1992- "Christmas All Over Again"

[.....This entry was supposed to have been dated the 16th, but I've recently switched to a laptop and, in the reverse of my old PC, using the Google Chrome browser eliminates all control over font size and style and other composition tools. Oddly, I can now use those tools only in the otherwise clumsier Explorer browser.]

.....Gradually supplanting Johnny Mathis, Andy Williams and Bing Crosby as holiday standards are the excellent A VERY SPECIAL CHRISTMAS albums benefitting Special Olympics. I haven't covered them much here because they are mostly covers, albeit distinctly arranged covers. The first volume had only one original composition, the excellent "CHRISTMAS IN HOLLIS" by Run-D.M.C. The second had a few more, including another Run-D.M.C. number and this from an artist who had nothing he felt was good enough for the first album.

• 04:12 "CHRISTMAS ALL OVER AGAIN" (Tom Petty)
• performed by Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
• original source: VACD A VERY SPECIAL CHRISTMAS 2 A&M 31454 0003-2 (US) 10/92
• and my source: 6CD PLAYBACK MCA Records MCAD6-11375 (US) 1995

.....I can't remember now if I bought Volume 2 of the Special Olympics album; I've heard it, and this song was the lead track. It was just promising enough to get me to follow through the rest of the album, which makes better listening than appearances would indicate. Volume 2 had half the star power of Volume 1. The biggest names were from previous generations (Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, Charles Brown) and, although both Run-D.M.C. and Bon Jovi returned from the 1987, there were few other contemporary performers comparable to U2, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Sting or Bruce Springsteen. Michael Bolton, Debbie Gibson, Paul Young and Vanessa Williams didn't have much more weight then than they do now. There was, however, talent in there (Boyz II Men, Sinead O'Connor and a dream duet by Ronnie Spector and Darlene Love).

.....One good reason for using the PLAYBACK box as a source is that Petty wrote notes for every track, in varying detail. He had quite a bit to say about this song: "To me and Mike [Campbell, bandmate] there's only one Christmas album in the pop field and that's Phil Spector's-- that was the only one we could relate to." Since Spector was famous for getting the most out of a lo-tech recording process, Petty wanted any Christmas recording he did to be live-in-the-studio, meaning that he would not be able to use the modern practice of recording each musician's parts separately and then combining them in the mixing process to make them sound as though they were playing as a band. To do what he wanted he would not only have to write an original song but arrange each part and schedule rehearsals so that an entire ensemble would be as coordinated as if they had been touring and playing the song together every night on stage, otherwise they'd be doing dozens of takes when they got to the studio......

.....What Tom Petty had after Volume 1 came out that he didn't have before (when he was first approached to do a song) was The Traveling Wilburys. George Harrison gave Tom the ukelele used to write "CHRISTMAS ALL OVER AGAIN". "I took the ukelele with me to my house in Florida in the middle of the summer and wrote this Christmas song." Petty and Campbell and the rest of the Heartbreakers joined producer Jimmy Iovine at A&M Studios where Iovine had booked the remaining studio musicians, including Mitchell Froom, Jim Keltner and fellow Wilbury Jeff Lynne. Lynne helped produce the additional vocals after the original sessions and worked with Petty in the post-production process. The final mix was credited to Richard Dodd.

[posted January 7th, 2012]

1963- "All I Want For Christmas Is You"

.....This single actually has two originals, so we'll lead with the A-side.

• 02:00 "ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU" ([A.C.] Williams)
• 02:40 b/w "GEE WHIZ, IT'S CHRISTMAS" ([Carla] Thomas, [Steve] Cropper, [Vinnie] Trauth)
• performed by Carla Thomas
• original source: 7" Atlantic 45-2212 (US) 12/63
• and my source: VACD THE ORIGINAL SOUL CHRISTMAS Rhino/Atlantic and Atco Remasters Series R2 71788 (US) 1994

.....Carla Thomas is the daughter of soul and R&B legend Rufus Thomas, but while Rufus was a master of dance crazes and innuendo Carla became an artist in her own right with more straightforward mainstream hits while still in her late teens. These tracks were recorded on September 26th, 1963 in New York City for producer Jim Stewart, who had worked with Cropper when producing Booker T. and the MG's. 1963 was a great year for Christmas pop music with the Beach Boys' "LITTLE SAINT NICK" and albums from the Miracles and the Spector artists. This fine entry probably would have been lost in the crowd had the B-side not been a call back to a familiar hit from two years earlier. The A-side is the more solid tune, even if a little spare in this first recording. The actual running time on the 1994 CD I cited above 1:41; the time of 2:00 that I gave above is from the original vinyl's label (visible at Discogs and 45cat). The label also provides only last names of the composers, hence my use of the brackets in the notation. A.C. Williams was a long time Memphis, Tennessee disc jockey with strong connections to the music community there. It was on a label closer to home, Stax, that Carla Thomas issued a rerecording of the song:

