In this ongoing
feature on Psychobabble, I’ve been taking a close look at albums of the
classic, underrated, and flawed variety, and assessing them Track by Track.
“The
biggest thanks goes to you for giving me the opportunity to relate my feelings
of Christmas through the music that I love.”
-Phil
Spector “Silent Night”
Like so many
visionaries, Phil Spector refused to grow up. Perhaps this has been the cause
of so many of his problems—his infantilizing of ex-wife Ronnie Spector, his
daddy issues, and his fatal obsession with playing with guns—but it is also the
source of his art. His favorite toys are the ones found in a recording studio
and his favorite time of the year is Christmas. In 1963, Spector attempted to
capture the essence of the holiday several months before December 25th
in the less than seasonal setting of sunny Los Angeles’ Gold Star Studios. How
would his thunderous Wall-of-Sound work with corny kiddie songs like “Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman” or the hymn carol “Silent
Night” or the easy-listening standard “Winter Wonderland”? Brilliantly, of
course, though it has taken longer than Spector surely wished for this to
become common knowledge.
As the
often-told tale goes, the release of A
Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records is not the first thing that
comes to mind when most people recall November 22, 1963. At 12:30 PM that day,
John Kennedy’s motorcade was driving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas,
when the president was assassinated. How this affected A Christmas Gift for You depends on whom you ask. By most accounts,
it was a simple matter of national mourning displacing holiday merry-making. In
her autobiography, My Name Is Love,
Darlene Love wrote that her producer decided to “yank” the album from distribution
out of respect for the grim times.
Regardless of
the circumstances, A Christmas Gift for
You from Philles Records was a flop, and the British Invasion that rocked
American shores in the first months of 1964 would do even more damage to Phil
Spector’s dominance of the pop scene. Although he’d continue to score some huge
hits with The Righteous Brothers through 1966, radio now belonged to The
Beatles and their brethren. Spector would get a creative and commercial second
wind at the end of the decade by hooking up with that band and its ex-members,
but there’s no question that late-’63 was as dark a time for him as it was for
everyone else.
Today A Christmas Gift for You from Philles
Records sits in the classic spot it should have earned fifty years ago. Hip
holiday fans with no patience for church choirs or Andy Williams feel no embarrassment
when giving this disc a spin. Surely no other Christmas record rocks so hard,
is so soulful and powerful, yet also translates that indescribable holiday
feeling so authentically. A Christmas
Gift for You is snow and sleigh bells and fur-fringed red suits. It’s also
a rowdy office party, a make-out session under the mistletoe, and in at least
one instance, the gut-shredding anguish of spending Christmas all alone. With
incalculable support from the expressive voices of The Crystals, The Ronettes,
Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, and—whoa…hold onto your Santa hat—Darlene
Love, as well as the instrumental might of the Wrecking Crew, Spector not only
made the never-will-be-challenged greatest Christmas record, he made one of the
greatest Rock & Roll records of any kind. Let’s take a closer look at each
track to see and hear why.
A
Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records
Originally released November 22, 1963
Produced by Phil Spector
Track 1: White Christmas by Darlene Love (Irving Berlin)
With the slowly rising piano figure that sweeps it in and
the moderately paced stroll that follows, “White Christmas” is an unusual
choice to begin this barrage of sounds. Spector is easing us into the
experience like a kid gradually waking on Christmas morning, rubbing her eyes,
and realizing what day it is before zooming downstairs to find out what’s under
the tree. However, Darlene Love’s voice is undoubtedly adult, without Ronnie
Bennett’s (remember, she wouldn’t be Ronnie Spector for five years) kiddie enunciation or even the high register of Bobby Sheen, the only male lead
voice on the record. Darlene’s delivery is also especially adult on “White
Christmas”. She keeps the fire rockets in reserve to be used judiciously on
“Marshmallow World” and “Winter Wonderland” and shot off without restraint on
“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”. Even her mid-song recitation sounds
drowsy.
