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5 Mystery Science Theater 3000 Songs I Can’t Find:
🕑 Added 2021-06-29 19:59:26 +0000 UTCAnyone who’s spent a decent amount of time down the MST3k rabbit hole knows how important music is to the experience. Sure, clever one-liners and recyclable memes and, ya know, the movies themselves rank much higher in priority, but the body of recognizable songs the franchise as accumulated over the years is pretty important as well. And just to be clear, I’m not talking about the original compositions written by the MST3k crew to sing during skits. Not to diminish the importance of gems like “Tubular Boobular Joy” or "The United Servo Academy Men's Chorus Hymn" or “A Patrick Swayze Christmas”, of course. The homegrown tunes are obviously really important to what makes MST3k into MST3k Heck, for a lot of people, "Every Country Has A Monster" did more to legitimize the rebooted MST3k than any of the actual riffs in Reptilicus. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. No, I want to talk about the songs in the movies themselves.
It’s a common sight in the cheapo drive-in movies frequented by MST3k for everything to screech to a halt for a musical interlude. Not that they’re musicals or anything, the cast just drops everything to sit in a bar and watch some nobody singer crank out a tune for a few minutes. Maybe the cash-strapped producer made a deal with some local label to promote a band by spotlighting their song. Maybe the producer OWNED that label and created the film in the first place as a vehicle for a musical act. Maybe the movie was just too short, so the director filmed his cousin’s bar band to fill out the run time. There’s plenty of reason for MST3k films to prominently feature musical numbers, very few of which in any way relate to the plot of the films themselves.
Now, financial logic dictates that the whole point of shoehorning a song into a film is to get the audience to go out and buy the record. But, of course, the world of exploitation filmmaking has little to do with logic, so it doesn’t always work that way. My completest, music-hoarding self has long wanted to have a collection of every single songs showcased in MST3k movies, preferably in their complete, original, straight-off-the-album forms. Alas, years of looking has revealed that a surprising number of these songs have either never been officially released at all, or at best received such limited distribution that 40+ years later they’ve become virtually unavailable. At least, I haven’t been able to find a copy so far. Sometimes, this “unavailability” is more of a technicality than anything. For example, the version of “California Lady” that Frank Larrabee performs in Track Of The Moon Beast doesn’t seem to have been publicly released, but that’s just because the movie is a live performance and a studio recording had already been released five years earlier. Other times the “song” might just be a snippet recorded specifically for the film, and there just ISN’T a full version floating around out there. But then there’s the songs that clearly do exist in a complete for somewhere, or at least they DID at one point, and I just can’t find them now. These blemishes on my collection annoy me greatly, and that’s why this blog exists! So come along with me as I spotlight five songs (plus some honorable mentions) from Mystery Science Theater films that I like, complain about how I can’t find full versions of them anywhere, and hope desperately that somebody S one day and help me out. It could happen. Look, we live in a world where I was able to track down the original soundtrack to Pod People. I now have the full, unedited “Hear The Engines Roar Now” (actual title “Burning Rubber Tires”). ANYTHING is possible!
5. “Joy Ride” – The Del-Aires (The Horror of Party Beach)
A mean-spirited person might suggest that the joke from The Creeping Terror about why The British Invasion was so easy could just as well be applied to The Del-Aires… and I am nothing if not a mean-spirited person. Still, for as dorky as this Jersey-based quartet looked –and sounded, if we’re being honest– they were far from the worst band to appear on MST3k. If nothing else, most of the songs they perform in Horror of Party Beach are decent, in a clunky “frat band trying to sound like The Beach Boys but totally not getting it” kind of way. “You Are Not A Summer Love” is a decent slow dance number, “Wigglin’ Wobblin’” is a decent rocker, “Elaine” WOULD be a decent rocker if it weren’t for the ill-advised Frankie Valli vocals, and “Zombie Stomp” would fit well on any “Monster Mash” Halloween novelty playlist if somebody could find a copy without sound effects from the movie all over it. But that’s just the thing: while a few of The Del-Aires songs got released locally as singles, a full soundtrack album never seems to have made it on to shelves. Thus, the rest of the songs can only be found as rips from the movie, with sound effects and dialog all over them and awkward edits ruining everything. At least, they pretty much ruin “Joy Ride.” This isn’t the best song in Horror of Party Beach, it’s an awkward attempt to meld Rockabilly with Doo Wop that doesn’t really do right by either, but it IS the one song that’s hardest to clearly make out with that pesky MOVIE happening all over it. I just wanna hear this song the way it was supposed to be heard, that’s all!
