CHRISTMAS SONG ROUNDUP: "Wonderful Christmastime," "Last Christmas" and More!

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone,
and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings
you the fascinating facts and little known secrets behind your
favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We are your.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Two stockings hung by the We're just hung with care
Jordan and I.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
It brings a new meting to Too Much Information anyway,
We're just as you shut up. We're doing Christmas songs.
That's the bit. That's it. That's all I got for you,
As fans of the show will know, and certainly my
co host knows. We've done a.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Full length episode of Mariah Carey's Deathless classic.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
All I went for Christmas is You. We have done
the Pogues, fairy Tale of New York. We have done
assorted movies, We've done TV specials. We did a rankin
embassed episode for Rudolph. But what about all the other.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Christmas songs that grind their way into the collective unconscious
every December, like those worms from Star Trek two The
Wrath of Kahn. So we're introducing a Christmas.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Song Lightning Round episode to TMI where we're going to
hit as many of these as we can before our
throats and hearts and minds give out you delivering that
in like a seasonal cow net cardigan is I know,
I should have been wearing a bat. I should have
been wearing like a smoking jacket, really, but I couldn't
get one on such short notice. The smoking jacket rental

(01:29):
season is just absolutely this time of year. So yeah, Jordan, yes,
say something about Christmas songs. Baby. I love Christmas songs,
you know, I mean, I love you would I know,
I mean, you know. Part of it is that it
actually they sound like the kind of pop music that
I genuinely like the other eleven months of the year,
Like it sounds like Phil Spector Wall of Sound, Brian

(01:50):
Wilson type stuff. Wel Phil Spector did indeed cut one
of the most famous Christmas albums, which, regrettably spoiler alert,
we're not talking about this episode. That's like a full episode.
That's a good Yeah. Yeah, these are great songs, Yeah
they are.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
I look, there's some Christmas music that I detest, and
there's some Christmas music that I'm like, you know what,
this is fine, this is fine and good. And obviously
the ones that I picked are ones that I think
this is fine and good.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
They have ten total. You did seven, I did three.
I did seven half acidly, and you did three with
your whole ass, whole ass, And they're all, I believe,
all ones that you despise. Well for you. Yeah, your picks,
I hate, Yeah, my picks I'm agnostic on. But here's
the thing though, unless we still want to be doing
this by next Christmas, we have to. We had to

(02:35):
put limits on it. Yeah. Yeah, I was looking up Billboard.
I went to Billboard Magazine's Top fifty Christmas Songs of
All Time, and I came upon a song entitled Sleigh. No,
they're going for the homophone there. They wanted to be
like Sleigh. It's like clever.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
That's a twenty nineteen song by Smigo featuring Monty Booker
and Massego.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
I don't want to learn anything about that. Yeah, I'm
not going to do it.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
Those sound like Star Wars characters and I'm not paying
attention to that.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
And we picked classics. We picked the ones that everyone does.
Let's see what else do you have any friends of
the pod. We got a shout out, Oh you know what,
I have a lot of friends of the pod. I
got a shot at I got a friend of the
pod named Emily who wrote in about our Jeff Buckley episode,
and she said that it was one of the most
poignant narratives that she had not expected when she was

(03:27):
researching Buckley.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
So that's so nice. It was really lovely. I and
she came through my personal website. So also a reminder
folks that you can always get in touch with us
at Kofi ko dot f I too much information pod
cast on there and we.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Will answer you. It will probably made me be me Jordan.
I don't know how often Jordan's in there, but it
will probably be me. I lost the pass word. I've't
been able to get in for like a couple of
months now. Sorry, So it's me baby to talk to y'all.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
So, and and you know, we also have somebody who
talks to us through LinkedIn, so all Paul.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Paul's great. Wherever you guys can find is, we will answer. Yeah.
I crave validation. So oh, I got to tell you
this crazy story. Okay, So it's a couple of days ago.
It's like the week before Christmas. My family's in town visiting.
It's also just the week before Christmas, so everything's crazy.
I'm running behind. I'm late on everything. I'm sure listeners
know the episodes have been late last couple of weeks.