Irving Berlin’s classic was made famous by Bing Crosby in
1942, and went on to become one of the biggest hits of the pop era, returning
to the Billboard charts some twenty times throughout the years and reaching the
number one spot a staggering three times, the only single with that particular
achievement to its credit. Its melancholic message of wishing to be in a
snow-blanketed Currier and Ives paradise must have really resounded with the
overseas soldiers fighting World War II. The spoken interlude in Spector’s
version better reflects his own yearnings. A child of the Bronx with a love of
traditionally wintery Christmases, he surely must have missed the East Coast on
those sunny December days in L.A. Darlene Love laments vistas of green grass
and swaying orange and palm trees. Perhaps most of A Christmas Gift was too up beat for the troubled times in which it
was released. This is not one of those tracks. The mood would change with the
next track though…
Track 2: Frosty the Snowman by The Ronettes (Steve Nelson and Walter
Rollins)
Track 3: The Bells of
St. Mary’s by Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans (A. Emmett Adams and Douglas
Furber)
Phil Spector basically has zero interest in keeping the
“Christ” in “Christmas,” so don’t think for a second that there’s anything
especially Christian in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” aside from its saintly title.
In fact, there’s nothing especially Christmassy about it either. The song is actually
a sort of sea chanty about lovers returning from voyages to the sounds of
church bells (well, maybe it’s a tiny bit
Christian). The reference to “red leaves” falling even indicates that the
setting is probably more like October than late December. The song’s Christmas
connection is fairly tangential. In the 1945 musical of the same name, “The
Bells of St. Mary’s” is performed during a Christmas pageant scene, though it
had already been around for nearly three decades before that. As he did with
“White Christmas”, Bing Crosby made it a popular hit, and as he did with the
rest of this particular album, Phil Spector made it into a pop song, handing
the singing chores to Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans.
 |
| Another Christmas Connection: the movie title appears on a cinema marquee as Jimmy Stewart runs through the streets shrieking “Merry Christmas!” at the end of It's a Wonderful Life! |
To give this non-seasonal song a stronger seasonal ambience,
Phil really lays on the sleigh bells, and the Blue Jeans (of which Darlene Love
was a member) support Bobby Sheen (trivia time! No one has ever actually been named Bob B.
Soxx) with especially choral harmonies. Bobby had a strong tenor, but he wasn’t
one of the more distinguished vocalists in Spector’s stable. Aside from the
Blue Jeans’ powerful support, and more elephantine drumming from Hal Blaine,
the most distinguished thing about “The Bells of St. Mary’s” is the twangy,
almost sitar-like sound (probably a blend of guitar and bells) that answers
Bobby’s lines on the verse, making this a likely candidate for the very first
raga rock song (indulge me!).
Track 4: Santa Claus
Is Coming to Town by The Crystals (J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie)
“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” is the first genuine classic
on A Christmas Gift for You, and this
is evident from the very beginning. Spector puts extra thought into the
arrangement, lulling the listener with a spoken intro over a music box-style
rendition of “Brahm’s Lullaby”. It’s a child’s fantasy come true: La La Brooks
reports back after taking a trip across the milky way in Santa’s sleigh and
visiting his work shop in the North Pole. That she addresses her tale to
“Jimmy” saves the intro from alienating Phil’s ever important teenaged
audience, because as we know from a million other pop songs, guys named “Jimmy”
or “Johnny” are boyfriends. La La tells Jimmy to make his Christmas list as the
snowflake-delicate music is poised to evaporate completely. But that’s not the
real message of this track.
Pow! The Wall of
Sound comes crashing down and Jimmy gets his warning to keep his shit together
or he won’t be getting diddley squat for Christmas. It’s nearly absurd to
reference any particular aspect of the backing track; every instrument is so
utterly in concert with each other, though we do have to give credit to Steve
Douglas for his hyperventilating baritone sax solo. Everything is unbelievably
loud too, the musicians reveling in the kind of bad behavior that might keep
Santa from shimmying down their chimneys on Christmas. After the solo, Spector
gives us a verse of respite as the percussionists come to the fore to clip clop
before everything busts right back in to shove us through the exhilarating
fade. While the track is credited to The Crystals, La La Brooks is the only
Crystal who actually sings on this album. She does justice to this holiday
blitzkrieg, though the song clearly belongs to the Wrecking Crew and not to any
particular vocalist.