4. "HaSo” – Jimmy Bryant (The Skydivers)
Okay, let’s look the elephant in the room right square in the eyes and move on: “HaSo” is so named because it opens with a version of that one stereotypical “Asian” riff, and somebody doing shouting the title like they’re Joe Jitsu from The Dick Tracy Show. It’s like somebody heard about The Ventures being huge in Japan and learned the worst lesson possible from it. It is… embarrassing, and a lazy hack might speculate that the reason a full version of the song can’t be found is ‘cos it got #canceled out of existence. But there’s far worse songs that are far easier to find today, and the disappearance of “HaSo” suggests more of a general lack of interest in preservation. See, Jimmy Bryant was no minor local artist, despite what appearing in a move like The Skydivers would suggest. He was actually a very highly regarded solo performer and session guitarist… in Country music. Of the three songs he performs in The Skydivers, the one most representative of his body of work is the lightning-fast steel guitar workout “Stratosphere Boogie.” Compared to that, the “Peter Gunn”-ish “Tobacco Worm” and the Surf-esque “HaSo” sound fairly out of character. With the many impassable chasms separating Country and Rock fandoms, I have a feeling that Bryant’s primary audience wouldn’t have had much reason to keep a song that sounds like The Ventures in circulation, so “HaSo” fell through the cracks. (Honestly, it’s a miracle that “Tobacco Worm” didn’t join it in limbo) That’s a real shame, because what can be heard in The Skydivers is a darn good Surf Rock workout. In a post-Hawaii Five-0 world, it can be easy to forget that The Ventures themselves often had a strong Country twang to their sound, and Bryant leverages that common ground into a pretty cool song highlighted by some fire-y licks. It definitely deserves to be found someplace better than a Coleman Francis movie… but then, it also deserves a better title.
3. “Shine Your Love On Me” – Patty Foley (Angel’s Revenge)
Another one where we’ve gotta get something out of the way right from the start: this song is NOT sung by Angel’s Revenge start Susan Kiger, she’s just lip-syncing. The actual vocals on this song are by Patty Foley. Surely, it is a musical scandal that rivals even Milli Vanilli. I apologize if I shook you to your core with this massive truthbomb Anyway, seeing as how Patty Foley also recorded the song “Heaven Sent” to play over the closing credits, that implies there was at LEAST enough original music to justify releasing a tie-in single. Heck, they could even go all Josie & The Pussycats and credit it to Kriger’s character Michelle Wilson if they insisted. But no, if there’s any physical release of this song out there, I’ve never seen any trace of it. Granted, it shouldn’t come as TOO much of a surprise that a movie from Greydon Clark wouldn’t have the funds behind it to try and launch a hit record… but Angel's Revenge was distributed by Arista Films. Now, I don't know for SURE it was a subsidiary of Arista Records, but it sure sounds like that’s the case, and you’d think they of all organizations would have a vested interest in cranking a record out. As it stands, though, all we have is the scene from the movie, which only features one verse of the song, followed by about 45,789 run-throughs of the chorus. And to be clear, I know for a fact that there IS more to the song, because the same year that Angel’s Revenge came out, Vicki Sue Robinson of “Turn The Beat Around” fame recorded her own version of “Shine Your Love”. Interestingly, Robinson’s version has a noticeably different melody than the film version, and it’s a LOT less memorable in my opinion. Like, they’re both pretty generic disco fluff either way, but at least Foley’s version has more hooks to it… even if Angel’s Revenge does repeat them to an absolutely mind-melting excess. Hey, that’s all the more reason to want to hear a full version of the song: some extra verses would help balance out all those choruses!
2. “Valerie” – Arch Hall Jr. (Eegah!)
