Once again it's time to wish everybody a merry Christmas as the blog hits the season climax. There will be posts going forward, but with the holidays being the holidays the rate of posting will start tapering off. Not too quickly; don't want to get the bends. Anyway, I appreciate hearing from listeners, readers, band members, everybody who responds to the little bit of scholarship I place in this tiny corner of the Inter-Tubes, and best wishes and a great new year to you all. At this point, I will give my nod to this viral sensation featuring an 11-year-old Bjork at Christmas time, and for a little something extra, Frank Sidebottom's Christmas video. Frank was actually the late Chris Sievey, minus the plaster head, who passed on in the year 2010, and before creating Frank was in a band called The Freshies, known mainly in England for such singles as "I Can't Get Bouncing Babies (By the Teardrop Explodes)" and "I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Check-out Desk." His story inspired a recent movie starring Michael Fassbender, who actually portrayed Frank while playing in a band with Maggie Gyllenhaal on "The Colbert Report." Oh, I've gone on too long, here's the video.
Recently in 1980s Category
One of the reasons this site exists is that, sometimes, even musicians and entertainers themselves miss out on what their audiences will find entertaining. Paul Simon, Steve Martin and Billy Joel, sometime in the early 1980s, dashed off this bit of PG-13 rated whimsey in a recording studio after a liquid dinner and never looked back on it. Someone dusted it off and uploaded it to YouTube, and now some folks have a new Christmas tradition. The full story is here (it originated with American Airlines' in-flight magazine, but the story is broken up in five parts and is hard to link to) and the song is below.
I was surprised to stumble upon this after all these years -- it's from 1986 -- as I assumed I knew everything there was to know about the purveyors of the historic, Dr. Demento-approved novelty smash "Fish Heads." It's gay-friendly, silly, and still likely to outrage listeners in this supposedly modern day. From their album Sicks.
Weird Al's got a really lengthy repertoire of parodies and funny songs, but his output for Christmas is limited to just two songs. "Christmas at Ground Zero," included on the CD of the first Dr. Demento Christmas album as well as the Weird Al's Polka Party album, was his first pass at the holiday, round about 1986, a fully original song written by Al in which he satirically envisions a nuclear holocaust with tinsel, evergreens and presents. The song has lost a lot of its bite in recent years, as the former World Trade Center site is now the only thing people think of when the words "ground zero" are mentioned. Nevertheless, it remains a nice piece of work.
Rivers has been a wacky morning show DJ for years, and he has his own website where you can hear fresh-baked parodies all the time. Back in 1987 he started issuing full albums of Christmas parody songs, and this is the first one. Topical parodies don't always wear well over the long run, so "O Come All Ye Grateful Dead-heads" ("O Come All Ye Faithful") might seem a bit quaint, and that goes for the parts of "The 12 Pains of Christmas" that sound like Archie Bunker, too. But other songs on this two-decade-old collection, like "Didn't I Get This Last Year" ("Do You Hear What I Hear"), "The Restroom Door Said Gentlemen" ("God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen"), "Wreck the Malls," "We Wish You Weren't Living With Us," and "I'm Dressing Up Like Santa (When I Get Out On Parole)" are timeless. The performances are impeccable, contributing to their ability to raise a smile even after all this time. Subsequent Rivers collections are also reviewed on this site.
It's Dan Hicks of Hot Licks fame, now gigging as Dan Hicks and the Acoustic Warriors, and this is old-style country-folk-swing adaptations of popular Christmas songs for the most part. Other names you might recognize on some of these recordings include Austin DeLone, Paul Rogers and Norton Buffalo. The Christmas Jug Band tradition began in 1976 as a live gig in Mill Valley, Calif., and Mistletoe Jam is the first time the group committed the music to disc, on vinyl in 1987. Trad carols like "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town," "O Holy Night" and "Twas the Night Before Christmas" lay alongside musical parodies like "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Christmas Card," "Gee Rudolf, Ain't I Been Good To You," and "Rudolph the Bald-Headed Reindeer." The Mack Rice number "Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin'" joins "Somebody Stole My Santa Claus Suit" as pre-chosen novelties, and everything wraps up conventionally with "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve." Further albums in the series are mentioned elsewhere on the site.
