Remember The Beastles?

 

            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”)

 

Rot Naturally

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)

 

Oh, yeah, I’ll tell you something,
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.

 

O please say to me
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 blood
            I 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.