(04:26):
I'm sorry, it's all my fault. I'm late to a
morning class. I'm late to see to see Lewis my trainer. Actually,
oh yeah, friend of the paud Lewis. Oh yes, Jordan yoke, Yes, absolutely,
he loved the Gladiator episode. By the way, I'm hupping.
I'm puffing down my street and a very friendly looking
man hangs out of a of a van on my
street and like waves to me very excitedly. And I'm

(04:49):
just assuming that it's it's someone behind me, or it's
a mistake, like you know, it's just and so I
just kind of keep booking and I keep trucking, and
then I get a DM moment later, Hey, that was me.
I'm sorry. I'm a TMI fan and I went to
your talk at the Paley Center last week and I
recognized you in the street. What are the odds? I
can't believe it, and I feel so bad I blew

(05:11):
right by him. So I just want to say, my
dear friend. For purposes of broadcasting, I'll refer to him
as too much KESO is handle I'm so sorry I
missed you. Please let's go to win Sun Bakery. He
was right by Windsun Bakery, which is near where I live. No,
I definitely owe you something from there. I just thought
that was so crazy, just like out on the street
was so wild. It's Christmas time and you know, I

(05:32):
didn't prepare anything, but I just want to say how
grateful we all are. I mean, the best part of
doing this show, aside from an excuse to nerd out
and an excuse to hang with my dear friend Alex Heigels,
just connecting with all these great new people and you know,
I was texting with a few today and you know,
it's really really special. It's been great. Yeah, we should

(05:53):
have opened it up much earlier, to be honest, because
just all the people who have said such wonderful things
on KOFI and the people have gotten in touch with
us on Twitter. It's been a real delight. So thank
you everyone for who has done that. And just a reminder,
if you make a Spicy donation, you get a claim
to an episode request and we are slowly going through them.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
A lot of you have requested music ones, so those
are a little backed up as we space them out,
But Gladiator was a listener request. So I have proof
that we do do them. And let's set to do Christmas.
We're doing Christmas Jordan from Christmas to Christmas and Christmas
to Christmas. Here's everything you didn't know about Christmas songs.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
I've been drinking all day. I was gonna say it
was good will, good will, goodwill, and then it was
like the end of film on Louise. It just was
like off the cliff.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
Well, you know, my nephew got baptized today, so it
was allowed to get drunk. I'm Italian.

Speaker 1 (07:06):
Is it at the church? No? No, just afterwards? All right,
jingle bells it we'll do it live.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Jingle bells. Why not open with jingle bells? What do
you think about jingle bells?

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Jingle bells? I mean to me, it's been kind of
tainted by the school Yard Batman edition. And we'll get
to that. Okay, Yeah, no, it's fine, it's fine. I
don't have deep you see, this isn't to me, This isn't.
I have more feelings about the new edition pop ones
from the last like fifty years.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
Well, you're about to care about jingle bells. I'll tell
me do you know why that is?

Speaker 1 (07:40):
There's gonna be a Titanic connection or Beatles connection, so
close Massachusetts connection.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
The song was Yeah, it's Massachusetts Baby. The song was
copyrighted under the title one Horse, Open Sleigh in eighteen
fifty seven. It's writer, James Pierpont, was living in Savannah, Georgia.
The title was subsequently changed to jingle Bells when the
song was republish in eighteen fifty nine. This is a
Civil War era Christmas song that's nuts but the town

(08:06):
of Medford, Massachusetts, where Pierpont was born, Medford, Medford, all
the blue heads all the way out in Medford, or
that one when old when old James Pierre Pond stepped
up to the plate, he wagged, he socked the dinga
so hard. Hey guy, guys, hey guy, watch this. You're

