BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

Just over two years ago I wrote about how I wanted to get my hands on the vinyl LP of ROBBIE THE WEREWOLF AT THE WALEBACK (1964), but pretty much gave up all hope of ever finding it thanks to it being incredibly rare. My interest in it stemmed from my love of obscure and bizarre records, plus with a cover like the one seen above, how could it be anything other than a triumph of low-rent awfulness?

Well, I finally found the album two weeks ago while cruising Greenwich Village's outstanding Rockit Scientist Records for musical oddities, hanging incongruously on the wall among assorted psychedelic rock records.

The sole album by ROBBIE THE WEREWOLF, hanging on the wall of Rockit Scientist records like some exotic trophy.

My heart leaped and I ran over to peruse it, but I was stopped in my tracks by its $200 price tag. I may be a fiend for the lure of loony albums, but I wouldn't pay more than forty bucks for this item, let alone two-hundred! Thus resigned to never owning it if this was how expensive it could get, I asked the store's owner just where the hell he even found a copy of the LP, and he answered not with a statement of where he obtained it, but instead he simply stated that Robbie the Werewolf was his uncle and left it at that.

Then, spurred by at-work boredom and morbid curiosity, I decided to Google Robbie the Werewolf and see what I could find. Well, those lovely folks over at WFMU have excellent MP3s of the entire album up on their site, and after listening to the album I officially declare my search for it on vinyl, or any other format for that matter, over and done with. It's a competently recorded bit of live "folk" silliness that is neither amusingly awful or even genuinely amusing to my current sensibilities, although I might have enjoyed it as a kiddie record when I was six. It's basically a bunch of goofy horror/humor tunes that will be forgotten shortly after being heard, so unless you absolutely cannot go to your grave without experiencing the musical stylings of a supposedly lycanthropic beatnik/folk singer, I say give it a miss.