Weird World of Old Records #5: John Carradine - "Night Train to Mundo Fine"

For this edition of the Weird World of Old Records, we're going to tackle something that was huge in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and even into the 80s: actors recording records.

There was a movement to get movie stars to record music as a way to capitalize on their popularity on TV or movies. Certainly, shows like The Monkees, The Archies and The Partridge Family contributed to this. See the Monkees play a song on the TV show and own a record of them singing the same song. That's a natural marketing technique.

But it went farther than that. Actors with little to no experience recorded albums. Jack Webb recorded albums. So did Wink Martindale. And of course, the infamous albums from William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy are legendary.

Then that brings us to today's entry: John Carradine. Not only does this let me indulge my interest in weird (and sometimes unlistenable) music, but my love for bad, bad movies.

I'm a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. For those who aren't familiar, the concept is that a guy and his two robots are forced to watch horrible movies and they make jokes about the movies while watching them. It's a natural extension from anyone who has ever seen a movie so bad it makes you cringe, or laugh. You'd make fun of them too. An infamous director of bad movies that got skewered by MST3K was Coleman Francis, an inept maker of boring movies from the 60s. One of those movies is called Night Train to Mundo Fine, or, among fans of the show, it's also known as Red Zone Cuba.

John Carradine, his best years of acting long behind him in 1966, has a bit part in this as a train engineer who appears at the beginning and end of the movie. Coleman Francis, always looking to work on the cheap, hired Ray Gregory and the Melmen, a tuneless garage band with some ties to his actors (I believe Ray Gregory was a friend of Francis' regular Anthony Cardoza), and had Carradine sing the song. Carradine's performance is... odd. Gravelly and atonal, it wouldn't sound too out of place in a Tom Waits album, if Waits had no concept of music, that is.

There is an absolute raft of stuff like this out there. This is truly a place to find the weird and the oddball, the type of music where you think, "Who on Earth would record this, and who on Earth would want to hear it?" Me for one. I love this kind of stuff.