(08:27):
like Dinga's.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
You like one hosse open sleighs. You're like one. I
got fucking spades.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
Medford, Massachusetts, where peer Pont was born, claims that this
song was actually written in eighteen fifty at a place
called the Simpson Tavern in Medford. And in case you
need to win maybe the most granular bar trivia contest
that could ever exist anywhere. The corroborating witness to this
is missus ODIs Waterman, missus Otis Waterman, missus Otis Watermen.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
What context is that? Yeah, you don't believe me. Asknis's wife.
I think that's the Medford Historical Society. They're like, missus
Otis Waterman was in the pub when she saw it.
But so here's what's really gonna blow your mind. Okay,
jingle Bells wasn't even a Christmas song. It was written
for children to sing at a Thanksgiving event at a
Medford Sunday school, and it turned out that it was

(09:31):
such a banger that they were asked to sing it
again at Christmas. Where it stuck.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Peer Pom was writing about literal sleigh rides and races
on Salem Street in Medford in the early eighteen hundreds.
In races as in like not the misigenation enough that
you would assume people from Massachusetts care about, but I
mean literally is one sleigh faster than the other. That's
kind of sick anyway, because Savannah was where peer ponm

(09:56):
was living when he wrote it. Unless he did write
it in this tavern, they have gone on to claim
it because they said it was on the occasion of
his first snowless Christmas in the South that he wrote
this whistole for his home in Medford.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
You can't claim something if somebody's there and not wanting
to be there and writing about wishing they were somewhere else. Well,
it gets worse because, of course Massachusetts found a way
to make this racist jingle bells. The re christened version
was first performed on September fifteenth, eighteen fifty seven, at
Ordway Hall in Boston by blackface minstrel performer Johnny pel Oh,

(10:35):
it's like Massachusetts claiming, like James Taylor's in my mind,
I'm going to Carolina. It's like, well, you could. But
was he incarcerated. He might have been in a psychiatric hospital. No,
I don't think so. I think he was in Massachusetts
and it was No, he's in London. Sorry, he was
in London and it was cold and he wished he
was back home. You can't claim something if somebody's writing
a song wishing they weren't there. I hate James Tanner really,

(10:58):
Yea's very nice to me. I know, I'm sure he was.
He was very nice.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
He seems that seems he seems too nice. How do
you feel about me, sweet baby James? If your nickname
is sweet Baby James, you're not like a real man.
I'm sorry you either have to be so huge and
so imposing that like like.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
He's a very tall man. He's not imposing. Eh, he's
pretty lanky. He's kind of like got that praying mannis
thing going.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
Do you think I could take James Taylor in a fight.
He's got reach, but I will cheat.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
I don't know anyone who could do that much heroin
and survive. I kind of think has something else going. Okay, okay, okay,
what about me versus Paul Simon? That's a wash. He'd
want it more, he would want it more, but I
would I would man handle him. Was he like five
to three? Yeah? But I don't know. Haven't you seen
that SNL thing where he plays basketball with like Wilt

(11:55):
Chamberlain or something. I have seen that sketch. Yeah again
next week for when we talk about other folk rock
icons that I might be able to beat in a fight. Oh,
I saw the Bob Dylan movie the other day. Oh,
I could definitely beat Timothy Shalloway as Bob Dylan. I
probably couldn't beat Bob Dylan as Bob Dylan. No.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
Yeah, that man was on so much government speed. I'm
gonna go ahead and a lemon say this.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
I'm gonna say he would cheat too, Yeah, but he'd
be open about it. Yeah. I think. Do we think
that that Dylan is a as a CIA operative similar
to all the Laurel Canyon stuff.

Speaker 3 (12:31):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Maybe he's one of the certainly one of the most
baffling ones.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
But I can figure out what the agenda for him
would be. What trying to get people to become born
again Christians.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
In the same way all the Laurel Canyon stuff was
trying to defang the very legitimate labor union. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
with like kind of a political hippie stuff. This was
sort of I guess his stuff was very political. Never mind. Yeah,
haven't you ever heard like a Ballad of a Thin Man? Dude? Yeah,
that's one of my favorite masters. Hey man, those songs
are political. Man. What's that is that cider? That's scotch?

