In the early 1990s, Somerville-born musician Bobby “Boris” Pickett was making questionable choices with his undead Halloween classic, “Monster Mash.” When promoters booked him for concerts - “I do a medley of my hit,” he joked at the time - he received a meager $350. And when a record label planning a “Greatest Hits of the ‘60s” album invited him to remake the original, he agreed, but the recording session was so flawed that Pickett referred to the resulting version as “Monster Mish.”
That was when Stuart Hersh, a New York radio promotions employee who set up celebrity guests for a morning show, decided to contact Pickett just before Halloween. Hersh, then in his early 30s, had been such a devoted “Monster Mash” fanatic that he had performed Pickett’s 1962 hit during an audition for “The Gong Show” as a teenager.
When the two spoke, Pickett told Hersh of the $350 booking fee, and Hersh responded: “Oh, no, that’s not good. That song is too beloved.”
“I said, ‘Send me a little piece of paper, and just write that you’re going to give me a commission,’” recalled Hersh, 66, speaking on a recent call from his home in Bronxville, N.Y. “I got that in the mail and I made some calls and we were off - and did it on a handshake for 18 years.”
Pickett died of leukemia, at 69, in 2007. But just as Colonel Tom Parker famously said, “Why, I’ll go right on managing him” when he lost his client Elvis Presley, Hersh continues to generate income for “Monster Mash” today.
He has a specific tool for doing so: a re-recorded version of the original track that he made with Pickett and a host of studio pros in 1993.
“You can’t tell the difference between the new master and the original one,” Hersh said.
Back then, Hersh quizzed Pickett about the spooky effects on the beloved original version. Hersh recreated the original backup vocals: a female singer doing the high parts, and Hersh and a friend harmonizing underneath. To match the bubbling sounds at the beginning, the singers used straws to blow into water glasses; for the squeaks, Hersh dragged his shoes over the concrete studio floor. Instead of slowly pulling a nail out of a block of wood to approximate a creaky door, Hersh found an actual creaky door that worked just as well.
When it came time for Pickett to sing (actually more of a Boris Karloff-style rap), Hersh found the star had naturally lowered his voice after three decades of performing “Monster Mash.”
“I would stop it and go, ‘Bobby, no, no, no!’” Hersh remembered. Pickett understood and “sang” in a higher pitch. To mix the final track, Hersh worked with the studio engineer to slide the knobs on the vocal mix until “we could not tell one from the other.”
Here’s how to tell the difference: On streaming services such as Spotify, the original 1962 version is attributed to “Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers,” produced by Gary Paxton, who had sung a previous hit, “Alley Oop,” by the Hollywood Argyles. Today, the 1993 version is marked with a photo of Pickett in his iconic Dr. Frankenstein-style labcoat with a giant spider on his shoulder, leaning over a gravestone. (Pickett had perfected his Karloff voice as a kid, enthralled by movie depictions of Frankenstein’s monster at the Somerville Theatre.)
Why did Pickett and Hersh need a new version of “Monster Mash”? In part, for the same reason Taylor Swift spent the last few years re-recording “Taylor’s versions” of her hits. Instead of a record company receiving all of the streaming and sales revenue from the original master recording, the artist keeps that money whenever fans can be persuaded to listen to the new version instead.
Pickett originally co-wrote “Monster Mash” with a singing friend, Leonard Capizzi. Over the years, Pickett’s songwriting share of “Monster Mash” changed hands several times until Reservoir, a top publisher, acquired it in 2014. His daughter, Nancy Huus, received songwriting royalties through February 2023, when she died of unknown causes. Now her widower controls the family share of “Monster Mash” royalties.
Just before she died, Huus gave Hersh an incredible gift: the rights to the 1993 “Monster Mash” master recording. (Master rights are separate from publishing royalties, which Pickett’s family still controls.) The track remains on the Mount Rushmore of Halloween hits, alongside Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters,” and Andrew Gold’s “Spooky, Scary Skeletons.” According to a 2023 report from Billboard magazine, the combined versions of “Monster Mash” generate nearly $1 million annually. Reservoir regularly places it in TV shows, commercials, and films, most recently this year’s “The Bride!,” starring Annette Bening, Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, and others. Miramax is also developing an animated film based on the song. A Reservoir representative confirmed that the song has been streamed 500 million times worldwide.
Today Hersh books classic TV stars at conventions such as the Chiller Theatre Toy, Model and Film Expo in Parsippany, N.J. But every fall, Hersh, too, works “Monster Mash” through his Pickett-emblazoned website themonstermash.com, where musicians can request to license the 1993 version for their own projects.
Hersh has also placed the 1993 version in a Hallmark greeting card and loaned Pickett’s original lab coat to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
“I’m just trying to get it out there and keep it alive as much as I can,” he said. “Monster songs, horror songs, novelty songs like that will come and go, but when you have a song like this, it represents so much - parents want to play it for their little kid, and the little kid grows up and he wants to play it for his children, and it just keeps spiraling like that. It’s just amazing what ‘Monster Mash’ became.”