• 02:50 "ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU" (A.C. Williams) [version 2]
• 02:53 b/w "WINTER SNOW" ([Isaac?] Hayes)
• performed by Carla Thomas
• original source: 7" Stax S-206 (US) Nov. 18, 1966

.....All I really know about "WINTER SNOW" is that Booker T. released a single by that name in 1968, two years after a Christmas album that didn't include it. I guess that's something to look for next year. The new A-side opens with a string section not on the original and has a slower tempo. Thomas is also displaying much greater control over her voice, taking some lines down almost to a whisper (counter to intuition for us non-singers, that's actually more difficult to sing at than the volume of a normal speaking voice). The lyrics are exactly the same, following a A-B-B verse order. Unfortunately, neither version made it onto VALP SOUL CHRISTMAS Atco Records SD33-269 (US) Nov. 8th, 1968. Instead, "GEE WHIZ, IT'S CHRISTMAS" closes its first side. Years later when the tracks from the first single were licensed to King Records for a seasonal reissue (7" King GG4816 (US) 1979), "GEE WHIZ, IT'S CHRISTMAS" became the A-side. It also became her default contribution to holiday various artists' albums with at least two notable exceptions.

.....In 1991 producer Yves Beauvais, then director of the Atlantic and Atco Remasters division at Warners, took advantage of the greater capacity of compact discs to compile the more ambitious 65 minute VACD SOUL CHRISTMAS Atlantic 7 82316-2 (US) 1991. This brought together the 1963 B-side "GEE WHIZ, IT'S CHRISTMAS" with the 1966 A-side "ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU"[version 2]. This must have prompted some kind of reaction from purists because only three years later the same division released a CD [refer to my notation at the top of this post] restoring the original program and artwork of the 1968 VALP SOUL CHRISTMAS, adding new liner notes and three bonus tracks, but calling it THE ORIGINAL SOUL CHRISTMAS. One of the bonus tracks was the original 1963 "ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU", reuniting it with its B-side for the first time on an album.

1974- "Star Of Bethlehem"

.....In the 1970's most new original Christmas music came from rock musicians in the U.K. and soul musicians in the U.S. Very little came from rockers in the U.S. (or soulsters in the U.K., for that matter) besides covers, notably Bruce Springsteen's "SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN". This is a sweet and subdued exception.

• 02:42 "STAR OF BETHLEHEM" (Neil Young)
• perfrormed by Neil Young
• original source: LP AMERICAN STARS 'N BARS Reprise Records MSK 2261 (US) May 27, 1977
• and my source: 2CD DECADE Reprise CD2257-2 (US) 1990

.....The compilation DECADE was previously released on vinyl (as SRS 2257) on October 20, 1977, mere months after the latest album from which it drew selections like this. Funny thing is, if you check out the catalogue number of LP AMERICAN STARS 'N BARS you may notice that it falls numerically just after that for 3LP DECADE. For any music label with a healthy release schedule those numbers are completely unrelated to order of release, but they are assigned in order at an early stage of production. Before I make this any more complicated than it needs to be, I should offer a brief chronology:

1. In November 1974 the song "STAR OF BETHLEHEM" is recorded, produced by Eliot Mazer. The line up is: Neil Young on acoustic guitar, harmonica and vocal; Emmylou Harris on vocal; Ben Keith on dobro and vocal; Tim Drummond on bass; and Karl T. Himmel on drums.
2. Young writes this about the song, later used in the liner notes of DECADE: "I cut this in Nashville where I cut HARVEST, but much later in late '74. It is from the unreleased album HOMEGROWN, sort of a sequel to HARVEST."
3. At about this time Frank Sampedro joined Crazy Horse as a guitarist. None of the band's regular members are credited on this track, although Ben Keith would later do session work for them (see below). Emmylou Harris, obviously, is also not a member of Crazy Horse. She had been singing with Gram Parsons until his death about a year earlier and after this song went on to record her first major label solo album. (She released a little known LP c.1970 before joining Parsons.)
4. In the spring of 1975, Young had completed a preliminary version of HOMEGROWN and played it for friends along with an incomplete project from 1973. He and they preferred the performances from 1973 and decided to cancel the release of HOMEGROWN and complete the earlier album, which was released as TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT.
5. In late 1976 the planned release of DECADE was delayed with the intention of releasing new material instead. Promotional material for DECADE had already been circulating when a different album, CHROME DREAMS, was announced in the music press. In early 1977 an acetate of the new album was created including the songs "STAR OF BETHLEHEM" and "HOMEGROWN" (a rerecording from late 1975).
6. In April 1977, after the acetate was cut, five songs were recorded with Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Frank Sampredo [i.e., Crazy Horse](with Ben Keith) that would eventually become side one of AMERICAN STARS 'N BARS. Needless to say, this meant CHROME DREAMS was not going to come out. The second side of AMERICAN STARS 'N BARS began with the 1974 recording of "STAR OF BETHLEHEM" followed by a 1976 recording called "WILL TO LOVE". Side two is completed by "LIKE A HURRICANE" and the newer "HOMEGROWN", both recorded in November 1975 with Crazy Horse. All four tracks were intended for CHROME DREAMS, with the play order of "WILL TO LOVE" and "STAR OF BETHLEHEM" reversed.
7. None of the recently recorded songs from side one of AMERICAN STARS 'N BARS were included on the compilation DECADE, but "LIKE A HURRICANE" became the first song on side six and "STAR OF BETHLEHEM" became the last song on side four, following the 1972 A-side "HEART OF GOLD".

.....The program position of "STAR OF BETHLEHEM" is not a trivial thing because of the nature of the song. It is not a conventional Christmas song because it uses the Star to evoke the journey of the Wise Men metaphorically, not literally. Where it is positioned relative to other songs can lead the listener to interpret the search differently. On one hand, the Star signifies the means to achieving an end, that is, it leads the Wise Men to Christ and it is understood that finding Christ is their objective. On the other hand, the Star signifies a journey that is an end in itself and it leads the Wise Men to discover Christ. The difference is that the second interpretation assumes that the Wise Men can only determine that the Star is a good omen and that following it is neccesary but that they had no idea what their saviour would look like until the Star led them to him.

.....By using the song at the beginning of an LP side followed by love songs, as it was on AMERICAN STARS AND BARS, it poses a search as the frame of mind with love, whether or not it is found, as the objective. By relocating the song so that it follows "HEART OF GOLD", a song that is explicitly about searching, on side four of DECADE, the song "STAR OF BETHLEHEM" becomes about the means to that end. The enigmatic closing line, "Maybe the Star Of Bethlehem wasn't a star at all...", means that the nature of the Star was never as certain as the need to follow it, or to follow something in the quest for purity or meaning, for a 'heart of gold'. Using this song in compilations requires not only considering how it mixes in in strictly musical terms but also in thematic terms.

1986- "Son Of Santa"

.....You know, there was a time when 'alternative music' didn't mean rehashes of Led Zeppelin. I remember the term being coined specifically to describe the hodgepodge of styles one could previously find only on college radio stations because they were outlets that (a) didn't agonize over commercial considerations and (b) had the highest concentration of a listener demographic defined by a desire to learn and experience new things, that is, college students. In fact, for the previous twenty years or so it was referred to as college music. The only reason people began to cast around for a new term is because during the eighties several events coincided that put much of that audience outside the gates of American colleges: public college tuitions increased not by increments but by multiples; affirmative action programs were under attack; and student loans briefly became taxable income (as though you were keeping the money rather than paying it back with interest). For the first time since the 1920's a student's academic potential became the least important consideration to their attendance. If you were poor, you could get accepted but you couldn't attend. You could, however, get a job a continue to be the intellectually curious person you always were. You could also live in a town with a college radio station and put your meager disposable income towards pursuing more of the bands you heard from it. There were enough people in that situation that it impacted the music market. Now that those people are middle aged, the music that they were told was non-commercial has become the soundtrack of their television ads. But there was a time when that music was unlike anything allowed onto commercial radio that was becoming more rigidly formatted every day.