Speaker 2 (13:09):
So apparently, jingle Bells was first actually recorded on an
Edison cylinder by a banjo player named Will Lyle in
eighteen eighty nine, though no copies of it exist. The
earliest version that does exist was recorded in eighteen ninety
eight by a male vocal quartet. So we're going through
steadily lamer and lamer incarnations of early music. However, the

(13:31):
first person to make jingle Bells a hit was swing
king Benny Goodman Baby in nineteen thirty five, followed by
in successive years, Glenn Miller Bing Crosby and Big Cronsby
with the Andrew Sisters. And then, and this shocked me,
electric guitar iconed Les Paul in nineteen fifty one, Less Paul,

(13:52):
in his multi tracking era, did a version of jingle
Bells where he just overdubbed all the guitar parts.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
It was like the first guy to really take over
ubbing seriously, right, yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
He's crazy innovative in that regard. But here's another fun fact.
Jingle Bells was one of the first songs broadcast from space.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
WHOA, that's cool.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
In nineteen sixty five, astronauts Tom Stafford and Wally Sira
were aboard the Gemini six and they pranked mission control
by calling in saying that they had seen an unidentified object,
and when they were pressed to identify it, they pulled
out a tiny one inch Honor harmonica and sleigh bells

(14:31):
that were contraband they had actually smuggled these aboard and
then saying jingle bells to mission control.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
That's awesome. Wasn't there another one? Wen't we just talking
about another episode? Somebody an astronauts smuggled at corn beef
sandwich aboard one of the Apollo flights. Or maybe it
was Gemini. This have to do with the Irish. Maybe
I forget what happened. That might have been Gus Grissom.
He didn't like the the in flight meals. That's probably
not what they were called Onora. Yeah, red meals. So

(15:00):
he went on the way to like blast off. He
stopped by his favorite deli and somehow smuggle the board
of corn beef sandwich. I feel like that's gonna get
so greasy and like unpleasant and just like all the
bits floating around, all the like crumbs. Yeah, you're gonna
contain every bit of like was it a rubin or
just a corn beef? I it's just a corn beef
on rye dry. He didn't put mustard on it. I don't,

(15:23):
well that would get even more gloppy, and yeah, can
you imagine like like some like a mustard seed gets
in like the computer. Oh yeah, I sure can. That's
probably It's probably happened to Apollo thirteen and they were
just too embarrassed to admit it. It's probably what happened
to Challenger in honor of the first teacher in space.
We're gonna smuggle the board, some square pizzas and watery pasta.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
They just had it to fit perfectly into all the
floppy disk parts. Oh no, one's stuck in one. Oh
it's sparking. Wow, this got dark real quick. Here's another
weird fact and a rare TMI correction. Oh okay, folks,
for all of you who who say I don't admit
when I'm wrong, I do, and I'm doing it now.

(16:07):
In our episode on Batman the Animated Series, I reported
that the legendary playground parody of jingle bells that rhymes
Batman Smells with jingle bells originated on Batman the Animated
Series and was later sung again on The Simpsons, leading
people to confuse the origins of the song, but now
TMI regrets the air. The first reference to jingle bells

(16:31):
Batman Smells is tied to the original sixties Adam West series.
It is mentioned on page sixteen of the January third,
nineteen sixty seven edition of the Lawton Constitution from Lawton, Oklahoma,
and the notice read as follows. Lil l I Pastrophiel
Lil Jana Montgomery, daughter of Major and Missus Ross D. Montgomery,

(16:57):
formerly stationed at Fort Sill and now with MAAG headquarters
in Brussels, Belgium, warbled this tune during the holidays. Jingle bells,
Batman Smells, Robin ran away, batmobile lost a wheel, and
commissioners stuck in a sleigh.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
That's really c plus work, Jenna, you really got a
stanchion on that. And I don't know who added, you know,
Riddler got away or whatever the last part of that is.
But Jena, you did a bad job.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
But the first reference to that song January third, nineteen
sixty seven. That's crazy. Don't let anybody tell you different.
That's the TMI promise. Jordan, what do you think is
the most depressing Christmas song?

