Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 287: 'Songs from the Ed Wood Zone' (2007)

The gang's all here! (artwork by Libby Reid)

There's something about Ed Wood, specifically the low-budget sci-fi/horror films he made in the 1950s, that inspires creativity in others. But why is that? I think it's because artists look at Ed and see a man who created highly distinctive, idiosyncratic work despite every conceivable obstacle. People watch his cheap but endearing movies and think, "He somehow got this insane movie made and released. What's my excuse?"

Even in his prime, Eddie had little money or access to resources, so his films feature laughable props, wobbly sets, and frequent continuity errors. His actors are often misfits and eccentrics, people who look and speak so strangely that they barely seem to belong to the human race. And Eddie's scripts, both in their plots and their dialogue, represent the deeply weird and personal sensibility of the author. Ed Wood just had a kooky, cockeyed way of looking at the world, and he managed to incorporate his own off-kilter ideas into stories of aliens, zombies, monsters, and flying saucers. Add to this the fact that Ed Wood was a cross-dressing alcoholic, and it's a minor miracle that his movies exist at all. But they do.

Over the years, I have reviewed numerous Ed Wood-inspired works, ranging from comic books to short films. Today, however, I am turning my attention to an obscure EP from 2007 called Songs from the Ed Wood Zone, which contains ditties about Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, and more. What, you've never heard of it? Well, I only encountered it because it kept turning up in my search results when I was looking for other Ed Wood-related material online. At first, I'd find it a little annoying ("Oh, not this again!"), but then I realized I should actually listen to the damned thing.

Cover art for the EP.

First, though, some history. Songs from the Ed Wood Zone was released by the good folks at WFMU, an independent, listener-supported radio station in East Orange, New Jersey that's been operating since 1958. Not an NPR station or part of any larger radio network, WFMU plays a truly eclectic variety of music, never limited to any particular genre or era. Anything from avant garde jazz to novelty music and alternative rock is welcome there.

Outside New Jersey, the maverick station may be best known to the general public for its long-running series The Best Show on WFMU (2000-2013), a combination of indie rock, interviews, and sketch comedy hosted by the curmudgeonly comedian and writer Tom Scharpling. (Scharpling now does the show on his own.) Offbeat music historian and journalist Irwin Chusid—who was vital in rediscovering Raymond Scott, Esquivel, The Langley Schools Music Project, and more—has been a disc jockey at WFMU since the mid-1970s. Chusid is also the author of Songs in the Key of Z (2000), a book about outsider musicians that inspired its own mini-franchise of compilation albums.

Songs from the Ed Wood Zone was part of a larger initiative at WFMU called the 365 Days Project. The project's mission statement: to provide listeners with "365 days of cool and strange and often obscure audio selections" provided by over 200 different contributors. On March 17, 2007, the contributor of the day was musician and author Jeff Grimshaw, probably best known as a columnist for the Delaware Valley News and the co-writer of Michel Gondry's high school comedy-drama The We and the I (2012). He does not seem to be the same Jeffrey Grimshaw who produced TBS' Super Scary Saturday (1987-1989) with Al Lewis, though that's the kind of credit an Ed Wood fanatic might have.

Jeff Grimshaw.

Accompanying the six-song EP is an essay by Grimshaw in which he explains the surprisingly complex story behind Songs from the Ed Wood Zone. In the early 2000s, during the file-sharing era of music, Grimshaw was a regular visitor to a now-defunct site called mp3.com. In addition to allowing users to search for songs by artist or title, it also let them set up their own internet radio stations. Grimshaw created one called The Ed Wood Zone, featuring every Wood-related song he could find on the site. Some were actually about Ed's movies, while others just had thematically-appropriate titles. He proposed an Ed Wood Zone album to Rhino Records but was politely rejected.

I am sorry to report that I was totally unaware of The Ed Wood Zone during its George W. Bush-era glory days. While I was definitely scouring file-sharing sites back then, I never stumbled upon Grimshaw's station even once in my travels. Since mp3.com is now long gone and totally inaccessible, even through the Wayback Machine, I will never be able to hear the EWZ as its creator intended. Running about 21 minutes, the modest Songs from the Ed Wood Zone EP may well be the last remnant of this project. "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone," as Shelley might put it. At least it features original artwork by cartoonist Libby Reid. 

I'm sure many dozens of tracks were featured on Grimshaw's station during its existence, but only six of them made it into Songs from the Ed Wood Zone. In a way, that's good news: theoretically we're getting the best of the best here, all personal favorites of the curator himself. I thought it would only be fair to review each of the tracks individually.

