The Moon-Rays Sell You Lloyd?
Attack Of The Moon-Rays
They may be Hollywood horror legends but, quite frankly, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolfman don’t get the musical credit they deserve. Sure, they’ve inspired a song or two through the years and, thanks to films like Young Frankenstein and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, even a couple of dance routines. Still, there are few musicians so moved by movie monsters that they’ve crafted entire albums – let alone entire careers – based on these fearsome fiends.
Fortunately for fans of such fright flicks, Scott Mensching, cofounder and creative force behind suburban Chicago band The Moon-Rays, found those classic pictures – and especially the schlocky late-night horror movie shows they subsequently spawned – so unforgettable he couldn’t help but recreate their scary sounds.
“It was around Halloween back in 2000, and a friend and I got to talking about old TV horror hosts and Saturday-night spook shows,” remembers the 51-year-old percussionist, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s grew up watching tons of those terrifying television programs on WGN and WFLD. “I told him that somewhere I had the theme to ‘Creature Features’ on reel-to-reel tape, because as a kid I used to record television shows just to get the audio. I searched around and, sure enough, I found it. The quality wasn’t that great, but one thing led to another and we got the idea to just re-record the thing. That led to us doing our first CD, Thrills And Chills.”
That disc, released in 2002, introduced the band’s one-of-a-kind style, which initially used horror, surf, and “spy-fi” sounds to spice up obscure movie melodies such as Henry Mancini’s “Experiment In Terror” (otherwise known as the “Creature Features” theme) and a track from the 1959 Vincent Price thriller The Bat. On their next recording, The Ghouls Go West, the group expanded their repertoire to include a few self-penned works, while their third album, Sinister Surf, was almost entirely new tunes featuring titles like “Spook Walk,” “Mysterion,” and “Sophomore Werewolf In Love.”
Ironically, The Moon-Rays’ latest CD, Swingin’ At The Séance (SVI), finds the five-man ensemble returning to their roots as a cover band while simultaneously heading in a different musical direction. Primarily comprising reasonably faithful renditions of vintage horror-themed jazz and big band songs (plus three contemporary band-written works performed in a retro style), the compositions, which include such classic cuts as Artie Shaw’s “Mysterioso” and “You’ve Got Me Voodoo’d” by Louis Armstrong, are uniformly spooky and – ahem – spirited. Now and again hints of the act’s signature surf sounds turn up, but for the most part all 12 numbers are, as the liner notes attest, for “people who both know and embrace the music of their fathers and grandfathers.”
“My dad was a piano player his whole life and, though he’s been dead for some 20 years now, during World War II he played for awhile in the Army Air Force Band,” recalls Mensching. “The first time I heard a lot of these songs was him playing them on the piano around Halloween. This was way back when I was young enough to be sitting on his lap. So I heard big band music around the house all the time when I was a kid. In that area my dad was very influential to me, and I know he would have gotten a real charge out of this project.”
Still, it’s one thing to remember your father plinking out a few ditties on the piano; it’s altogether another to try to fashion an entire album awash with ancient melodies, especially when many of the tunes have never been re-recorded or, in some cases, even released on CD. Fortunately, Mensching and the band’s sax player, Andy Blanco (who has a master’s degree in music and composition), took whatever audio bits and pieces they could find and turned them into full-blown charts for each number.
“If it wasn’t for Andy’s arranging, we couldn’t have done this album,” admits Mensching, at the same time acknowledging the contributions of the other three band members: keyboard whiz Greg Griffiths, guitarist Brandon Cochran, and bass player Adam Kraus. “We were taking all these obscure songs, and Andy was listening to them and writing arrangements right off the old Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan 78s.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean that buried within the works there aren’t a few marked Moon-Rays moments. “To bastardize the music would, to me, be a real sin,” continues Mensching. “These songs were written in a certain style and they should remain that way. Nevertheless, on some of the tunes we wanted to put a few of our signature touches. ‘Nightmare’ is a great example. That composition was Artie Shaw’s theme song in the 1940s, and we decided to throw in a Theremin as a bit of a nod to our other records. We also used some organ in parts where maybe there wouldn’t have originally been an organ. But we basically tried to record the songs without completely updating them. We didn’t want to change them all that much.”
One significant exception is the disc’s closing cut, “Haunted House Blues,” first performed by Bessie Smith in 1923. Mensching and guest vocalist Theresa “Dixie” Villec (who also lends her voice to the album’s title track) believed it would be impossible to capture the legendary blues singer’s storied subtleties, so they instead opted to offer a somewhat more modern take on that terrifying tune.
“You’re not going to try and sound like Bessie Smith, and you’re certainly not going to try and do the same arrangement, because the comparison between our version and the original would, for purists, pretty much be the kiss of death,” explains Mensching. “So with that song we decided to go in a totally different direction. I just told Dixie, ‘Sound like you’re in a haunted house and you’re scared. Just make it like the story that the song is.'”
Ironically, after this latest effort to honor their fathers’ and grandfathers’ musical roots, Mensching and The Moon-Rays hope to further mine their collective past in an altogether different manner. While another CD of either originals or classic covers isn’t totally out of the question, at this point the group intend to focus their efforts on composing music for low-budget fright flicks. In fact, a couple of tunes from their earlier albums have already been picked up for use in such direct-to-DVD fare as American Scary, Dr. Horror’s Erotic House Of Idiots, and Ghost In A Teeny Bikini.
“We seem to have become the B-movie band,” laughs Mensching. “As a matter of fact, we just wrote the title track to The Ghastly Love Of Johnny X, which should be coming out soon.”
Which can only mean that, a few decades from now, it’s entirely possible some of The Moon-Rays’ melodies could inspire yet another generation of horror-music fans.
— Jeff Berkwits
