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New Haven Gets Ready To Monster Swim

Brendan Toller & Lucy Gellman | October 26th, 2018

New Haven Gets Ready To Monster Swim

Cafe Nine  |  Music  |  Arts & Culture

 

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Brendan Toller on a recent Sunday, in his Shake N. Vibrate best. Lucy Gellman Photos. 

This is the first installment in a new monthly series we’re doing on Shake N’ Vibrate, musician, DJ, and filmmaker Brendan Toller’s monthly vinyl series at Cafe Nine. To get the full taste of Shake N’ Vibrate, New Haveners still have to go to the events themselves. But here, readers can get a glimpse—or a listen—into what they’re in for.

Brendan Toller doesn’t like Halloween. But he’ll definitely be doing the monster swimming on that spooky, scary, ghoulish day this year—and he’s hoping to have some New Haveners come out and do it with him.

That’s Toller’s pitch for a special Halloween “Shake n’ Vibrate,” a monthly vinyl series that has been running at Cafe Nine since June of this year. Typically held the last Sunday of each month, the event is a big, free listening party featuring 1950s and 1960s soul, 1970s glam and punk, and early rock n’ roll. There are only two rules: nothing published late into the 1980s, and nothing digital.

“I don’t want to just have a hard drive,” he said. “I like the tactile experience. Nobody remembers their first download.”

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This month, he’s doing something a little different, pushing the dance and listening party directly to that Wednesday. New Haven rock band Ryxno will also be playing, turning the venue into a full-fledged dance party well before the end of the night. And he’s hoping, he said, that the night will endear him to a holiday that he doesn't especially like. 

“I like the sentiment of Halloween,” he said. “Confronting fears, fears out in the open, mortality, a little bit of gaudiness, cheese, spookiness.”

But “the holidays where everyone is dressing up and drinking, that’s so messy,” he added. “For me, that’s a Wednesday night. But when everybody does it, it gets disgusting and messy. Nobody likes the green vomit holidays … but put me in any situation where people want to party and they need a musical connoisseur, an arbiter of taste, and I’m your man.”

In advance of that party, Toller sat down with a few of the songs listeners can expect to hear that evening. Here’s what he had to say.


Halloween is one tough "holiday" to pick just one track. Year-round, I marvel at the sheer cash-grab gall of Bobby Pickett & the Rolling Bones "Monster Swim." Recorded about two years apart from "Monster Mash" by Bobby Pickett & the Crypt Kickers (featuring Wrecking Crew Leon Russell on piano and the Ventures' Mel Taylor on drums), "Monster Swim" is a revved-update of the "Monster Mash" er, mashing melodies of Bobby Freeman's "C'mon and Swim" into the mix. 

My name is Boris
and back in '62
the Crypt Kickers and I
brought the Monster Mash to you

But now it's a different bag
and mashing is drag
when the lights grow dim
we do the Monster Swim

But, if I was caught between a ghoul-and-a-hard-place, I'd have to pick Charles "Mad Dog" Sheffield's 1961 bopper, "It's Your Voodoo Working.” The album was cut in Crowley, Louisiana and pressed on Nashville's staggering Excello label.

"Voodoo" clocks in at just under two minutes like the best of 'em. The percussion and horn arrangement and background howls make you feel like you're swingin' in an underground dungeon, groovin' with dancing skeletons as some witches brew boils in the corner. And it’s part of music history: the infamous Lazy Lester plays "shakers" on "Voodoo." Lester was a hell of a songwriter, harp player and guitarist that made the 60's white rock 'n' rollers blush. The Kinks, Flamin' Groovies, and Dave Edmunds all covered his songs.

Sadly, Sheffield only recorded one other Excello side, titled ”I Would Be A Sinner.” It’s backed with “Kangaroo," which has a fab New Orleans feel. Sheffield entered the supernatural realm in 2010, followed by Lazy Lester this year.

Alas, here’s to the rock 'n' roll ghosts and the treasures they leave behind.