Beer #2 is from suburban Itasca's Church Street, and it was brewed in collaboration with the proprietor of this lovely advent calendar, Beer on the Wall. I assume that means it was made especially for the advent calendar, particularly because I was only the 8th person on Untappd to ever check it in. Anywho, this one's a red ale called Rudolph's Red, and it's pretty damn good -- malty, caramelly, and not too heavy at 5.3%. Not enough breweries make red ales anymore, which is too bad because it's really a great style of beer. Hopefully Church Street keeps making it.
Name: Rudolph's Red
Brewery: Church Street Brewing Company
Location: Itasca, IL
ABV: 5.3%
IBU: 37
Good for drinking if: You need a nice malty beer after once again shuttling children to and from sports practices.
Rating (out of five stars, by quarter star increments): 4.25
December certainly snuck up on us, didn't it? Seems like just four days ago, I was drinking Underberg in a vain attempt to settle my engorged stomach after eating way too much turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, shrimp, cheese, cured meats, crackers, olives, and pie. And now I have to start drinking a beer every night until Santa comes to visit.
Like last several years, I will once again be engaging in a 24-day weight-gaining enterprise I call It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Beer -- a daily look at a different beers throughout December. I once again bought bought my beer advent calendar from local beer shop Beer on the Wall. I'll also once again take this opportunity to express my disappointment that Costco once again didn't have its German beer advent calendar, which I also usually buy just to have unique German beers throughout the year. But here's a shot of this year's calendar. It's noticeably shorter than the last few years, which leads me to believe it's all cans -- but I dare not peek! Disregard the bunched up rug in the background. My brain-injured dog likes to spite pee in our house when we have the gall to leave him alone for more than two minutes, so what you're seeing is a hopefully clean, but wet, portion of the rug propped up to dry. It truly is the little things that drive you insane.
The advent calendar began this evening with a selection from north suburban Lake Zurich's Roaring Table. The beer is called Jubilation, and the can touts it as a "Winter India Pale Ale." It features five varieties of hops that all start with "c." We have Cascade, Cashmere, Centennial, Chinook, and Columbus hops. I'd love to tell you what any of that means, but you know damn well I don't like hoppy beers. And this one is hoppy. I suppose the "winter" portion of it comes from the fact that it's a little bit darker than the normal IPA. While I'm not a fan, at least I was able to drink it out of the commemorative Beer On the Wall glass that came with the calendar.
Name: Jubilation
Brewery: Roaring Table Brewing Company
Location: Lake Zurich, IL
ABV: 6.8%
IBU: N/A
Good for drinking if: You feel like drinking a pine tree.
Rating (out of five stars, by quarter star increments): 3.5
We've reached the end of Rocktober, but be sure to tune in Monday for Crowvember, a daily look at nature's most misunderstood avian animal.
But before then, we have one more Coverocktober song for you. It's Hair Band Friday, so our final selection will be Mötley Crüe's cover of The Beatles' "Helter Skelter."
"Helter Skelter" is one of my favorite Beatles songs, off of my favorite Beatles album, their self-titled 1968 four-sided masterpiece we know as The White Album.
As rock lore goes, Paul McCartney wrote "Helter Skelter" after hearing an interview with Pete Townshend, who described "I Can See For Miles" as the loudest and rawest song The Who had ever recorded. Being a Beatle, Paul thought "challenge accepted," so wrote a blistering (literally, if you believe Ringo's outburst at the end) rock song that is considered one of the first heavy metal songs.
A helter skelter is a British term for a large amusement park slide that spirals along a tower. So why is a cover of the song being included in Coverocktober on Halloween week -- and Halloween itself, at that? Well you see, there was this guy one time who thought this song about a slide (that even specifically refers to a slide) and a couple other songs on the White Album were actually coded songs that predicted an international race war. That guy's name was Charles Manson. "Helter Skelter" was part of his motivation for the Manson Family's horrific Tate-LaBianca murders in the LA area in 1969, and it ended up being the name of the best-selling book written by Vincent Bugliosi (the prosecutor in the Manson murder trial) about the murders and the subsequent trials (a chilling but worthwhile read), as well as the name of a 1976 made-for-TV movie based on the book. After Manson Family members murdered the LaBiancas, Patricia Krenwinkel wrote the misspelled "Healter Skelter" in all caps on the LaBiancas' refrigerator door in Rosemary LaBianca's blood. Cults, am I right?
Mötley Crüe's version was the last track on the first side of their epic 1983 album Shout at the Devil. It was the perfect cover song for an album that drew the ire of parents and the PMRC, alongside songs with "devil," "kill," "dead," "beast," and "danger" in the titles. Their version is an even more hard-rocking, but generally true-to-the-original, version of the song. Happy Halloween, piggies!
Yesterday we featured a cover medley of two Misfits songs, so today we're featuring a cover song by The Misfits -- their version of the Halloween classic "Monster Mash."
The now-iconic and enduring original version of the song was released by Bobby "Boris" Pickett and The Crypt-Kickers in 1962, and it went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year, just before Halloween. It has reentered the Billboard Hot 100 five times over the years, reaching #10 in 1973 and the Top 30 within the last few years.
In the early '60s, Pickett was an aspiring actor who was also in a band. At a show one night, he started doing an impression of Boris Karloff, a horror movie icon best known for his portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in the original 1931 version of Frankenstein. The crowd loved Pickett's impression, so he decided to capitalize on it. He and his fellow band member Lenny Capizzi wrote "Monster Mash," with Pickett doing his Karloff impression as he sings about a mad scientist whose monster arises and starts dancing (a variation of the popular dance craze the Mashed Potato), and then he invites all of his monster friends. And then they fucking party.
