T.S.O.L. – "Silent Scream" (2008)

I'm the wooden mallet

The sharpened stake

A few years ago, a British auction house offered up a 19th-century vampire protection kit for sale.  

The kit included a crucifix, holy water, garlic paste, and other items that were believed to repel vampires.  It also held four wooden stakes and a wooden mallet you could use to drive one of those stakes through a vampire’s heart – a surefire method of killing it:

Click here to read more about that 19th-century vampire protection kit.

Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, didn’t invent vampires but his 1897 novel about the Transylvanian vampire, Count Dracula, is the granddaddy of all vampire novels.

A good friend of mine gave me the Modern Library edition of Dracula as a birthday gift when I was twelve years old or so.  I’ve always been a public library guy, and my family owned almost no books when I was growing up – it was odd for me to have my own hardbound copy of Stoker’s classic novel to read.  (I have to admit that don’t remember a thing about the plot.)

I hope you have a happy Halloween.  But I’m giving you fair warning: if you bring your kids to my house expecting me to open the door and give them some candy, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

*     *     *     *     *

T.S.O.L. (“True Sounds of Liberty”) formed in Long Beach in 1978.  The group subsequently changed personnel, broke up, and reformed.  At one point there were two bands touring simultaneously and using the same name.  Eventually three of the four original members of the group got back together.

“Silent Scream” was originally released in 1981 on T.S.O.L.’s original studio album, Dance With Me.  It is filled with Halloweenish references – including a number of references to the two most enduring horror classics,  Dracula and Frankenstein.

In 2005, the band released an anthology album titled Who's Screwin' Who?, which includes a number of songs from the band’s early albums and EPs (including their most popular song, the necrophilia-themed “Code Blue”).  But instead of just reissuing the original recordings of those songs, T.S.O.L. decided to re-record them all from scratch.

Here’s the newer recording of “Silent Scream,” which I think is better than the original:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: