Rock On Vinyl: W.O.C.K on Vinyl: The Ghouls

Friday, October 31, 2025

W.O.C.K on Vinyl: The Ghouls - Dracula's Deuce (1964)

Before things get too serious here at Rock On Vinyl, I thought it might be fun to post a song / album at the end of each month, that could be categorized as being either Weird, Obscure, Crazy or just plain Korny.

Now here's an album that's guarenteed to grab you (down! Igor. down!). Something new and different for all you Monstrous Music lovers. Half the tunes are vocals with great, horrifying lyrics, and half are swinging instrumentals guaranteed to wake the dead (go back to sleep, Igor, the sun's still out)

So whether you're in the mood to mash, jerk, watusi or swim - or just want to lie back on your slab and relax with some wonderful music for queasy listening - this album is for you. [Album liner notes]

This album is actually Dracula parodies of the Beach Boys and surf music in general. It's particularly notable for having come out in 1964, before the heyday of psychedelia. It perfectly presages a lot of retro interest in goofy halloween music, surf rock, sunshine pop, etc. among the garage rockers of the 2020s, purely innocently. No sinister psychedelia or subversion here, just good clean fun.

Cemetary Rockers will really dig this album

While I love hearing a 60’s-era monster party song any time of year, cemetery rockers and blood-sucking bops make up a substantial part of my diet come October. I’ve been reviewing a mix of gleefully ghastly and truly god-awful genre pieces through my Instagram stories all month long, but for Halloween-proper I wanted to dig a little deeper into a record that’s fascinated me for decades: The Ghouls’ Dracula’s Deuce, from 1964.

The Ghouls weren’t exactly a real band, but rather a studio project concocted by Gary Usher, a California producer/musician who carved out a career making music with various fictional ensembles.

Drac loves surf music too

Dracula’s Deuce is a weird beast. It pretty well trades off song-for-song between instrumental and vocal pieces. But it’s also a novelty record to the max, and painfully punny to the core. Considering Gary also had a dozen co-writes with Brian Wilson (most famously “In My Room”), it’s not surprising to see the Ghouls' macabre goofs on iconic tracks from Jan and Dean (“The Little Old Lady from Transylvania”), The Beach Boys (“Be True To Your Ghoul”) and even Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" ("Bela be Good").

While borrowing quite liberally from the surf and hot rod music scenes, it’s hard to miss that Dracula’s Deuce also owes an eternal debt to “Monster Mash”. Vocalist Richie Burns often works a similar Boris Karloff lilt as the Crypt-Kickers’ Bobby “Boris” Pickett; the Ghouls’ “The Graveyard Shift” is musically a beat-for-beat Mash, though it moves the monsters from the party to a back-breaking night of ditchdigging.

Drac's Red Deuce

The simmering, sax-loaded “Monsterbilly Heaven,” the album’s best vocal track, is an accidentally profound piece about monsters crossing over into a second afterlife, with Drac and Vampira having one last bash before ascending to that big black cloud in the sky. That’s kind of how the Ghouls avoid being mere “Monster Mash” retreads, putting them a rung ahead above more pitiful Pickett bites like Mann Drake’s “Vampire’s Ball”.

That’s not to say the record is without faults. Burns loves dropping these pained cries throughout the vocal pieces that are a struggle to listen to. It’s as if he’s constantly being staked through the heart (maybe he was !) For this reason alone, the instrumentals steal the show. Take “Dracula’s Theme,” a cool-but-creepy bit of whammy-undulated guitar exotica.

While they haven’t repressed The Ghouls’ lone record since the ‘60s, it is streaming through Apple and Spotify. It’s doubly niche, between the hot rod talk and the horror aesthetic, but when it comes to songs about vampires racing custom-plated hearses through a graveyard, you can’t get much better than Dracula’s Deuce.[BY GREGORY ADAMS]