One night Bobby asked the guys if they’d mind him doing the monologue in his Boris Karloff Frankenstein voice. The crowd loved it, and afterwards Lenny said, “You know, that would be a great voice to use on a novelty record.” But Bobby wanted to act. He left the group, signed with an agent, and two weeks later the agent died. So he called Lenny back and said, “Remember that idea for the novelty song?”

They got together one Saturday night to write it. How about Frankenstein’s monster doing a groovy Sixties dance craze? Hey, neat! Bobby wanted to call it “The Monster Twist”. But Lenny thought the Twist was on the way out and proposed instead “The Monster Mashed Potato”. But Bobby thought it would go better as “The Mean Monster Mashed Potato”. Eventually they got it right:

(He did the mash)
He did the Monster Mash
(The Monster Mash)
It was a graveyard smash
(He did the mash)
It caught on in a flash
(He did the mash)
He did the Monster Mash...

If you’ve got a great idea, the trick is not to overcomplicate it - and Bobby Pickett was never in much danger of making that mistake. He’s no Noel Coward or Alan Sherman, but he knew enough to figure it out - a simple tune, verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and, although his prosody’s a bit clunky and the inverted word order doesn’t help, he managed to come up with one distinctive rhyme in each quatrain:

From my laboratory in the castle east
To the master bedroom where the vampires feast
The ghouls all came from their humble abodes
To get a jolt from my electrodes…

The sound effects were state-of-the-art. The coffin lid opening was a rusty nail being pulled out of a two-by-four with a claw hammer. The bubbling cauldron was someone blowing a straw into a glass of water. The clanking chains were real but they made that sound by being dropped on some plywood on the studio floor. The singers included the writers, the producer Gary Paxton, Paxton’s writing partner Johnny McCrae, and a session vocalist, Ricki Paige. The pianist was Leon Russell, who went on to do that archetypal slice of sultry Seventies smoocheroo, “This Masquerade”. They did it in one take, and for the name of the “band” fell back on the combo identified in the lyric:

The scene was rockin’, all were digging the sounds
Igor on chains backed by his baying hounds
The Coffin Bangers were about to arrive
With their vocal group the Crypt-Kicker Five...

http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/646/30/

More at Mark’s house.