Yes, I do know that now; I figured out years ago it must be. But when we were kids in the 1970s, it was a pretty scary thing to listen for the scream.
I know it’s instrumental only but the absence of words precludes it from being called a song? Call me embarassed but I actually didn’t realize that. Well I’ll be…
As a very small child. Mom and dad had the soundtrack from South Pacific
The haunting notes of Bali Ha’i scared me.
“Riders in the Sky” by Vaughn Monroe. It was an oldie when I was a kid, but occasionally I’d hear it on the radio. Very scary song.
Not a song, but I used to find Ravel’s “Bolero” unnerving. I loved it, though.
Whatever. I wasn’t there, and I’ll assume neither were you. Pardon me if I accept the word of the band’s drummer, who was actually present during the recording.
But whatever floats your boat.
I had forgotten how truly creepy the scream sounds, especially since it’s in the background, almost as if you weren’t supposed to hear it. I can definitely understand why a 14 year old angsty, impressionable kid could believe the rumours about someone being killed.
My scariest song when I was a little kid: Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. by Patti Page. Not only had I seen the movie, but the words “I’ll love you till you die” creeped the hell out of me.
Music per se rarely scares me, but I do remember being scared as a kid by a song called “Day After Day”, performed by a Calypso-ish band called Shango. Sometime around 1970, IIRC, someone got a scare going that there would be an earthquake that would cause California to break away and sink into the ocean. I think the earthquake was supposed to hit in April of that year. I don’t know how the scare originated–might have to start a new thread about it. Anyway, the lyrics I can remember went:
Day after day,
More people come to L.A.
shhhh!
Don’t you tell anybody
The whole place is slipping away.
Where can you go,
When there’s no San Diego
Better get ready to tie up the boats in Idaho.
(bridge)
Do you know to swim
You better learn quick, Jim!
I remember that song, too. If memory serves me correctly, since I can’t find a cite, the title was “The Last Days of the Late, Great, State of California.” But hey, who wants to say a title that long?
I love Love Rollercoaster, and it’s included it on my Purer Funk compilation. Played it many times…and I’ve never noticed the scream, even after hearing about this urban legend.
The Doors deliberately tried to be creepy; I can still recite the lyrics to Horse Latitudes, which is about throwing horses overboard on a becalmed ship (despite not having heard the song in 35 years).
When I was real young - maybe 3 or 4 - we had a Chevy Celebrity station wagon, the kind with a rear-facing seat in the very back. I loved to sit back there, but my dad liked to take advantage of it.
He would fade the speakers all the way to the back and play Pink Floyd’s Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict at full blast, and I had to sit there and endure it because I wasn’t allowed to take my seat belt off.
I remember the first time I ever heard “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix - that guitar solo didn’t scare me, as such, but it changed something inside me, freaked me out and for the longest time I didn’t understand the feelings it sparked up inside me.
The music that scared me was the theme to Johnny Quest!!
mm
Ditto to Zager and Evans’ In the Year 2525 and also to Tubular Bells.
Another one that used to freak me out as a kid was Quentin’s Theme from Dark Shadows. I remember that when that song played on the show, he would appear. When I heard it on the radio at night in my room, I was just sure that he was going to suddenly appear and scare me to death.
Angie Baby-by Helen Reddy.
I spent a lot of time in my room, and that song hit a little close to home.
Does anyone remember “I Can’t Wait,” by Nu Shooz…it was on the radio in the mid-'80s, and the chorus had a lot of "doo doo doo doo doo"s in it? Well, anyway, yes! That one! I permanently associated it with a book of ghost stories I was reading the first time I heard it as a wee lass, and from that point onward, it gave me the chills whenever it came on the radio.
There was this creepy Carpenters song about aliens, calling occupants of interplanetary craft or some such. It started with a static blast, like you were dialing thru the AM dial and landed on some secret frequency where someone was pleading with the aliens to come get us.
Not realizing it was a song, I really thought my radio had been posessed and we were in imminent probing danger, had to sleep with the light on for weeks.
Re: Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells
Walloon, friend, can you provide a clarification on this? In a thread specifically asking for songs it’s the one you list and then, when agreed with you say in fact it’s not but provide no explanation. Was my earlier guess right? The dictionary could go with a lack of words but did not state that specifically.
Just curous and if there’s a point to be learned, I’m all ears. Thanks.
I can remember being pretty terrified by one or two sections of Peter and the Wolf when I was little. We had an LP of, I guess, the Disney version, with Mickey Rooney narrating, IIRC. Not sure whether this counts, under the possibly stringent definition of “song” that has been suggested here, but figured I’d toss it into the mix anyway.
Ah, no – a quick check of Wikipedia suggests that the voice I recall was that of Sterling Holloway, who ended up voicing Winnie the Pooh.
A song has words, and “Tubular Bells” does not. Although the thread title asked for songs, I submitted “Tubular Bells” because it was a Top 10 radio single in 1974.
Can we just assume that, in a thread that isn’t dedicated to formal music theory, the word “song” refers to any relatively short musical piece, instrumental or vocal, since that’s the way it’s used by just about everyone outside of technical discussions?
Because, frankly, harping on the technical definition of the word “song” in an informal discussion is the height of pedantry.