Goth Soap Slippery Slope & Dark Shadows Theme (2011 home recording)
DESIRE. "For most men, time moves slowly, oh, so slowly, they don't even realize it." —Barnabas Collins
Word, Barney. I didn't realize the scale of my lifelong Dark Shadows compulsion until I began writing this post, as if slipped a virulent Prevagen Mickey Finn that triggered my meandering recall mechanism into running amok. (I'll try not to get over-focused . . . )
It begins with a latchkey attraction to the TV show. A generically innocent flashback recalls the nurture of broadcast babysitting game shows & syndicated Looney Tunes loops before or after school — a few precious lone hours set between waiting out an ongoing pastime of rudimentary catch-up &, sooner or not, when the actual animated guardians, my parents, arrived home from their itinerant employment as apparent storm clouds themselves, to gather again above dark waves crashing on the rocks below some lover's leap: precisely the opening visual televised behind the hypnotic theme music to episodes of Dark Shadows — absorbed as an eerie primer for the probable melodrama always on the horizon, usually arisen at its pinnacle around the bloodlined dinner table. The program was obsessively watched whenever possible over shifting schedules while teething my personal set of fangs like Barnabas, who lived between conflicting netherworlds as well.
That plastic glow-in-the-dark denture, which must've also been toxic, came with the DS board game, the aim of which was to bag enough bones to complete a skeleton. It additionally contained a protective little coffin to inter the pieces including real wooden mini stakes.
From that point, let’s nonchalantly skip ahead about thirty-plus years to where I was still trying to put it all together, renting an upstate NY black-mold shack in a downmarket eastside neighborhood on the outskirts of a county seat plunked in middling polity. I'd just escaped The City & was now rurally working out melodramatic employment issues of my own after clocking out by holing up without cable, but consoling a PS2 tending cocktails of DualShock therapeutic destruction in an attempt to loosen up the mood long enough to revive with inconclusive results. I also rented Netflix by mail.
This is where the Dark Shadows serial habit was fixed upon again. I binged at my leisure through most of the original '66-'71 soap run by the end of my two years there. It was around this time that I also subscribed to a newsletter from the Dark Shadows Fan Club mailed from a New Jersey two-digit post office box. It spotlighted the latest goings-on of the cast & crew, included an order form/poster pullout to pen-&-stamp for various ephemera & announced a few nearby-ish DS Festivals I was tempted by but, mournfully, never attended. The paper bulletin was eventually replaced by an email version I still click from time to time, now called SHADOWGRAM.
I stopped the gaming placebo altogether when I moved closer to town where there was a hobby store to sentimentally pickup the downtime with retro model kits instead, leaving my former fringy hovel to live among a brand new living cast of unglued villains & tragic figures whom I continue to neighbor these days. It's the street where I was delivered The Complete Dark Shadows Soundtrack Music Collection composed by Robert Cobert — seven hours & forty-five minutes of pure DS — & the address where I recorded this postcard's audio offering my version of the theme music planted at the bottom of this post.
Cobert also scored Trilogy of Terror — like Dark Shadows, a Dan Curtis production — along with the signature music to some of the daytime game shows that competed for my time-slotted attention ages ago such as Password — where I would love to've seen T-of-T's Karen Black as a celebrity player. I can just imagine the crazy tension that would've been felt by the teamed contestant from K.B.’s singular stare . . . whereas, I’ll go on, Barnabas’ Jonathan Frid would’ve instilled a more trancelike calm, fluidly compelling the correct response with an enunciated Shakesperean-trained gaze . . .
Okay, I'm beginning to sense a twinge of digression here so let's get back on a horizontal mobility track to when I found out in 2011 that there was going to be a Dark Shadows redux. I went right to unrequested work on my treatment of the theme song & sent it to my music administrator, most likely way too late, only to be beat by some upstart named Danny Elfman, who’d probably already completed the entire score.
(Oh-oh — I'm about to meander again for a sec: )
I saw Oingo Boingo at Day on the Green #3 music festival 9/10/83 at the Oakland Stadium that also featured Thompson Twins, Madness & The Fixx headlined by The Police on their Synchronicity tour. I gas-money-chauffeured a guy who used to come in the record store I cashiered at & who groomed himself very closely to Sting, though I'm pretty positive we were both wearing parachute pants on the green that day.
(Wow. That Mickey just kicked in hard — must've been the mixer. I wonder if they make a cartoon character gummy. I'll have to remember to chase that down, but right now I'd better pull out of this incidental labyrinth & just get to the music . . .
It really is such a timelessly full, wee rabbit hole afterworld after all . . . )
As such, this postcard's unreleased take was captured at home with meticulously logged & barely readable recording notes. Evidently, the rhythmic stutter is my unmistakably over-utilized Boss Slicer pedal SOS-ing an eBow loop. The melody is carried by a rickety 50's vibraphone, Wurlitzer electric piano & joined at the peak by my Casiotone 401. The electric guitars are a Jazzmaster I no longer own with tremolo & my retired Harmony Hollywood without. A Crumar Performer crescendos, a tres takes double swipes & the chug is a low-tuned tenor Dobro clawing out of its dented hubcap center that I've rehabbed a few times to upkeep its coughing acoustic death metal impression.
The warbling drone is also my Casiotone 401 on the Oboe setting which has always reminded me of a tweenage tone similar to the voice of Pokey trying to get Gumby out of some jam with the Blockheads.
(Ah, come on — hocus-focus — we're almost there . . . )
The sound is keyed with the left hand while the right rhythmically jiggles a slider simultaneously on a Realistic gizmo.
This arrangement was expressly constructed to repeatedly showcase just the signature melody of the theme song & to represent slight variations of sound layers — a method that I employ like a menu of sides when serving up something I hope to be used in an outside project pitch that usually goes nowhere as did this.
Yes, Barn, our run-on game with time moves along before we can put it in perspective from scattered baby steps & yet also in a drawn-out serial of boundless fallen leaps taking everything endlessly with it but the indelible shadows themselves who appear to never change purpose, filling their void by means of recollected nostalgic obsessions & crafty new distractions of desire to keep our imagined image alive as though there-we-were continues still within the limbo of the current where nothing truly cutting seems to go on until it eventually goes off like the SHADOWGRAM this week which reported the passing of the fan club newsletters longtime original coordinator — as if cast to be sent from beyond by an immutable specter.
Thanks for staying focused with me & I tangentially invite you further along, then or now, to my appropriation of what I've been harkening on back about, with Dark Shadows Theme (2011 home recording):
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