Death Discs: the most morbid music trend of the 1960s
At the tail end of the 1950s, a new trend began to emerge. Dark, violent and unconscionable to the war generation, the Death Disc boom must be one of the most morbid trends of the post-war era. Also known as “splatter patters”, these songs dealt with suicides, murders and fatal car crashes, offering young music fans what exploitation cinema offered moviegoers.
The heydey of Death Discs lasted from 1955 to 1965, though the subject matter of such songs has been the sport of traditional folk, blues and country for centuries. While the identity of the very first Death Disc is up for debate, many have named ‘Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots’ by songwriting duo Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller as a potential candidate.
The track was first released by The Cheers in 1955 and soared to number six on the US singles chart, hinting towards the commercial viability of songs dealing with bad-boy motorists, fatal car crashes, heart-broken girlfriends and rigor mortis. “And when they cleared the wreckage, all they found,” The Cheers sing in the final verse, “Was his black denim trousers and motorcycle boots / And a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back / But they couldn’t find the ‘cicle that took off like a gun / And they never found the terror of Highway 101.”
Here’s where things get really weird. Just six days after ‘Black Denim Trousers’ entered the charts, teen idol James Dean, the star of Rebel Without A Cause, was killed after crashing his Porsche 550 Spyder at the junction of California State routes 41 and 46. This strange coincidence helped cement Death Discs as a teen obsession, with tracks like ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ by Ray Peterson and ‘Teen Angel’ by Mark Dinning’ making a significant impact on the US charts in the following years, much to the dismay of concerned parents and paternal radio broadcasters.
The trend hit new heights with the arrival of the 1960s. In 1964, The Shangri-Las released their hit record ‘Leader of The Pack’, which carries all the hallmarks of a stereotypical Death Disc, telling the story of a leather-jacketed outsider who dies in a motorcycle crash, leaving his sweetheart to water his grave with tears. Perhaps the most widely-known of all ’60s Death Discs, the girl group followed the hit single with a cover of ‘Give Us Your Blessing’, a tale of two young lovers chased away by disapproving parents and subsequently killed in a car accident. As punishment, the parents of young Mary are forced to pluck her mangled body from the wreckage. “Give us your blessings,” she says, dying. “Please don’t make us run away.”
Eventually, Death Discs became the subject of parody, with The Detergents releasing their song ‘Leader of The Laundromat’, though such spin-offs rarely achieved the success of their predecessors. Even in the 1970s, a band like 10cc were harking back to the heyday of spatter patters with tracks like ‘Johnny Don’t Do It’. As recently as 2000, Eminem released a modern Death Disc in the form of ‘Stan’, in which an obsessive fan and his pregnant girlfriend are killed after driving off a bridge. Clearly, some trends can’t be killed.