Speaker 1 (17:45):
I'd say it's a toss up between fairy Tale of
New York, which I think is equally depressing but also exhilarating,
especially for lines like I could have been someone, but
so of anyone. But also I think probably the one
you're about to read, because I know dimly about the backstory.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Well, my favorite actually would be Another Lonely Christmas, which
is one of my favorite Prince Deep Cuts, that is
the film in which are the film because there's such
cinematic visions. This would be the Prince Deep Cut. How
did this song? Oh the B side too I Would

(18:26):
Die for You right in nineteen eighty four, So Another
Lonely Christmas. Prince was quite lonely, apparently during this point
in his life, so he decided to fictionalize an account
of a man mourning his lover who had died from
pneumonia on the previous Christmas Day. Prince is the character

(18:46):
in the Song's method of remembrance is to get schnookered
on banana dakers because that was his beloved favorite drink.
But we are not here to talk about another one.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
I actually, oh, I have another one. Actually I forgot.
Do you remember I think we talked about this on
the fairy Tale of New York episode when we did
a rundown of depressing Christmas songs. Do you remember the
Christmas Shoes? No? Bye? The group is called New Song.
It's about it sounds Christian. I think it probably is. Sir.
I want to buy these shoes for my mama. Please.

(19:17):
It's Christmas Eve and these shoes are just your size.
Could you hurry, sir? Daddy says, there's not much time.
You see, she's been sick for quite a while and
I know these shoes would make her smile, and I
want her to look beautiful if Mama meets Jesus tonight, I.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
Said D plus. Those rhymes are atrocious, sure, but Big
Bommer still a D plus. So have yourself a merry
little Christmas. Also Big Bommer a huge bummer. Yeah, one
of my favorite Christmas songs. I love the melody in this,
I just love the writing, and I love how convoluted

(19:53):
a lyrical history it has. This song was originally written
by the songwriting team of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine
in nineteen forty three for the nineteen forty four musical
Meet Me in Saint Louis starring Judy Garland.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Now.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
In that film, Garland's character sings the song to cheer
up her five year old sister. The family has just
been rocked by the news that their father may move
them all to New York for his job just before
the nineteen oh four World's Fair descended upon their hometown.
So that's where you get couplets like will pop the
champagne cork next year we all may be living in

(20:28):
New York. But Hugh Martin, who has since claimed soul
songwriting credit for this song, said Ralph Blaine didn't do
His first draft had couplets featuring couplets like have yourself
a merry little Christmas.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
It may be your last.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Faithful friends who were dear to us will be near
to us no more.

Speaker 1 (20:49):
Now.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
I love Christmas songs confronting the grim specter of death,
but the team behind Meet Me in Saint Louis not
so much. I often wondered what it would have been
like those lyrics been sung in the movie. Margaret O'Brien,
who played the younger sister and Meet Me in Saint Louis,
told Entertainment Weekly in two thousand and seven, but about
a week before we were to shoot the scene where

(21:10):
Judy sings it to me, she looked at the lyrics
and said, don't you think these are awfully dark? I'm
going to go to Hugh Martin and see if he
can lighten it up a little. So absolutely gacked to
her little gills on speed. Judy Garland went over to
mister Martin and suggested the change. He was initially resistant.

(21:32):
He recalled to Entertainment Weekly. They said, it's so dreadfully sad.
I said, I thought the girls were supposed to be
sad in that scene. They said, well, not, that's sad.
And Judy was saying, if I sing that, if I
sing that to little, sweet little I don't have a
Judy Garland impression. I didn't have that locked. If I

(21:52):
sing that to sweet little Margaret O'Brien, They'll think I'm
a monster. And she was quite right, but it took
me a long time to get over my pride. Finally,
Tom Drake, who is the male lead of the of
the movie, who was a friend, convinced me. He said, you,
stupid son of a bitch, You're gonna foul up your
life if you don't write another verse of that song.