Track 5: Sleigh Ride by The Ronettes (Leroy Anderson and Mitchell Parish)
OK, now we’re in the thick of
the blizzard. No more yawning, no more gradual build-ups. With “Santa Claus Is
Coming to Town”, A Christmas Gift for You
began its parade of back-to-back classics, and the march continues with The
Ronettes’ rendition of “Sleigh Ride”. Leroy Anderson originally wrote the piece
as a picturesque orchestral instrumental during a July heat wave in 1946
(Michael Parish would not pen his lyrics until 1950). Spector pays a little lip
service to the original arrangement in the first dozen seconds of his version
as if to say, “Yeah, I could do traditional arranging if I wanted to…” Then he
cries, “…but why the hell would I
want to?” as the Crew slams home a wild ride that would have given Anderson
whiplash. Ray Pohlman’s walking/swinging bassline slips a woozy undercurrent
under the forward-thrust of the rest of the band, which pumps out a double-stop
beat reminiscent of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave” (more holiday heat
waves!). There is similar unsettling push-and-pull in the vocal arrangement:
Ronnie’s lead vocal is an easy-going slur as she reclines at the back of the
sleigh while Ronettes Nedra Talley and Estelle Bennett (no doubt joined by
Darlene Love, Cher, and anyone else Spector found hanging around the studio)
sit up front, propelling the horses with their chant of “Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-dong-ding!”
In 1982, Nedra told Record Exchanger
magazine that Phil pushed her so hard while making this album that she thought
she’d “lost it mentally.” That isn’t hard to understand after hearing this
exhausting performance.
Track 6: Marshmallow World by Darlene Love (Carl Sigman and Peter DeRose)
Sitting in the middle of
selections we all get sick of when hearing them performed by non-Spector
artists every year is a relative obscurity called “Marshmallow World”. Though the
song has been performed by a number of popular singers—including Johnny Mathis,
Brenda Lee, Dean Martin, and of course, Bing Crosby—it most certainly is not
the perennial that “Sleigh Ride” or “White Christmas” are. Perhaps that’s one
reason why it sounds so utterly fresh on A
Christmas Gift for You.
The arrangement is magnificent. As
he did on “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”, Spector begins with a deceptively
light introduction. Pseudo-classical strings sound as un-Rock & Roll as
anything you’ll hear on a record by legit Rock & Roll artists in the years
before McCartney sang “Yesterday”. But then—oh,
I get it!—we learn this intro is actually a parody of seasonal muzak. Spector
reveals the big joke as Leon Russell pounds out a very un-classical piano bounce.
The Wrecking Crew responds to each jaunty stab at the keys with a skull-crushing
thump. Hal Blaine then gives his kit
a beating it will never forget, and the band starts swinging and banging in
equal proportion. Darlene Love gets a greater opportunity to show off her
robust voice than she had on “White Christmas”. Her vocal oomph makes mash of
such ridiculously saccharine sentiments as, “It’s a yum-yummy world made for
sweethearts.” Then we get two marvelous instrumental passages: a slightly
halting, slightly jazzy horn arrangement, then another wild Steve Douglas solo.
With the return of Love, the joyous sound builds and builds and builds and
builds until slamming shut with a cheeky quote from “Deck the Halls”. So ends
Side-A of A
Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records but not its run of spectacular tracks.
The
record was rereleased as Phil Spector’s
Christmas Album in 1972 on Apple Records with this creepy shot of Spector
Claus on the cover.
Track 7: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus by The Ronettes (Tommie Connor)
Side B begins with the cinematic
sounds of someone getting a big, wet smooch while peeping kids cause doors to
creak and slam. Once again syrupy strings give way to a rhythmic onslaught that
lets us know we’re still listening to a Phil Spector record. Ronnie really
belts it out on the greatest non-Darlene-Love track of A Christmas Gift for You. Had Spector decided to begin his album
with a Ka-Boom instead of a whisper,
this would have been the ideal track.
