This starts with a “back in my day…”, but it’s not about how things were better back in my day, so adjust your expectations accordingly.

Back in my day, before personalized entertainment was delivered straight to your pocket 24/7, there were two choices for amusement: watch tv or try to beat the third level in Battletoads. Going outside was also technically an option, but nothing good has ever happened outside, so why bother?

When one’s thumb could no longer withstand the unforgiving plastic of the NES d-pad, one was left to ride the waves of whatever programs were cheap enough to fill the hours between the shows people actually wanted to watch. You know how there are now so many good-to-great tv shows that it just reinforces that the hours left for you on this mortal coil are a rounding error in the actual history of the universe? Wasn’t like that back in my day. There were 3 shows worth watching and in between those 3 shows was a wasteland of things that people would watch just to see something move on that damn screen.

Back in my day, the content well was dry. New movies were not a click away, we had to walk/drive to a damn store and rent an actual tape. So I often just watched whatever was on tv. And thanks to that, I’ve developed a nostalgia for insignificant things that happened before I was born. So in that spirit, I made a Halloween special designed to pay tribute to the hours I wasted watching 70s television in the late 80s/early 90s.

The prime mover on this was the Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which was on Amazon Prime sometime over the summer. It’s from 1976 and is almost painful to watch, but it has KISS lip syncing some tracks from Destroyer and so I’ve seen it more times than I should admit to.

I actually saw KISS earlier this summer and though they do slightly less lip syncing than they did on the Paul Lynde special, it was enough that the idea of doing a one man performance with a backing track seemed less ridiculous to me than it probably should have. All Hallow’s Evil has always used a backing track for drums, but back in the day there were 2-3 of us on stage, so at least all the guitars were live. I always felt that was important, but from what I’m seeing out there, it’s not as important as it used to be.

All Hallow’s Evil didn’t play live a lot, but when we did, we recorded it. On at least two occasions, we were also pretty good! Unfortunately, all of our live performances were from a time before digital video was a big thing, so they’re all trapped on Hi-8 video cassettes and saving them from oblivion requires both knowing where they are and having the means to play them back into a computer. I’d love to see them again if only to find out if we were indeed as good as I thought we were, but in the meantime, I wanted to find out if I’m still as good as I thought I was.

There was some question about that, because when I was 22, youthful exuberance could power me past my limitations–I can’t breathe, dammit!–but I’m 36 and tired now, so the light very well could have died. However, I’m happy to report that I am still one of the great unsung performers of my generation.

It’s on Amazon Prime Video now, so hopefully people accidentally stumble upon it as they search for Peanuts or something like that. You can also enjoy it on YouTube, where it is only two clicks away from some truly heinous shit.*

*One thing that was better back in my day: you could watch random programs without fear that some math problem would eventually start serving you up some Nazi propaganda.