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mywifeleftme · 5 months

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240: Various Artists // The Golden Turkey Album: The Best Songs from the Worst Movies

The Golden Turkey Album: The Best Songs from the Worst Movies Various Artists 1985, Rhino

Early Rhino Records was a grand old place for musical perverts thanks to its steady stream of novelty compilations like the Dr. Demento albums and Teenage Tragedy, which collected ‘50s and ‘60s songs about kids dying in automobile accidents (there were a lot of those, it turns out). The Golden Turkey Album: The Best Songs from the Worst Movies is from square in the label’s whacko prime and it’s exactly what it says on the label. These 16 tracks culled from trashy exploitation films like Eegah! (1962), Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1964), and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) range from Confederate bluegrass to saloon music performed by a group of little people, though the majority are cornball rock ‘n’ roll numbers. On balance, it’s a highly listenable record, full of amateurish, nakedly trend-chasing but ultimately charming recordings that spark the same bewildered laughter as the films from which they derive.

As we march through the tracklist, remember at all times that I am sitting alone on the couch in my apartment wearing a frayed housecoat. Okay, let’s go.

Side One

Trevor Duncan — “Grip of the Law”

Side one opens, as indeed it must, with the blaring opening title theme from Ed Wood’s deathless groaner Plan Nine From Outer Space (1959). Duncan, an Englishman, was a prolific composer for film and television, but “Grip of the Law” wasn’t written for Wood’s opus, which lacked the budget to commission an original score. Duncan’s piece rather was cribbed for the film by one of Wood’s collaborators—which explains why in contrast to everything else about the film, it’s a perfectly competent piece of bombastic orchestral horror/thriller music

The Five Blobs — “Beware of the Blob”

1958’s Steve McQueen vehicle The Blob tracks the very, very slow slugtrail of destruction wrought by a ball of alien red Jell-O, and it’s probably fair to say it peaks with its opening credits and this incongruous “Tequila”/cocktail music-esque number penned by a young Burt Bacharach and Mack David (the elder brother of Burt's future writing partner Hal David). It doesn’t rise to the level of a good Esquivel! track, let alone Bacharach’s own later work, but it’s very dumb and goes on my Halloween playlist every year.

Arch Hall Jr. — “Valerie”

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The first of three Arch Hall Jr. tracks on the compilation, which tells you the Rhino guys figured they had a little find on their hands. Hall Jr. was a genuinely talented singer and guitarist with an enormous dome who resembled Jesse Plemons (Todd Alquist from Breaking Bad) or perhaps a wax museum James Cagney. His father, filmmaker Arch Hall Sr., clearly hoped to turn the 16-year-old into an Elvis Presley-esque acting and singing double threat, and featured him in a series of screamingly bad early ‘60s B-movies. “Valerie” is a twinkling, whistling ballad drawn from 1962’s Eegah!, a film which sees the 7’2 Richard Kiel (later Jaws in the James Bond series) as a horny caveman who wants to rail a teenage girl named Roxie whom Hall Jr.’s character is dating. As someone who loves sock-hop dream music and throwing metaphors in a blender (“vitamins are good they say / and so’s a calorie / but I feel like a tiger / on one kiss from Valerie”), I think this one’s pretty great!

Carol Kay & the Stone Tones — “Shook Out of Shape”

Coming in hot from The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964), billed as “The First Horror Movie Musical,” “Shook Out of Shape” puts me in my mind of a Wanda Jackson or a Patsy Cline in a rock mood. Perfectly acceptable beach party music, though it has less of that wonderful offness about it than most anything else here.

Bobby and Benny Belew — “Lonesome”

This is more like it. 12-year-old Texan twins sing close harmony rockabilly from 1957’s Rock, Baby—Rock It! one of a million chintzy attempts to cash in on the rock ‘n’ roll craze that looks like it was shot for $10 (in today’s money). The performances (which some kind soul has cut free of the film’s narrative) by a string of never-were stars generally rip (check out Johnny Carroll, and also whoever’s playing guitar for Preacher Smith & the Deacons, goddamn!), but the Belew Twins were definitely the right choice for this comp. Kids singing adult music basically always comes with the scent of some sweating, overambitious father clenching his fists in the wings. Delish.