The original recording was cut
in 1952 by the appropriately young Jimmy Boyd. Ironically, Ronnie Bennett’s
vocal is her most adult on this album. Boyd’s recording apparently ran aground
of the meddlesome crybabies at Boston’s Roman Catholic Church, who felt that
Christmas is a completely inappropriate time to express affection. After the
thirteen-year-old patiently explained the meaning of his super-complex song
(Mommy kisses Santa-suit-wearing Daddy, which confuses their spying child) to
the Archdiocese, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” received the official seal
of approval from the church, so you don’t have to fear eternal damnation for
grooving along with The Ronettes’ version. Or perhaps head-banging would be
more in order since the beat is so forceful. A wall of saxes creates the
bedrock beneath Blaine’s galloping beat and the pulse-quickening clatter of
castanets. Even the polite string interlude (pierced by some cutesy piano
tinkling) cannot lighten this weighty number, which receives a heavenly boost
in the final verse from a mass of choral harmonies. And that final baby-ish
quote from “Rock-a-Bye Baby” is not fooling anyone either… this is some heavy-duty
Kiddie Christmas music.
Track 8: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by The Crystals (Johnny Marks)
After getting off to a seismic
start, Side B of A Christmas Gift for You
eases back a bit. Aside from a great harmonized guitar riff, a cool bass-line
that snakes around the bottom end of the track, and some particularly
in-your-face castanets, there’s nothing too extraordinary about The Crystals’
version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.
Johnny Marks’s musical
adaptation of Robert L. May’s story about a reindeer whose jerky peers only realize
they like him after he proves himself useful to them was a huge hit by Gene
Autry in late 1949. The Crystals (again, La La Brooks solo) certainly make a
better go of the song than Autry’s annual earworm, and it’s as good as any of
the tracks that opened A Christmas Gift,
but tucked in the middle of the stunners stretching from “Santa Claus Is Coming
to Town” through “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”, Rudolph fails to make a significant impact.
Track 9: Winter Wonderland by Darlene Love (Felix Bernard and Dick Smith)
Now we’re back on track with one
of the album’s most glorious tracks. The arrangement of “Winter Wonderland” seems
like a conscious recall of Darlene Love’s recent minor hit “Wait ’Til My Bobby
Gets Home” (minor in chart performance, not in quality. It’s an amazing
record). The piano/bass duet that introduces the track sounds like the “Wait
’Til My Bobby” 45 played at 33 ⅓ RPMs. The decision to
bury Love’s powerful pipes within a cluster of harmonies, as well as allowing
her to rise from the din to shout off some bluesy improvisations, is also
highly redolent of “Bobby”. All of this compliments the composition rather than
feeling like rote retread. The harmonies convey Dick Smith’s pastoral lyrics dreamily.
The dense backing track conveys a snowstorm. Smith wrote his words while
recouping from tuberculosis and thinking back to happier times looking out over
snow-blanketed Central Park in NYC. “Winter Wonderland” is one of the most
oft-covered Christmas classics, and it’s hard to believe that any version is
better than Love’s.
Track 10: Parade of the Wooden Soldiers by The Crystals (Leon Jessel and
Ballard MacDonald)
From one of the most ubiquitous
Christmas songs to another relative obscurity. German composer Leon Jessel
wrote “The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” in 1897 as “Die Parade der
Zinnosoldaten”, which actually means “The Parade of the Tin Soldiers”. It was American Ballard MacDonald who mistranslated
the title while penning his lyrics in 1922. Though the song has been performed
by a number of artists, it is not necessarily considered the property of any
particular singer, so La La Brooks can feel just fine laying claim to it.
There’s something really brash
about her over-enunciation of the words about a coming attack of little toy
soldiers. Perhaps she was inspired by the blasting brassiness of the trumpet
line. “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers” boasts one of Spector’s finest
arrangements, jogging between the attitudinal verses and tick-tocking wind-up
toy bridges. Spector’s one odd decision was fading the track rather than giving
it a proper ending –or at least waiting until La La had finished singing before
lowering the fader. Maybe he wanted to create the illusion that his soldiers
would continue marching eternally, that his wonderful track was not ending at
all but would go on and on and on.
Track 11: Christmas
(Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love (Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry, and
Phil Spector)
And here, everything reaches a goose bump-raising climax.