• 03:40 "SON OF SANTA" (Mojo Nixon)


• performed by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper


• original source: EP GET OUT OF MY WAY! Restless/Enigma 72185-1 (US) 1986


• and my source: CD FRENZY Restless/Enigma 72127-2 (US) 1987

.....FRENZY was Mojo Nixon's and Skid Roper's second album for Restless if you include the reissue of their eponymous debut, originally on an even-smaller independent label. It also marked a willingness among the emerging community for alternative music to be more visible and vocal in their rejection of the music industry in toto. By that point there were not only performers and audiences outside the mainstream, but many healthy labels, several competent distribution companies, viable retail outlets and mail-order services and even non-traditional venues all functioning parallel to their larger corporate subsidiary counterparts rather than subsisting on crumbs from their table. The corporations, however, seemed still convinced that these people and enterprises were merely competing with them and failing; there was an inability or unwillingness to comprehend that this smaller music scene had worked for (and to a large extent already achieved) different, unrelated objectives. Thus, when Mojo Nixon repeatedly butted heads with MTV's censors the assumption was that he would dissolve into a deserved obscurity. Instead he faced the greatest demand of his career. To keep ahead of it, he recorded an EP as a stop-gap measure until he could open space in his schedule to complete an album.

.....The first side of EP GET OUT OF MY WAY! starts with the title track, which sounds as though it might have been a likely single or recommended play track from a planned follow-up album to FRENZY. The next songs are both from the FRENZY sessions, "STUFFIN' MARTHA'S MUFFIN" (an anti-MTV harangue that became FRENZY's most popular track) and "RUTABAGAS" (an instrumental Skid Roper outtake). Side one closes with "BURN DOWN THE MALLS", which would have made an appropriate B-side to "GET OUT OF MY WAY".

.....The second side of the EP could have been a Christmas single. It begins with "SON OF SANTA", a song about the saint's errant offspring whose Christmas Eve jailbreak has alarmed the terminally nervous. Next is "TRANSYLVANIA XMAS", another Roper instrumental, this time an Eastern European flavored arrangement of "JOY TO THE WORLD". The last song is a rerecording of "JESUS AT MCDONALD'S" with Christmas references in the first verse. The original version is on the first album.

.....The song "SON OF SANTA" is a high octane rocker played almost entirely by Mojo and Skid with a large crowd of friends providing a vocal chorus. A year later they performed it live for a Christmas episode of I.R.S.'s "The Cutting Edge" series on MTV (which would have been about the end of the series). Not long afterwards, Mojo's long strained relationship with MTV had finally reached it's limit, their stated reasons being that his song "DEBBIE GIBSON IS PREGNANT WITH MY TWO-HEADED LOVE CHILD" constituted slander because their audience was likely to assume it was true. Then Roper left to pursue a more folk-oriented solo career, Enigma went out of business and finally Restless changed ownership. For the next decade Mojo continued to perform in several outfits before eventually becoming a staple of Sirius XM radio and offering his back catalogue as downloads. Paradoxically, his lo-fi music has become much easier to find in the digital age since most chain stores didn't have a "sexually depraved drunken street preacher" section. Be advised, though, that this song does not appear on his 1992 Christmas album CD HORNY HOLIDAYS.

1959- "Five Pound Box Of Money"

.....Although over fifty years old, this number could easily find an audience today. The B-side, I mean.

• 02:18 JINGLE BELLS CHA CHA CHA (Pearl Bailey)
• 02:35 b/w FIVE POUND BOX OF MONEY (J. Barker, P. Bailey)
• original source: 7" Roulette R-4206 (US) 1959
• and my source: (for the B-side) VACD HIPSTERS' HOLIDAY Rhino R2 70910 (US) 1989

.....Rhino Records compiled a number of excellent Christmas collections from the mid-1980's to the mid-1990's, often with different configurations on vinyl and CD. HIPSTERS' HOLIDAY was one of the best, with a cross-section of jazz acts from 1946-1966 and one horrible kitsch lounge act recorded less than a year before the compilation came out. Unlike many of their compilations, HIPSTERS' HOLIDAY provided detailed personnel and exact recording dates for most of the tracks. For jazz bands that could mean upwards of a dozen musicians on some performances. "FIVE POUND BOX OF MONEY" is one of the few for which there is "No session information available". Jazz isn't my strong suit and my resources are not nearly as extensive as Rhino's, but my guess is that their suggested date of release on the jewel case may be a typo. The year '1958' follows the songwriting credit, and that may be when the song was recorded or when the sheet music was copyrighted, but a discography of Roulette's singles maintained by Global Dog Productions places the single in 1959, as does an article in a music industry publication (Billboard, December 14th, 1959) announcing that several radio stations would be holding contests asking listeners to guess the dollar amount of a five pound box of mixed coins, specifically tying it to the release of the single. That said, the internet abounds with sites offering mp3's of the song identified (if by any date at all) as coming from 1958, which I guess tells us from where these tenth generation copies were ultimately stol-- uh, acquired. Both sides have actually resurfaced periodically in the CD age and I may dig around next year for "JINGLE BELLS CHA CHA CHA" and revisit this post or simply leave a link to any new post in the comment area.

