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.

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.