A little history

This all started with Halloween.

The Dudley Manlove Quartet played their first Halloween show in 1995 at Moe's (now Neumo's) on Capitol Hill in Seattle. We wore Lone Ranger masks and sang as many Halloween-ish songs we could think of. That included "The Monster Mash," a bossa nova version of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" and the theme from "The Blob." And that was it.

After the show, we were brainstorming the subject of "scary songs." David Bowie's "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" came up -- not a bad suggestion. Out of nowhere, one of our intrepid band-mates (and memory has lost which one) said, "You know what's really scary?"

"Muskrat Love."

He was referring to the Captain and Tennille hit (1976, #4) and he was right. Anybody can be musically creepy on purpose. Alice Cooper ain't scary. Marilyn Manson, nah. Fucking muskrats? That'll haunt your days.

And that's where the idea was born: have our fans vote for what they think are the worst songs of all time -- any era, any genre, any artist. They'd vote for a month on our website, and the band would learn the top ten worst songs and play those songs at our Halloween show. So that's what we did.

The response was overwhelming. Some people really get off on this subject. Either they have been assaulted by these songs and want a little payback, or they want to exorcise their musical demons -- namely the ones found in their record collection. Sure they can vote for "We Built This City" now, but they know that somewhere in a box lies their vinyl copy of Knee Deep in the Hoopla.

Voting starts September 4th and goes all the way through to the end of the month. Watch this blog for updates, teases, false starts, clues and other leading and misleading information.

Cheers!