1974- "Wombling Merry Christmas"

.....For Americans now accustomed to Barney and Teletubbies, the Wombles are no longer so hard to explain. I hope.

.....Boxing Day, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the day after Christmas. It's probably most commonly acknowledged in England and countries now or once part of the British Empire such as Canada. The idea was that most people spent Christmas Day enjoying a feast with their families at home. The next day they would make packages out of representative samples of the feast and bring them to non-relatives in their lives who would have been working through the holiday. Today that's known as "foisting leftovers on the help", but many Brits now celebrate it as a legal holiday for its post-festivity wind-down value. One particular Boxing Day in the 1960's Elisabeth Beresford took her young children for a stroll on Wimbledon Common. It was there that she conceived the idea of an entire hidden species of sophisticated rodents that lived under the Common, the Wombles. She began making sketches of individual Wombles, each with their own personality, and eventually they took on a well-defined collective identity with their own culture, ethos and history. The hallmark of their society is that they see new uses for the trash lying around the Common. Not having the same preconceptions as humans, everything they see has a purpose which they live to find. While we might see an empty bottle or food wrapper as something that has fulfilled its purpose and discard it, the Wombles discover it in that state and assume that its purpose has yet to be determined. Once created, the ecological and economical life lessons implied by the Wombles' way of life were obvious.

.....The idea blossomed into a franchise starting with children's books in 1968 and eventually including a television series, a feature film, dolls, toys, a variety of licensed products and a series of albums that spawned an string of consecutive top forty hits. Rocker turned jingle writer Mike Batt was asked to write an instrumental theme that evoked the personality of the characters when the television series was in the planning stages. He suggested it would actually be easier to go one step further and make it a song with lyrics. That turned out to be a fateful decision that consumed the next two years of his life.

• 03:18 WOMBLING MERRY CHRISTMAS (Mike Batt)
• -N/A- b/w MADAME CHOLET (Mike Batt)
• performed by The Wombles
• original source: 7" CBS 2842 (UK) 11/74; the B-side originally appeared on LP WOMBLING SONGS CBS 65803 (UK) 1973 and the A-side appeared contemporarily on LP KEEP ON WOMBLING CBS 80526 (UK) 1974
• and my source: 2CD THE CHRISTMAS ALBUM Global Television/Warner Music/Sony Entertainment RADCD152X (UK) 1999

.....After Batt left the franchise new releases slowed to a trickle. Ten years after he started, the label released LP THE WOMBLES CHRISTMAS ALBUM CBS 25805 (UK) 1983. Rather than an actual Christmas album, it was a compilation of previously released material with "WOMBLING MERRY CHRISTMAS" as the lead track. This was not only a dirty trick, it wasn't even an original dirty trick. The Pickwick label licensed a similar batch of album tracks from CBS for their LP THE WOMBLES CHRISTMAS PARTY Hallmark Records SHM977 (UK) 1978 five years earlier. The one bright light was that the Christmas song was reissued (with a later hit as the new B-side) in 1983 with the album. For Christmas 1989 CBS released a greatest hits album ending with the Christmas song (novelty song or not, it was a bone fide pop hit at #2). In 2000 Batt teamed up with Roy Wood for a new recording of the song, this time spliced with Wood's perennial Wizzard hit, "I WISH IT COULD BE CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY" for the once in a lifetime mouthful, "I WISH IT COULD BE A WOMBLING MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYDAY". This year however the original is being reissued (this week in fact) in a typically Womblish altruistic attempt to drown out the bad taste of Simon Cowell's "X Factor" with their very own "W FACTOR" compilation. Check out the video online. (For American readers: the twin Wombles with the mile-high pompadours who appear to be 'auditioning' in the video are a parody of real life would-be teen pop stars John and Edward Grimes, notorious X Factor contestants.) Don't just do it for England; do it for all of us. Godspeed, you Wombles.

.....So come this Boxing Day when you look around you at the remnants and fallout of the holiday and your newsfeed of choice is choked with end-of-year "best" lists and the unshakeable implications that the world has had just about enough of this year and has crumpled it up for a premature tossing, remember that you're a Womble. Others may conclude that this Christmas has fulfilled its purpose and discarded it. If so, pick it up and you may discover that it has a whole year to it that's only just beginning. And you'll be the only one trying to figure out just what its purpose will be.