In 1997, The Misfits recorded a cover of the song as part of a promotion relating to the DVD release of a 1967 Rankin Bass stop motion animation film called Mad Monster Party -- which starred, you guessed it, Boris Karloff. The Misfits then released their version of "Monster Mash" as a single in 1999 and rerecorded it for their 2003 album Project 1950. The song is notable because it was the first song on which bassist Jerry Only sang lead vocals. I'm posting the 2003 version because I like that version slightly better than the 1997/1999 version. Like the original, they use bubbling and chain sound effects at the beginning, before it turns into a punked-up, fast-paced version of the song, with sing-along backing vocals. All in all, a pretty damn fine cover that both pays homage to the original and makes it their own at the same time.
Our next selection in the darkness of the last week of Coverocktober comes courtesy of one of the best cover bands there's ever been, Metallica.
In 1987, the band released a five-song EP of covers called The $5.98 E.P. - Garage Days Re-Revisited, and then in 1998, they released Garage, Inc., which included a full album of new covers on disc one and then Garage Days (which had been unavailable since its original run in 1987) and some additional covers that had been B-sides to singles or were one-off recordings on disc two.
One of the covers from the 1987 Garage Days EP was a medley of two Misfits songs -- because it takes two Misfits songs to make one three and a half minute song -- "Last Caress/Green Hell." Then at the end of the song, there's a little wonky, out-of-tune version of the opening riff to Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills." The Misfits songs are pretty true to the originals, but Metallicized.
"Last Caress" has been a standard at Metallica live shows over the years, though they usually leave "Green Hell" out of it. The song was also the centerpiece of a minor controversy. At the 1996 MTV Europe Music Awards, the band was supposed to perform "King Nothing," but MTV forbid the band from swearing or using pyrotechnics. So they did what any good metal band would do: they played a song about murder and rape, which got them banned from MTV for a few years.
"Green Hell" is a blistering hardcore song, originally released by The Misfits in 1983, but in my mind, that takes a backseat to "Last Caress." The original version of "Last Caress" (recorded in 1980) is one of my favorite Misfits songs, and it's widely considered one of their best songs and one of the best punk songs ever, for that matter. In a 2019 poll, it was voted by New Jersey residents -- New Jerseyeans? New Jersers? New Jerseyganders? New Jersies? -- as the best song ever released by a band or artist from New Jersey, beating out Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Skid Row, and other great Jersey bands and artists. That's crazy.
The lyrical content of the song is disturbing, purportedly the fictional confession of a killer and rapist. The opening stanza is about as brutal as it gets: "I got something to say / I killed a baby today / And it doesn't matter much to me / As long as it's dead." That's followed by a stanza about raping "your mother." Then the chorus is about longing for "sweet lovely death," though whether that's the killer wanting to die or talking about giving his victims "one last caress" before they die is unclear. But the way Glenn Danzig sings the song has a macabre beauty to it, where if you weren't listening to the lyrics, you might think it's a punk cover of a late '50s/early '60s teen tragedy song. It's a hell of a song, but certainly not for the faint of heart.
Back in 2013, Swedish metal band Ghost released a five-song EP called If You Have Ghost. It was produced by Dave Grohl, who also played on a couple of the tracks, and all but one of the songs on the EP were covers. But these weren't your standard metal covers of other hard rock or metals songs. The band covered ABBA's "I'm a Marionette," Depeche Mode's "Waiting for the Night," Swedish pop group Army of Lovers' "Crucified," and Roky Erickson's "If You Have Ghosts."
Their cover of "If You Have Ghosts" seems to fit with the band's mystique and, of course, fits very well with the band's name. Now if you're not familiar with Roky Erickson, I'll give you some background. Erickson was a co-founder, lead singer, and rhythm guitarist of the influential Austin-based psychedelic rock band The 13th Floor Elevators, whose 1966 song "You're Gonna Miss Me" -- with Erickson's howling vocals -- is considered a treasure of both the garage rock and psychedelic rock genres. Then in 1969, he got busted with a joint, and rather than face up to a decade in a Texas prison, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, so he was sentenced to a state mental hospital, where he remained until 1972. In between electroconvulsive therapy treatments, Erickson wrote songs, many of which would end up on future albums.
After he was released, he formed a band that would become Roky Erickson & The Aliens, and Erickson's lyrics and music took more of a hard rock and horror-inspired turn. In 1978 and 1979, the band recorded songs that would end up on a self-titled EP in 1980 and a full-length album, The Evil One, in 1981. CCR bassist Stu Cook produced the songs, and the recording sessions were interrupted when Erickson got arrested while having a psychotic episode and then had to spend three months in a state hospital before returning to finish the songs. He also did a lot of drugs.
"If You Have Ghosts" was on The Evil One, and the original song is kind of a frenzied southern rock power pop song, with Erickson seeming to go off the rails a couple times. I'd say Ghost's cover version is far more polished, with staccato strings kicking the song off, crisp vocals from Papa Emeritus II, some nice guitar solos from some Nameless Ghoul, rhythm guitar from Grohl, and generally a more clean feel than the original. But they turned it into one of their anthems. Also, The Nameless Grohls would be a great name for a Ghost/Foo Fighters tribute band.
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