(22:13):
But the song, this is the craziest thing to me.
That song was not even a banger. People did not
really cotton to it. It's just like over the Rainbow.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
But you know what the big hit was from Meet
Me in Saint Louis. It was a try song Chian
Klang Klan goes as a.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
Young ring ring went the bell zing zing zing my
heart strings and something I'll see you and hell have
yourself for Mary Little Christmas was such a dud it
took even old blue eyes Frankie sin himself to make
it a hit. He recorded it once in nineteen forty
seven and then came back to it a whole decade later.

(22:52):
According to songwriter Martin, he said, Frank called ask if
I would rewrite the muddle through somehow line he said,
the name of my album? He said, the name of
my album is a Jolly Christmas. You think you jolly?
That line up for me? Otherwise it's ring a ding
for you, bozo. He didn't say that last line. That's
just me editorializing. So not about to give the chairman

(23:15):
any lip. Otherwise he would have been underage raped by him.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
Ooh, can't say that about Frank, right, Is that something that?

Speaker 2 (23:24):
Oh that famous Frank Frank Sinatra mugshot is for stature rape?

Speaker 1 (23:28):
Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
Anyway, Martin made some cheerier alteration. He said he shifted
the happiness into the present tense and changed the muddle
through line to hang a shining star upon the highest bow.
And then, in one final twist to this convoluted history
of the song's lyrics, Martin wrote a pointedly religious version

(23:52):
of have Yourself a marri Little Christmas in two thousand
and one, changing it to have Yourself a Blessed Little Christmas, which,
among other things, replaced if the Fates Allow with if
the Lord Allows. Martin was once again supposedly correcting an
original bit of censorship done to his first draft. He
originally had if the Lord Allows, and then the songwriting

(24:15):
the people behind meet me in Saint Louis said, we
can't skew that religious Martin. The country has been torn
apart by war and discord, and clearly there's no God,
so please, there's no God left, So you simply can't
say if the Lord allows, we are a secular country
now and we will be for the rest of our duration.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
I had been under the impression that this song dealt
with the looming specter of nuclear holocaust. I thought that
was part of why so the lyrics were so ominous.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
Like well, it was clearly under the Specter of Ward
War II because I've written nineteen forty three.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
But yeah, what a great song. Yeah, it's a really
good song. And you know, of the three songs that
I'm going to talk about this, this is one that
I actually think there's a chance you might like. Even
though the pairing is so weird, I think it's really
pretty and I think it's cool. Oh, my friend, I
know where you're going with this. Yes, Peace on Earth.
Little Drummer Boy Boie meets Bing nineteen seventy seven. I

(25:15):
love this. How do you feel about this? Before I
get into the whole back start.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
It's one of those things that just kind of fries
your synapses. Yeah, the incongruity, like if you first see that,
I guess honestly, if I saw that for the first
time in twenty twenty four, I'd be like, what is
this deep fake bulch that you've served to me? Yeah, Like,
there's no way those two were in the same room together.
But here we are talking about it so many years later.
It's a good song, it's a good performance. I should

(25:39):
say it's no, it's not a good song, but.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Go ahead, all right, Well we'll talk about why it's
not that great of a song because they wrote it
in like an hour on the spot because Bowie didn't
like the song that we're gonna have him sing. Okay,
So it's nineteen seventy seven. With the release of Heroes,
David Bowie said about trying to normalize his professional reputation
after his period in Berlin, during which he'd.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Kept a low profile, trying to kick an ungodly amount
of coke yes and making some of the most experimental
music of his premiere He released the album Low the
year before Heroes was a little more in the pop lane,
and so now he was doing more promotion than he'd
done in many years. As he was trying to kind
of get back in action.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
He made high profile appearances on the Top of the
Pops TV show in the UK and Mark Bolan's TV
series Mark performing songs. Rumors that he drop in on
The Muppet Show sadly proved false. That would have been amazing,
but he did take on an arguably weirder role on
Bing Crosby's Christmas special. I guess, bearing in mind David's influences,

(26:46):
it's not quite as in congress as you might think.
David had a penchant for middle of the road entertainment.
He was initially when he first became a performer, obsessed
with this guy Anthony Newley. Back in the sixties. He
was this kind of light entertainment singer, song writer figure.
He's probably most famous to millennials for co writing the
songs in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But yeah,