The Pleasant Valley Boys — “Robert E. Lee Broke His Musket on His Knee”

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From the seminal hicksploitation film Two Thousand Maniacs (1964), we have straight up and down rural car chase bluegrass concerning the eventual return of the South; the horrible shrieking of a crazed Robert E. Lee; and the sucking chest wounds of Stonewall Jackson. The slapping sound? Oh, don’t mind me, I’m just tapping away on the big vein in my arm.

Some adults and some kids — “We’re the Lemon Grove Kids”

Described in the liner notes as a “grating jingle,” this minute-or-so number served as the theme song for a series of Bowery Boys knock-off short films directed by Ray Dennis Steckler, who also gave us The Incredibly Strange Creatures and Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (see side 2 of this LP). Both grating and a jingle.

Arch Hall Jr. — “Vickie”

More Hall Jr., hailing like “Valerie” from Eegah!, also like “Valerie” sung to his character’s girlfriend whose name is Roxie. The songs are similar, but this one is dweebier.

Side Two

Milton Delugg & the Little Eskimos — “Hooray for Santa Claus”

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This review didn't need to be this long, but with band names like this, and movies like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) I don’t see how I can stop. A thoroughly unbearable twist-style song sung by a chorus of children who pronounce it out S-A-N-T-A but say it “Santy.”

Arch Hill Jr. — “Yes, I Will”

Yet another one from Arch, this time from 1962’s Wild Guitar. “Yes, I Will” is kind of pubby rock, and it’s perfectly fine, but there are much better numbers from this one—chalk me up as a “Twist Fever” guy personally. Wild Guitar is very in the Elvis teen idol-movie mode—ironically though the best performance of Hall Jr.’s short career would come the following year in Jamis Landis’s brutish The Sadist, in which Hall plays a psychopathic killer based on Charles Starkweather!

Johnnie Fern — “Hey, Look Out! (I Want to Make Love to You)”

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1938’s The Terror of Tiny Town is a Western with a cast entirely composed of little people. It will not shock you to learn the movie did not originate from an urge to improve representation of little people in film, but rather from a joke producer Jed Buell overheard. According to the liners the song is sung by someone named Johnnie Fern, but in the film it’s presented as the voice of Nita Krebs, a dancehall girl doing a kind of Marlene Dietrich femme fatale shtick. It’s a treacly Vaudeville-ish ballad sung in a very, very high pitch, and I love it. Sending this one out to my girlfriend, to whom I am hornily disposed and who also is quite short.

Dr. Frederick Kopp — “The Dance Hall Twist”

Yet another twist number (from 1964’s monster flick The Creeping Terror). Not much to say about it, likely included here because it immediately precedes this unforgettable sequence:

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Dr. Frederick Kopp — “She Left Me Lonely”

A vaguely Latin-flavoured country ballad from the same film featuring the indelible chorus, “she left me lonely / she left me sad / but still I am happy / in fact I am glad,” the liner notes quote the classically trained Dr. "Not a" Kopp as “feeling dirty” to have written the song, which apparently took him 15 minutes or so.

Harold "Duke" Lloyd with Page Cavanaugh and His Trio — “Special Date”

Before kicking off this number from 1958’s Frankenstein’s Daughter, the Duke sends “Special Date” out to anyone in the audience on a special date, which is like dedicating a song called “Having Sex” to anyone currently having sex or “Eating Food” to anyone actively eating food.

Ron Haydock & the Boppers — “Rat Pfink”

Ray Dennis Steckler’s Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966) is a straight crime movie for the first 40 minutes before abruptly becoming a parody of the Batman television series and ending with a rockabilly barbecue party. Sung by Ron Haydock, who plays the titular Batman knockoff, the Gene Vincent-y “Rat Pfink” is damned solid stuff.

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Ron Haydock & the Boppers — “Big Boss A-Go-Go Party”

Same artist, same movie, same scene, not quite as vigorous as “Rat Pfink” but you gotta think Lux Interior of the Cramps must’ve loved this shit.

That’s it? That’s all the turkey? Thank you Rhino, thank you directors of trash movies and performers of trash music, thank you dear reader for sticking around.

240/365

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