Here’s a prime example of how frustrating these out of circulation songs can be. There was a time when ANY Arch Hall Jr. songs were “out of circulation” beyond a few corners of Southern California. For all the song numbers in Wild Guitar and Eegah!, Archie only seems to have released one indie single for general audiences, plus a pair of promo discs meant to hype said movies more than ever being sold in stores. Thus, it was kind of a big deal to trash movie/music fans when the Wild Guitar! compilation emerged in 2005 to finally compile those stray song, unearth the unreleased tracks, and collect the entire Arch Hall Jr. songbook in one convenient, high quality album… except that they forgot my favorite one of his songs. While “Vickie” is the song from Eegah! that most people remember (and also a centerpiece of Wild Guitar), it’s not really all that good. A formless, meandering lump of wimpy Teen Pop warbling cursed with some DEEPLY regrettable falsettos; “Vickie” probably didn’t deserve to be in even one film, let alone two. Yet the song that served as the B-side to “Vickie,” “Valerie,” is pretty darn good. Yes, it’s another Teen Pop ballad, but “Valerie” has more of a Country/Western foundation that gives it a lot more focus and a much-needed sense of grit… well, as gritty as Arch Hall Jr. was ever going to get. Alas, the performance in Eegah! is marred by the usual intrusive editing, such as the volume drooping out while we watch Richard Kiel stumble around the desert in bearskins. Presumably they just lost the master tapes after 40 years, but of all the songs lose, it just HAD to be the best one, didn’t it? Oh, and just on the odd chance that somebody’s wondering: No, this song has absolutely nothing to do with The Monkees’ hit, though I’d have paid good money to see Arch Hall Jr. in The Monkees.
Well, we’re one step away from my top pick, but first I want to run through some Honorable Mentions:
“I Just Want To Rest” & “Do You Want To Laugh Or Cry?” – Chris Howard & The Third World (Girl in Gold Boots)
Honestly, these two songs are some of my favorite songs on this whole list, and on a personal level I’d probably be more excited to find complete versions of them than nearly any other track here… but I’m not all that sure complete versions actually exist. See, a Girl In Gold Boots “soundtrack” was released just a few years ago, but it’s another one of those cases where most of the audio is just ripped straight from the film. “I Just Want to Rest” has obvious crowd sounds dubbed over, and cuts off abruptly once the scene ends. That’s just frustrating, but “Do You Want To Laugh Or Cry?”is genuinely concerning. The track on the album is indeed longer than the performance in the film… but it doesn’t contain any audio that isn’t in the film. Apparently some ambitious editor repeated some clips and tried to construct an “extended” version of the song. Something about this makes me suspicious. Given how short a lot of the other Girl in Gold Boots songs are, there’s a very real possibility that Chris Howard didn’t bother writing any more than was needed for a scene, and this is really all there is. And so, in the interest of keeping my hopes reigned in, I’ve demoted both songs to Honorable Mention status. Prove me wrong, somebody!
“Baby Do A Thing With Me” – Robert Smith Jr. & Russ Huddleston feat. ??? (Manos: The Hands of Fate)
…and speaking of keeping my hopes reigned in, there is absolutely NO chance of anybody finding the original master tapes of the Manos soundtrack. Yes, I know they released an album a while back, but that’s another rip of the film’s audio. Thus, the songs are all haphazardly edited and full of dialog snippets. In fact, these songs are so ill-preserved that the credits I just listed up there probably aren’t even that accurate. Huddleston & Smith may be the COMPOSERS credited for the Manos soundtrack, but who actually performs on the songs is mostly a mystery. This is especially bad for “Baby Do A thing With Me,” which is one of the only songs to have vocals. One can make the educated guess that Nicki Mathis is the female vocalist, since she’s credited with singing the opening/closing numbers, but nobody seems to know who the dude on lead vocals is. What’s more, the clip of the song in the film is VERY obviously not the whole thing. Like, even if there aren’t additional verses of the song anywhere, the film doesn’t even play the full chorus! That’s what really does my head in, the obnoxious incompleteness of it all. Nobody wants to be left hanging, ya know?. I don’t even like “Baby Do A Thing With Me” all that much (hence why it’s an Honorable Mention) but MAN do I need to hear how it ends, just once! I’ve had this itch in my brain for decades now! It needs to be scratched one of these days!
“Shook Out Of Shape” – Carol Kay & The Stone Tones (The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?)
The Incredibly Strange Creatures is an odd film for a great many reasons, from the title on down. Comparatively speaking, the constant interruptions by musical numbers ranks fairly low on the oddness list. However, I do get the feeling that, unlike with many of the films on this list, director Ray Dennis Steckler wasn’t wrapped up in any promotional deals with these artists but was just letting his friends plug their records to pad out the run time. Thus, it’s not that surprising that there wasn’t any Incredibly Strange Record Who Stopped Playing And Became a Mixed-Up Soundtrack, (yeah, I’m proud of that) and honestly, most of the songs here are only interesting as curiosities anyway. That said, “Shook Out Of Shape” isn’t that bad as far as Twist cash-ins go. I’m mostly just surprised at the fact that this one doesn’t seem to be floating around as a vinyl rip anywhere. Again, there’s no chance Steckler commissioned any songs specifically for the film, so Carol Kay almost certainly had the single already recorded some time earlier. I just wonder where any copies could be hiding.
