Spike Jones - In Stereo: A Spooktacular In Screaming Sound! [Green]

In Stereo: A Spooktacular in Screaming Sound is Spike Jones treating stereo speakers like a haunted house, monsters flying wall to wall on slime green vinyl.

Jones had spent nearly two decades before this turning car horns, burps, and gunshots into a genuine musical language, but by 1959 he had a new toy to play with: stereo itself, still novel enough that most listeners had barely heard it done well. His arranger Carl Brandt described scoring the record like a film, built in pieces because the sound design was simply too complicated to cut any other way. The cast reads like a murderers' row of voice actors nobody could quite place at the time, Paul Frees, Thurl Ravenscroft, George Rock, and Lucille Norman all disappearing into ghouls and monsters.

My Old Flame gets sung by a character credited only as I.M. Arson, which tells you exactly what kind of joke this record is. This Is Your Death turns Dr. Jekyll and a chorus of ghouls loose across the full stereo field, sound genuinely darting from speaker to speaker in a way nothing else at the time attempted, and the Spooktacular Finale throws every voice and gag into one last collision.

Sixty-five years later, the stereo trickery still lands. Monsters were good business in 1959. Turns out they still are.