Today's song from my mixtape is "Spooky," which was recorded by dozens of artists but the best known version was a 1968 hit by…well, I'm not sure precisely what name was on the label when it first came out. A gent named Dennis Yost was the lead singer and his band went under the name "The Classics" or more often, "The Classics IV," the "IV" meaning "four." So I've seen the record attributed to Dennis Yost, to Dennis Yost and the Classics, to Dennis Yost and the Classics IV or sometimes just to The Classics IV. Most likely, all those names were correct at some point.
This video appears to be Yost and his band singing it on some TV show where they were billed as "Classics IV" with the number four all over the set. But someone has dubbed in the actual record so the sync doesn't match exactly…
I don't know much about Mr. Yost except that he had a lot of medical problems in the seventies and eighties that impaired his singing…and then in 2006, he fell down a flight of stairs and suffered severe brain injuries. A lot of performers rallied to his aid and staged one or more benefits to help him and he died a few years later. But a lot of radio stations still play "Spooky," especially around Halloween.
More interesting to me is a gent named Harry Middlebrooks, who I've met briefly on a few occasions, though never for more than a few words. Middlebooks co-wrote "Spooky" but I knew him as a local performer popping up at clubs and occasionally on television. In the late seventies, I was dating a lovely lady who always wanted me to take her to see Middlebrooks performing at a steakhouse/bar on Ventura Boulevard called Chadney's. He was almost always joined by a fine lady vocalist named Terry Gregory who went on to become very popular in the world of country music.
Every time we saw Middlebooks and Gregory, Harry would at some point play "Spooky." If you were a piano bar-type performer and you'd had a hit of that magnitude, you'd play it every night too…or at least every time your ASCAP check arrived. Here's a fairly recent (I think) video of him playing it at some club somewhere…