“There’s A New World Just Opening For Me” – The Cascades (Catalina Caper)
Now THIS is a movie where the lack of a soundtrack album is fairly mystifying. I mean, they roped in Little freakin’ Richard to record an exclusive song, for crying out loud! Yes, it’s just a blatant rewrite of “Bony Maronie” with awkward scuba diving lyrics thrown in, but that’s still more high profile than anything else on this list, and paid for by Warner Brother of all companies. Surely they could afford to get some copies of a soundtrack album into stores! I’m not here to talk about Little Richard’s “Scuba Party,” though, but rather “There’s A New World Just Opening For Me” by The Cascades. They’re best known as the band behind “Rhythm of the Rain,” which isn’t exactly Little Richard levels of legend but still better known than the other artists contained here. More important, though, is the song’s author: Ray Davies. Yes, The Kinks’ Ray Davies. How these guys got their hands on a stray Kinks song is anybody’s guess, especially since The Kinks never recorded a proper version themselves. If you ever see “There’s A New World” listed on a Kinks compilation, it’s just an acoustic demo that comes across as a lesser version of “Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me From Worryin' 'Bout That Girl.” So just the historical connections make it surprising that no Cascades greatest hits albums have dusted off this number as a bonus track. I don’t even care that it’s not all that great of a song, that The Cascades just weren’t cut out to be rockers, or that the poor drummer is audibly struggling to keep up with the rest of the band. This is a true oddity of Rock history, and I’m really surprised some Brit-Rock archivist hasn’t managed to preserve this song more properly.
And speaking of unpreserved British Rock…
1. “That’s All I Need You For” – The Birds (The Deadly Bees)
Let’s get the one thing everybody has to mention out of the way first: that’s “Birds” with an “I,” not “Byrds” with a “Y.” This group was one of the many Mod bands to spring up across London in the mid-60s, and is widely regarded to have been one of the best of the lot. At least, the handful of records they managed to get released at the time hold up just as well as any of The Who’s early songs. Alas, having a name just one spelling error off from a MUCH more popular band did them few favors, and their management launching a VERY ill-advised lawsuit against Byrds with a “Y” to try and force THEM to change THEIR name didn’t help much. That blunder led the band to split from said management, which was ill-advised in its own right and led to even more legal wrangling. All this mess proved so disastrous to The Birds’ career that, despite getting a spot to plug “That’s All I Need You For” in The Deadly Bees, they never managed to get the song physically released anywhere, and would break up a year later (with chief songwriter Ronnie Wood going on to join The Rolling Stones, the OTHER thing everyone has to mention about The Birds). This song vanished so hard that even the most legit of career retrospectives released today have to resort to ripping audio from the film, because the master recording just seems to not exist anymore. I cannot overstate just how weird that is, because mid-60s British Rock is one of the most exhaustively catalogued and archived eras of recorded music ever. ANY obscure garage band who managed to record an acetate demo in the second half of that decade has seen that muffled, hissy recording licensed for some rarities collection. A band couldn’t even record something as disposable as a radio jingle for a burger joint without an amateur recording of it turning up as a bonus track somewhere. So for a band with the posthumous reputation of The Birds to record a song as obvious intended for wide release as “That’s All I Need You For” and even showcase it in something as public as a feature film, and NOBODY held onto the master tapes? That’s downright bizarre. And “That’s All I Need You For” is a REALLY good song, too! It’s the perfect melding of feedback-drenched Freakbeat rock with the catchy melody of an old school Soul stomper… and that’s all the more impressive when you know that this WASN’T some obscure Soul track being covered, but a Ronnie Wood original. This song didn't just deserve to be preserved in a form without some actresses talking over it, it deserved to be a hit. Instead, the closest it ever came to being released at all was when Birds frontman Ali McKenzie drafted a cover band to re-record it in 2011. Truly tragic.
And that’s it! Are there any other amazing rarities that I missed? Are there some forgotten classics from the Netflix seasons that I don’t know well enough to mention? Should I have included anything from Rifftrax or Cinematic Titanic? Most importantly, though, do you happen to know where the full versions of any of these songs are? Let’s get some of the people working on The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet to try and track some of these down!