(27:10):
Bowie meets being it seemed almost perverse. I mean, you
have the king of the cutting edge appearing with a
seventy four year old World War II crooner in a
festive Cardigan. Crosby was seventy three. Seventy three excuse men
die a month after this taping. Yes, yes, yes, yes,
I'm really unclear by Bowie's motivations for going on this.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
I have it, Okay, I have it from actually an
article I wrote it people. He said, I won't sing,
I hate the song. I'm doing this show because my
mother loves bing Crosby. That was Bowie's motivation.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
But he and his mom had like a really tempestuous relationship,
so I almost question that. I mean, I really wonder
if he was trying to either subvert this most bland,
you know, banal art farm Holiday TV's specials, or if
he was just doing the most punk rock thing he
could possibly do, which is doing the least punk rock

(28:05):
thing he could possibly do. I don't know. He never
really opened up about it beyond that statement that his
mom liked Bing Crosby. So David Bowie travels to the
ATV L Stree Studios, just north of London on September eleventh,
nineteen seventy seven, to film Bing Crosby's TV special Merry
Old Christmas. Bing had extended the invitation to David, partially

(28:27):
because his teenage children were big fans, but when David
showed up wearing over the top makeup and an earring,
he apparently had some second thoughts.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
Also full length mink coat. That's awesome, he and his wife.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah, according to Bing's kids, producers took David aside and
gently requested that he wipe off his makeup and remove
the earring, and he duly complied. Crosby son Nathaniel would
recall the appearance almost didn't happen. I think the producers
told him to take the lipstick off and take the
earring out. It was just incredible to see the contrast. Yeah,
you mentioned that They claimed that he showed up with

(29:02):
his wife, Angie, but at this time they were really
on the outs and they would be divorced, I think
by the end of the year, so it's really unlikely
that she showed up there with him, which kind of
throws this whole story in the question. Well, it might
not have been Angie who showed up in that length. Okay,
good point, good point. But yes, as you mentioned, there
was a bigger problem on the horizon than David Bowie's attire.

(29:24):
The original plan was for Being and Bowie to perform
a duet of The Little Drummer Boy, but when David arrived,
he announced I hate this song? Is there something else
I could sing? Which is such a classic bit of yes,
this has been in the works for weeks now, and
nobody for me. If nobody told you, or you didn't

(29:44):
look at the one cheat we gave you, and now
here you are. One of the script writers would later
say that Bowie felt the song quote wasn't a good
showcase for his voice, and Bowie doubled down by saying,
if I have to sing that song, I can't do
the show. Jordan, what would you do it with me?
On a Christmas song? I would say, Baby, it's cold
outside and you can beat whichever part you want so

(30:09):
you can stay in and podcast, much to the original
spirit of the sound. Just a short time before the
shooting of the TV special began, the show's musical directors
Ian Frasier, Larry Grossman and scriptwriter Buzz Cohen held an
emergency writing session on an old piano in the studio basement,

(30:30):
and within an hour they'd whipped up this new counterpoint
to Little Drummer Boy that they called Peace on Earth.
And they presented it to Bowie, who loved it. And
then after an hour of rehearsal, Being and Bowie ran
the act for the cameras. Buzz Cohen would say that
Being loved the challenge of the arrangement, saying that he
was able to transform himself without losing any of his crosbyisms.

(30:53):
For anyone who's actually seen the full clip of this
and not just heard the song, there's a whole sketch
and it's still too but I find it cute in
a cross generational seventies Network TV special kind of way.
In the skit, Being is an American visitor to a
historic British home, and Bowie lives down the street, and

(31:13):
he drops by to use the owner of the house's piano,
and Bowie recognizes Bing and says, you're the guy who
sings right, And these two guys have a moment where
they compare holiday traditions. It's a real bridging the generation
gap kind of thing. And then they gathered by the
piano and start rifling through a pile of Christmas Carol
sheet music, and David earnestly claims that he likes all music,