The good doctor knows how to throw a rockin' Christmas bash. This collection was originally released on vinyl in 1985 and was updated with four additional cuts in the CD age. It features classic hit novelties like Allan Sherman's "The 12 Days of Christmas" and Spike Jones' "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth," along with obscure gems like Gayla Peevey's "I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas." There's also two classics by Stan Freiberg, "Green Christmas" and "Nuttin' For Christmas," and Cheech and Chong's "Santa Claus and His Old Lady." The vinyl version had the original "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer," but the CD has the re-recorded atrocity heard more often nowadays. Although the Demento show is on track to fade away from radio, his collections will keep his vision alive for years to come -- especially since most of them, including this one, remain in print. A second Dr. Demento holiday compilation followed this one.
You might expect this to be some sort of late 50s-early 60s beach movie artifact, but this was recorded in 1981 to capitalize on nostalgia for the Mousketeer era. It's about what you would expect, complete with orchestral backing, a children's choir and a dedication to Rodney "On the ROQ" Bingenheimer. Overall, it sounds like a 60s performance caught in amber 20 years later. Paired with "The Night Before Christmas." This turns up on compilations occasionally.
Harding, a guy who named himself after a Bob Dylan album and toured for several years with Elvis Costello's band, put this acoustic talking blues Christmas tune on a 12-inch single from 1989 called God Made Me Do It: The Christmas EP that also includes a half-serious cover of Madonna's "Like a Prayer" and a conversation with the late great Viv Stanshall, all obvious plays for collector's item status. We're mainly concerned with the Christmas tune, however, and it's a great holiday romp. Now downloadable.
The computer-generated sci-fi star was best known musically for appearing on an Art of Noise record ("Paranoimia"), but he also got around to doing this single, which is fairly smarmy even for Max. It's actually pretty weak; you'd have to be an awfully big Max fan to tout this one. He's much better on television than on record. I've yet to find a download or CD of this, so you'd have to find the original single.
This pair of beer-swilling Canadian brothers, created by SCTV alumni Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis, had such a cult following for their "Kanadian Korner" sketches on that show that they turned their success into a 1983 movie ("Strange Brew," rated by my old buddy Jim Damp as one of the great hangover movies, a genre that deserves its own website) and the album Great White North, from which comes this version of the holiday classic, in which they sing, "On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a beer........." Subsequent verses concern their attempts to make this change to the lyrics scan correctly. Good fun if you're familiar with the sketches.
It's unlikely that anybody surfing this page is unfamiliar with Spinal Tap, the parody heavy metal band that was the subject of Rob Reiner's mock-documentary "This Is Spinal Tap" and has since recorded three albums, several TV specials, video short subjects and this 1984 single. It's everything you would expect from a dunderheaded heavy metal band: "The elves are dressed in leather and the angels are in chains...." The comic actors who portrayed Spinal Tap, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, also wrote and produced this backhanded Christmas tribute and went on to perform it on "Saturday Night Live." A great conversation-stopper when put on a mix tape, as long as there are no fundamentalists in the audience. It's actually been on some holiday compilations, but I've linked you to the original soundtrack, with two versions of this song as bonus tracks.
The actor and formerly perennial Oscar host did a stint on "Saturday Night Live" in the early 1980s, and this is the Mel Torme chestnut, done as a tour through his stock SNL characters, from Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali to Sammy Davis Jr., Fernando and what's his name, the character he turned into a movie in "Mr. Saturday Night." It's OK, but it's more of a vanity production. Long out of print, I've yet to spot it on a comedy or novelty holiday collection.
The Blues Brothers are far from the only "Saturday Night Live" acts to make their own records. Don Novello, aka the good Father, did this tune, a bit of Brill Building boilerplate with the patented SNL Band sound, in 1980. Novello actually did two whole albums as Father Guido, now out of print, and he revisited the Christmas genre with "Santa's Lament," still available on Dr. Demento's Holidays in Dementia album. About 2008 or so he returned with "100 Bulbs on the Christmas Tree," about which more here.
Standup comic Addotta does this 1984 turnaround on the pop hit about Mommy and Santa and he does a wonderful job of selling a very simple punchline. Needless to say, if I tell you what it is, I'll have to kill you -- or at least you won't enjoy the record as much. It's still available on the first Dr. Demento novelty Christmas CD.
