It was in the early 1960s that the American audience for pop music’s new offshoot, rock’n’roll, heard of a new band from the other side of the Atlantic pond. It was four Vlads who played loud and hard and long. Whispers among excited fans was that this new band, The Beastles, was slayin’ ’em right and left.
It was true -- literally. This quartet of supernatural swing -- John Venom, Paul McCoffin, George Hairyson, and Ringo Stab -- became known to the world as “the Slab Four,” as the popularity of their music and their only-after-dark public appearances made a ticket to a Beastles concert the hippest “Ticket to Debride,” as one of their song titles put it.
In 1964 they signed with the American label Decapitate Records. Over the next six years, until 1970, when a curtain malfunction in their tour van brought about a sudden and smoky and smelly and crumbly end to their career, The Beastles were the rulers of the musical underworld, producing dozens of hits, such as
Yelp!
Grey Mood (with its famous three-minute-long fadeout)
Scum Together
She Digs You (Blehh! Blehh! Blehh!)
I’ve Just Seen a Throat
Dying (the group’s only instrumental; culminating in a whispery sound signifying a sheet being drawn over one’s head)
Don’t Dig Me Up
Carry That Deadweight
Axeman (from their first Sickedelic album Repulsor)
A Hard Day’s Fright
You Mother Should Croak
Clavicle Blistery Tour
Lady Belladonna
I Dig Up Bony
Twitch and Howl
While My Widow Gently Weeps
You Never Give Me Your Mummy
Get Black
PS I Bit You
Revulsion (echoed in their eight-minute sound montage, Revulsion #9)
Festerday
The Long and Winding Shroud
Things We Bled Today
Everybody’s Got Someone to Bite Except Me and My Creature
I Am the Werewolf
Get Drac
I’ve Just Been Erased
Long-Buried Fields Forever
Old Brown Bat
You Know My Name (Look Up the Obituary)
She Came in Through the Charnel Window
No Werewolf Man
The Cool of the Thrill
Dead Letter Writer
Back in the U.S. ER
I Should Have Dug Deeper
Doctor Leper’s Heart Transplant Club Band
Please Mr Ghostman
Grave Stripper
Filling a Hole
You’re Going to Lose That Ghoul
Getting Deader
Good Night Moonshine
Lucy in a Box with Flowers
She’s Bleeding Out
Scum Together
I Want You (She’s So Bloody)
Don’t Let Me Drown
Maxwell’s Silver Bullet
Happiness Is a Cold Slab
A Waste of Honey
I’m Happy Just to Drink from You
Rotting Raccoon (which inspired Loudon Wainwright III’s “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road”)
Decay in the Life
And Your Wolf Can Sing
Baby, You’re a Dead Man
Being for the Death Benefit of Mister Kite
Blue Blood Way
(The Worms Crawl) Within You, Without You
Two of Pus
A Little Help from My Fiends
Norwegian Stake
Let It Beat (nicknamed “the Poe song” by fans for its retelling of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”)
We Can Dig It Up
Got to Get You into My Crypt
Ironically, their final single release reached Number One on the US and British pop charts the same week of their passing. Perhaps prophetically, it was titled “Here Comes the Sun (Better Hide).”
But their first hit made such a smash that I am including its lyrics here today.
I Want to Bite Your Neck
by
The Beastles
(John Venom, Paul McCoffin, George Hairyson, Ringo Stab)
I hope you won’t object.
When I say that something,
I want to bite your neck.
I want to bite your neck, I want to bite your neck.
You’ll let me be your wreck,
And please say to me
You’ll let me bite your neck.
You’ll let me bite your neck, I want to bite your neck.
And when I touch you I feel thirsty inside.
It’s such a feeling for your bloodI can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide.
Yeah, you’ve got that something,
So don’t keep me in check.When I feel that something,
I want to bite your neck.
I want to bite your neck, I want to bite your neck.