The EP begins with the song that launched Grimshaw on his musical journey: a catchy, high-energy number called "Tor Johnson" by Planet Log. This is a herky-jerky alternative rocker that would have fit in nicely on any college radio station in the '80s or '90s. At first, I thought it sounded a bit like Devo or The B-52s, just with heavier guitars. After a few listens, though, I feel confident in saying that it sounds more like The Cramps. The lyrics draw heavily on Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994) and George "The Animal" Steele's portrayal of the Swedish wrestler. We hear about Tor meeting Ed Wood while wearing a towel, playing the "bumbling" servant to an "evil doctor," wearing contact lenses that make it impossible for him to see, having a bald head that reflects the light, being a "Casanova" with the ladies, and never being trusted with dialogue. Have you already guessed that the song is written in that ungrammatical "time for go to bed!" cadence?

We now move on to "Me and Bela Lugosi" by The Immigrants. This quirky, low-fi tune is described as "punk folk," which is as apt a label as any. The arrangement is dominated by acoustic guitar and accordion. This song, too, is largely influenced by Burton's Ed Wood and its portrayal of the Wood/Lugosi friendship: "Me and Bela Lugosi/Driving around in my car/The time has come for him to rise/And I can make him a star." In the biopic, Eddie (Johnny Depp) offers Bela (Martin Landau) a ride home soon after they meet. This is also when Ed begins to plan Bela's big comeback. There are references here to Bela's morphine addiction (and his distressed arm veins), his beloved pet Chihuahua, and the scene from Bride of the Monster (1955) in which he wrestles a rubber octopus that lacks a motor.

Naomi Hall.

The EP's third song, Naomi Hall's "Bride of the Monster," is the only one so far I'd describe as haunting. Hall is an outsider musician, very much in the tradition of the mavericks profiled in Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z. As a teenager in Florida, Hall produced music in her bedroom, singing all the parts and playing all the instruments herself. As such, this track has the insular, shut-off-from-the-world feel of a Daniel Johnston track. Hall's lyrics summarize the plot of Bride of the Monster and reference most of the main characters: Vornoff, Strowski, Kelton, pretty Janet Lawton, etc. Even the movie's alternate title, Bride of the Atom, merits a mention. And naturally, it ends with: "He tampered in God's domain." It's a shame we haven't heard more from Naomi Hall in recent years. She seems to have attracted a fair amount of attention in the 2000s before largely dropping off the radar.

The next track, "Love Feast" by Godmonster (or God Monster, sources vary), is a complete change of pace. This is a danceable techno track that uses dialogue samples from Joe Robertson's softcore comedy Love Feast (1969) starring Ed Wood. Specifically, we hear Eddie himself as that drunken old lech, Mr. Murphy, delivering his "girls, girls, girls" monologue. And it took this track to make me realize how unusual a character Murphy is. Apart from Criswell in Orgy of the Dead (1965) and Night of the Ghouls (1959), I can't think of too many Wood characters who are able to address the audience directly and participate in the plot. According to Grimshaw, Godmonster also recorded a track called "The Sinister Urge," but I have been unable to locate it.

The EP's fifth song is perhaps its most mysterious: "Angora Space Dream" by Semtex. While there's a fair amount of publicity online about Naomi Hall and an actual music video for The Immigrants, there's essentially no information available anywhere for Semtex. (Warning: There are numerous bands with this name, which comes from a type of plastic explosive.) Jeff Grimshaw admitted he didn't even have credits for this one. I'd describe "Angora Space Dream" as an overcaffeinated techno instrumental with some dialogue samples from Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), namely the confrontation between Eros (Dudley Manlove) and Jeff Trent (Gregory Walcott) near the end of the film. It sounds like it could have been on the soundtrack for Fight Club (1999).

Songs from the Ed Wood Zone concludes with "Would Ed Wood?" by an acoustic duo called Prewar Yardsale. We've already had a "folk punk" band; this one is described as an "antifolk" band. That's the thing about alternative rock: it's split into a thousand little super-niche subgenres like that. This is a very stripped-down song: just vocals, acoustic guitar, and minimalist percussion. Dina Levy provides the deadpan lead vocal, and her bandmate Michael Rechner occasionally shouts Ed Wood's name for emphasis. The lyrics ask a series of rhetorical questions about Ed Wood, mostly punning on his last name. This is a song for the end of the night, when you've had seven or eight too many. If "Would Ed Wood?" whets your whistle, Prewar Yardsale has a whole Bandcamp page with more of their music.

When I started Ed Wood Wednesdays in July 2013, I originally intended to focus solely on the movies Eddie wrote and/or directed between roughly 1948 and 1978. But within mere weeks, I had expanded the scope of the project to include reviews of his novels, short stories, and articles. From there, I decided to tackle the lives and careers of the people who worked with Eddie over the years. And, gradually, I've come to include many of the creative projects inspired by Ed. Songs from the Ed Wood Zone is just such a project. It's very likely that, if I weren't writing this series, I'd never have heard any of this material. And that would have been a shame.

I wonder how much else there is out there, just waiting for me to stumble across it?

P.S. Speaking of that, in the course of researching this article, I found a fan-made album called The Church of Ed Wood Hymnal (2021) that uses four of the selections from Songs from the Ed Wood Zone but supplements them with other material, some of it quite strange. Proceed with caution.