Sonic Youth’s Halloween
“Halloween,” from Sonic Youth’s 1985 Flower EP (later appended to the Bad Moon Rising LP) is music for a scene from a low-budget, 1970’s cult horror film. In the scene, a Super 8 camera reveals the grainy image of a dilapidated, two-story Victorian home in a clearing of dense forest. Shutters hang by one hinge and smack against the siding. The wood on the porch is rotten, warped and cracked. The little glass that remains in the windows is just jagged bits. Suddenly, a man rushes out into the night. His clothes are in blood-drenched tatters, his eyes nearly bursting from their sockets with terror. He stops in the tall grass and falls to his knees. For a moment all is still. Then, out in the distance, something begins to move. The music starts up.
The guitars sound like a ghostly breeze passing through wind chimes. The rhythm stalks, approaching the man who kneels frozen in the tall grass. The man looks out at what is coming for him. The guitars play a sinister, unrelenting riff. Now a woman appears. A black slip clings to her thin and pallid frame. Dirty blond hair covers her face. Her right hand clutches a Bowie knife. She begins to whisper-sing in a hollow, menacing tone. The man twists in agony as she slithers, nearer and nearer. We see in his expression that he knows there is no escape. She reaches him. The knife is raised…
In 1988, Mudhoney covered “Halloween” for a Sub Pop-released split single with Sonic Youth. If Sonic Youth’s original is the soundtrack for a cult horror film, Mudhoney’s version is the soundtrack for the Halloween party you attend after watching it. All the partygoers wear shredded, sweat-soaked costumes and have makeup smeared across their faces. They thrash upon the floor and slam cans of Rainier. Instead of Kim Gordon’s spectral vocals and Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s skeletal guitars, you get Mark Arm and Steve Turner’s howling guitars, turning the riff into a mammoth monster. Arm sings as if he’s lusting after the devilish woman from the film. He’s dreaming about her, she looking at him with her big dark eyes. She slips and twists and rubs her body, the Bowie knife between her teeth. The music builds behind him, the guitars crunching and the rhythm stomping. In Sonic Youth’s version it’s all tension and no release. But in Mudhoney’s, when the suspense reaches its peak, the monstrous riff mutates into that of The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” — the S&M now standing for the life of Sex & Murder.
The party roars with maniacal glee and then trashes the place.
Mudhoney’s Cover of Halloween
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Josh Luft is a writer/musician working from a clandestine location somewhere in Brooklyn, NY — insiders believe it to be an old subway tunnel — that he’s refashioned as a home/place for tea parties with broken typewriters and guitar distortion as his guests. He writes fiction, essays, reviews, sex manuals for pilots, and much, much more on What a Fool Believes and makes fuzzed-out primal pop music as Virago.