While the rest of A Christmas Gift for
You consists of well-travelled standards, Spector packed Ellie Greenwich
and Jeffy Barry into the writers’ room to compose one very, very, very special
original for his labor of love. The song was such a smashing success that Spector asked Greenwich to pen less seasonal lyrics for the track, but “Johnny (Please Come Home)” didn't have the same resonance as “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”. When Ronnie Bennett couldn’t quite deliver the
adult torture present in their lyrics about a woman pining for her love on the
merriest of holidays, Spector made the decision he should have made from the
get go: put Darlene Love in front of the mic. Holy shit. The outcome is not just
the best track on this album; it is one of the most thoroughly devastating
performances on wax. Just thinking about Love’s wails puts a lump in my throat.
Really, she could have been singing about doing her laundry and her voice would
still have expressed utter torment completely and convincingly. But those
lyrics are powerful, painful stuff. The singer looks out at all the people
around her taking the usual holiday stuff for granted: snow falling, church
bells ringing, “pretty lights on the tree,” choruses of “Deck the Halls”. None
of it means a damn thing to distraught Darlene Love. She just wants her baby to
come on home. She shouts for him, cries for him, moans, and laments, but he
never does come back in those two minutes and fifty seconds of pure emotional
drama.
The arrangement is equally dramatic, from the shivery
strings that start it off to the backing vocalists’ conciliatory choruses of
“Christmas!” to Steve Douglas’s groaning sax solo to Leon Russell’s astounding
bangs up the keys as the song reaches it’s unimaginable climax as Love screams
“Please! Please! Please!” The
emotions this song stirs are not the kind we’re supposed to associate with
December 25th, but there has never been a more utterly incredible
Christmas song. The failure of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” to reach a
wide audience is the greatest tragedy of the initial commercial failure of A Christmas Gift for You, so we should
be thankful to Joe Dante and his holiday horror-show Gremlins for giving it proper exposure in 1984. It is now fully
understood to be a classic for the ages.
Track 12: Here Comes
Santa Claus by Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans (Gene Autry and Oakley
Halderman)
As if Darlene Love’s emotional intensity was just too much
for one LP to bear, things start falling apart a bit on “Here Comes Santa Claus”,
yet another dopey Gene Autry song. The backing track is just as fine as we’ve
come to expect from any track on A
Christmas Gift for You, but Bobby Sheen comports himself strangely on his
second and final vocal on the record. His singing is gulped, as if he too is
choked up by Darlene Love’s wailing on the previous track. Hear how he swallows
the word “bright” at the 23-second mark. It’s understandable that a singer,
even one as good as Bobby, might mess up a take, but it’s rather shocking that
a perfectionist like Phil Spector allowed it to creep out on his masterpiece. This is the most glaring error, but the rest of Sheen’s performance lacks polish too. This
is particularly surprising considering the care Spector puts into the bombastic
backing track, with its shimmering sleigh bells and clopping wood blocks and
angelic choirs and popping pizzicato strings and zingy brass. It’s a strange
track that wallops to a sudden, almost violent close. But the weirdest one is
yet to come…
Track 13: Silent Night by Phil Spector and Artists (Josef Mohr and Franz X.
Gruber)
For the only pointedly
spiritual track on this decidedly secular Christmas album, Phil Spector decided
to boot most of the lyrics about the serenity of holy mama and holy babe (leaving “Here Comes Santa Claus”, strangely enough, as the most explicitly Christian song on the album) so he
could instead take the mic himself to thank his artists and you—the person who
gave him “the opportunity to relate my feelings of Christmas through the music
I love”—in his elfish voice with almost uncomfortable sincerity. With its
Hallmark monologue, syrupy strings, and choir (are we really supposed to believe that these are the voices of The Crystals, The Ronettes, and Darlene Love and not some sort of Mormon Tabernacle Choir type group?) “Silent Night” is an
uncharacteristically mawkish way to close a record that otherwise sneers at the
usual Christmas corniness with its punishing Rock & Roll arrangements and
child-like, attitudinal, awkward, and disturbingly
tormented vocal performances. But Phil Spector has given us so much to enjoy, to revel in, to
tremble before on A Christmas Gift for
You from Philles Records that we can forgive him this one lapse in taste.
After all, he had just finished making the greatest Christmas album in Rock
& Roll history.
A happy holiday
to you too.
