TRACKS #405:
Transylvania Disco Hustle by Monsters
Do you remember back in 2023 when we were talking about The Monsters from the UK and I said they weren’t these Monsters over here to the left, but that we’d get to them in just a bit?
Oh course you don’t. Why would you? What am I, fuckin ridiculous? I barely remember it and I wrote all this dumb shit. Nobody even read that post, much less remembers it 2 years later, let’s get real here.
At any rate, I said that and you can cross reference that if you want, but I don’t know why you would. Either way, that “just a bit” I was talking about was apparently 2 years, cause we’re about to talk about those Monsters and their “disco jammer” right now.
The Monsters (pictured above looking appropriately fiendish in this graveyard, you ask me) 
started life as actual monsters, dressed up and everything, but calling themselves Children of the Night. Check them out over here on this other album looking just as Monstery.
Now, they dropped that album and an accompanying single in 1976, but began life their musical life 3 years prior in New York.
For some reason, after this LP and some monster swapping, they became The Monsters proper in 1977 and released this album. Even looking through some of this great promotional material and reading the interview with The Wolfman found there as well, it seems a bit unclear why they changed the name. I would venture to say it was less of a mouthful than Children of the Night. Catchier and easier to remember as well. But who knows. They’re dressed up as monsters and their holding guitars, they can call themselves whatever the fuck they want really. We’re on board, either way, I mean, c’mon.
That album features a cover of the Monster Mash, a solid jam about The Mummy and this banger that gives the disco treatment (yet again) to that Monster Party ethos. And as we like to say, if that kinda thing can’t be here, then it can’t be anywhere. This is the place where things like this land. This is where it belongs.
I will say the narrative on this one kind feels a little bit like The Monster Club, where this square fella gets seduced by a Vampire bar and then taken to a club where a bunch of different monsters are dancing and having a great time. It’s a fun story and when the guy goes back even, the club is gone!
It makes a for a fun Disco monster tune, that’s for sure. But no one old enough to know what The Hustle is actually reading this blog. In fact, I’d say no one is, period, but you get the point. No one that would have been doing The Hustle is here right now reading this.
But if there were, they might tell you that The Hustle was a popular line-dance that became associated with Disco and then sort of turned into a catch-all for several similar dances across the scene. It originated with Puerto Rican teenagers in the South Bronx in 1973 before becoming a mainstay at clubs all throughout the mid-70’s, then becoming the subject of a song by Van McCoy in 1975, culminating in John Travolta Hustling it up in Saturday Night Fever, simultaneously exposing the entire world to the dance and shooting it in the back of the head.
Eventually, like most dance crazes, it landed in Transylvania, were monsters of prestigious report, like Dracula and The Wolfman – to lesser ghouls, like The Cyclops and The Thing, all partook in its stepping shuffle of this
Apparently, at some point in the 80’s, the band were trying to get a TV show made. What? Gimmie a break, and no one gave the green light to that thing? If that had gone through you know I’d be posting those episode to TeleWeen right now, but here we are in reality without any Children of the Night TV show.
But we do have some Children of the Night music. Or at least some musics from The Monsters, at any rate. So let’s give in and do the Transylvania Disco Hustle.
Everyone was high!
Yeah, I’ll bet.