Somerville’s premier undead outfit have a history shrouded in mystique and it seems they’d like to keep it that way. Are they actually the reanimated corpses of 1963 Texan rock ‘n roll band the Fishercats?

Just as Spawn was called Al Simmons during his formative pre-death years, the first appearances of Ghost Scorpion! followed the demise of the Fishercats, an amateurish quartet of misunderstood juvenile delinquents out of Denton County, Texas. On a rainy night in 1963, after a gig at a high-school dance, the Fishercats' car crashed and burned off the road near Goatman's Bridge. No one survived.

This tale might've made good fodder for a Shangri-Las song had it not taken a terrifying turn. Shortly after the post-sock-hop tragedy, an instrumental horror-surf outfit bearing an uncanny resemblance to the totally dead Fishercats began gigging around Denton. They came to be known and feared as Beware the Dangers of a Ghost Scorpion!, and then they vanished as abruptly and inexplicably as they appeared.

Okay, maybe that’s a tad over-dramatic. Still, little is known about the ghastly crew and the band’s members (Glotch, Snakeboy Henry, Vince Vance Delambre and Professor Coyote Science) never seem to stick around long enough to answer questions, disappearing without explanation just as eerily as they arrived.

In contrast to their backstory, Ghost Scorpion! stay firmly unconvoluted while renewing the retro-a-go-go vibes of the Ventures and Dick Dale, with a touch of Reverend Horton Heat tossed in as a reference point for those who weren't teens in the early '60s.

"After [the Cramps'] Lux Interior passed over to our side, we hung out for a bit, and he explained the basics of psychobilly to us," DeLambre claims. "It goes hand in hand with surf rock. Throwback, straightforward rock and roll. No bullshit, but exclusively bullshit at the same time." Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.