Tuesday Top Ten: '70s Halloween Songs

With Halloween approaching in two days, I have already provided you with this year's version of my Ultimate Halloween Party Playlist, but since that is so long, I don't provide embedded songs for your listening pleasure, requiring you to seek out your dark master on your own time.  As I was going over this year's list, I noticed that a lot of songs on the list were from the '70s -- and not only that, but they were some classics.  Thus, I decided to give '70s Halloween songs their own Tuesday Top Ten.

These are all songs you can (and should) put on any Halloween party playlist.  As always, I'm only going with one song per artist, so that this didn't turn into a list of ten Black Sabbath songs.  For a change, I'm putting them in alphabetical order by artist.

1.  "Night Prowler" by AC/DC (1979)
"Night Prowler," off of AC/DC's seminal 1979 album Highway to Hell, is a creepy song allegedly about a boy sneaking into his girlfriend's bedroom in the middle of the night.  I have never bought that, given some of the lyrics to the song, like "And you don't feel the steel / Till it's hangin' out your back."  I know plunging a knife into someone's back is generally associated with teenage love, but come on.  The song took on more sinister connotations in the spring and summer of 1985, when Richard Ramirez -- who was an AC/DC fan and a fan of this song -- murdered more than a dozen people in LA and San Francisco.  He dubbed himself the "Night Stalker."


2.  "Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath (1970)
This eponymous track was the first off of Black Sabbath's eponymous debut album.  Can you imagine what this must have sounded like in 1970?  Less than two months after the end of the '60s and flower power, heavy metal was born with this song.  It starts off with rain and some distant church bells, perhaps in a quaint village in the English countryside.  And then plunges into the devil's triad -- an inverted tritone (I have no idea what that means!) that was very rarely used in music because it was said to summon Satan.  It doesn't get any more metal than that.  But then it does.  Ozzy's voice is chilling, and the lyrics are chilling, describing a figure in black pointing at the narrator, who tries to run away.  Turns out it's Satan, and he's smiling.  Shit.  The lyrics were inspired by a now-infamous metal legend, experienced by bassist Geezer Butler a couple years earlier.  He had painted his apartment black -- as one does when he is obsessed with the occult -- and he had, among other things, a black occult book that Ozzy had given him, which was written in Latin (obviously) and contained various pictures of Satan.  Butler put the book on a shelf next to his bed before he went to bed one night.  Then he wakes up in the middle of the night to see a giant figure in black standing at the end of his bed and pointing at him.  After the figure disappeared, Butler got up and the book was gone.  I think I would have gotten some primer and some off-white paint as soon as the hardware store opened the next morning.

3.  "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult (1976)
Long before this song was featured in the now-legendary "More Cowbell" sketch on SNL, it was a creepy song that seems to be about some sort of suicide pact, but according to BOC's lead guitarist and sometimes singer, Buck Dharma (not his given name), the song is about the inevitability of death and eternal love.  So when he sings "Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity," he's not suggesting you and your lover kill yourselves so that you can live together forever in the afterlife.  Hell, according to most religions that ascribe to the existence of a sky deity, suicide means you don't go to the good place, so you'd probably both end up in hell, just out of each other's earshot, so you're all "Romeoooo!," and he's just far enough away that he can't hear you, so you give up and turn away, just as he turns around to see you, and he's all "Julieeeettt!," but you're too busy racking your brain about ways to better project your voice.  This process repeats itself for the next infinity years.  Moral of the story:  don't kill yourself.


4.  "I Love the Dead" by Alice Cooper (1973)
Alice Cooper kind of invented "shock rock," bringing theatrics to rock and roll arenas.  The last track off of their seminal 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies was "I Love the Dead."  There are plenty of metaphors in music, but this one is not.  It's a song about necrophilia.


5.  "Gates of Babylon" by Rainbow (1978)

Rainbow was formed by guitarist Richie Blackmore as kind of a side project from Deep Purple, but it turned out to be a full-time gig, and it introduced the world to the vocal power of one Ronnie James Dio -- who did, in fact, bring the devil horns to rock and roll.  "Gates of Babylon" is about sleeping with the devil, which is something we can all relate to.  But there is a lesson to be learned here:  sleep with the devil, and then you must paaaayyyyyyyy.  Presumably because the devil has balanital chancroids.


6.  "Psycho Killer" by Talking Heads (1977)
Another song that is incorrectly assumed to be about a famous serial killer, "Psycho Killer" was not about the Son of Sam -- who was terrorizing New York in 1976 and 1977.  The song was actually written in 1975, and though it was about a serial killer, it was written long before David Berkowitz was pretending to be taking orders from a neighborhood dog possessed by a 2,000-year-old demon.  It just happened to be released in 1977.


7.  "Runnin' With the Devil" by Van Halen (1978)
The world's introduction to Van Halen came not with the wild finger tapping of Eddie Van Halen, but with the pounding bass of Michael Anthony at the beginning of "Runnin' With the Devil," the first track off of the band's self-titled debut album in 1978.  Last week, I ran a 5k dressed as the devil, playing this song on my phone as I ran.  It was worth it.


8.  "Frankenstein" by The Edgar Winter Group (1972)
The only instrumental on this list, The Edgar Winter Group's 1972 jam wasn't actually named for Frankenstein (or his monster), but because the song was originally so damn long that it required extensive editing and splicing to get it down to a radio-palatable length.  Whatever they did, it worked, as the song went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. If nothing else, the cover photo on the album is pretty creepy.


9.  "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder (1972)
Funk can rock too, and Stevie Wonder's 1972 classic "Superstition" proved that.  It's got that unmistakable repeating riff that makes you bob your head and almost forget that Wonder is singing about believing in things you don't understand, like the fact that I'm clearly wearing the wrong t-shirt right now because, as I'm writing this, the Astros are behind 7-2 going into the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 6 of the World Series.


10.  "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon (1978)

We couldn't possibly have a list of the top ten Halloween songs of the '70s without Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London," a sardonic and catchy track about a werewolf roaming around various London neighborhoods, looking for Chinese food.  With lines like "He's the hairy-handed gent / Who ran amok in Kent" and "I saw a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic's / And his hair was perfect," how can you not love this song?

Honorable mention:  "We Are The Dead" by David Bowie (1974); "Friend of the Devil" by Grateful Dead (1970); "Magic Man" by Heart (1975); "Hotter Than Hell" by KISS (1974); "Dead Men Tell No Tales" by Motörhead (1979); "Frankenstein" by New York Dolls (1973); "Dead Flowers" by The Rolling Stones (1971)