gives out gourds on Halloween.” And I’m at peace with that.
Best laid plans are that I’ll be ready on the right night of the week this time, with enough mini bars of off-brand candy and my Monster Dance Party CD playing on a boombox.
I think that’s how Don has wanted this to end all along for me: at the heart of Halloween, cosplaying as a well-adjusted adult American man and dancing passionately, almost solemnly, across his front porch to the dulcet tones of the “Monster Surf Stomp.”
The Five and Dime is member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where each week a slew of new writing appears from around the state. It is gracefully collected by
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