(31:35):
including old timers like John Lennon and Harry Nilsen. O great,
great inside joke there, and he plucks out the sheet
music for Little Drummer Boy. He says that it's his
son's favorite. Whichever one of my sons it is. Did
he only have Duncan at that point or he only
had Zoey or Zowie whoever? He said it back then
at the time that he was known then, No, no, it's

(31:58):
the same guy. But oh the guy who later made
Moon Warcraft. Oh yeah, yeah, he was knowing Zoe Zoe Bowie.
That was Zowie Bowie. Your mileage, my very tomato tomato,
Zowie Bowie. Let's make a beautiful salad. You always sing

(32:19):
that I've never heard that from anyone, But you have
no idea, dude, I have no idea where that's from.
That's like deep in the recesses of my reptile brain. Tomato, tomato, potato, potato,
let's make a beautiful salad. I thought it was just
let's call the whole thing off. Maybe I mean, I
like your version better. I've just never heard it. Thank you.
I hope to record it with Bing Crosby. One day

(32:42):
I got some magic of AI.

Speaker 2 (32:45):
And then one day an AI replica of Bing Crosby
will beat me with a sack of Valencia oranges as
he did to his children, because it won't leave a bruise.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
You mentioned the Tupac hologram out of Bing Crosby hologram
and a Bowie hologram.

Speaker 2 (33:01):
Oh my god, that would get so racist so fast.
He'd be like, he'd like, Samay Davids Junior, what are
you doing?

Speaker 1 (33:09):
I love it. We all agreed that that's how Bing talks,
even though I'm pretty sure that's not how Big talks.
But like that's everybody's impression of Bing.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
You can beat him with osaka, sweet Valenzia olunges and
I won't leave a bruise like that.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A few days after the taping, Bing
praised Bowie as quote a clean cut kid and a
real fine asset to the show. He sings well, has
a great voice and reads lines well. Translation, yeah you
can read. Didn't really expect that, Yeah right, I don't know.

(33:42):
I find it to be an undeniably sweet performance. Even
though Bowie himself would call the appearance quote ludicrous in
later years, it is quite cute. There's a certain undeniable
chemistry that they have where they both are clearly like
radiating why am I here? Like what is going on?
What are the circumstances of my life that led me
to sing next to this man? But they're kind of

(34:05):
both also selling it. Yeah yeah, to me, it's up
there with the Sinatra Elvis duit in nineteen sixty on
his Welcome Home Special. With these two guys that you
get the sense that there was a lot of like
words said in private beforehand against one another, but they somehow,
like you said, they make it work in the moment,
and you get the sense that they like each other

(34:26):
more than they would have thought because they're professionals. Baby, right,
that's why But yeah, Bowie, he would later say, we
were so totally out of touch with each other. I
was wondering if he was still alive. He was just
not there. He was really not there at all. He
looked like a little old orange sitting on a stool

(34:46):
because he'd been made up heavily and there was just
nobody home at all. You know. It was the most
bizarre experience. So that's one take on it. That was
his later era take. It's interesting to know that Bowie's
take on the experience in nineteen seventy eight, shortly after
the special aired, was much softer. He said Crosby was fantastic.
That old man knew everything about everything. He knew rock

(35:08):
and roll backwards, even if he didn't know the music.
I'm glad I met him. So yeah, two very distinct
takes from Bowie. He might have been really nice in
nineteen seventy eight because this was just after Bing had died.
In fact, Bing was dead by the time the special
aired that Christmas, which kind of adds a whole weird
flavor to a Christmas special from a beloved entertainer. I

(35:33):
love Christmas specials that are touched with death. Judy Garland
is the most famous. You know, what's her Christmas special
or just the worsd of it. It's like Lynchian, dude,
it's all this like fake posed stuff with Liza and
the kids. But it oh that this has this undeniable
rro like the Queen in her decline and oh it's

(35:54):
grim I forgot about that. Yeah, if you want to
watch it, if you're looking for something to watch with
your parents, you should cast the Judy Garling Christmas Specialty TV.
But yeah, Bing died a month after his shoot with Bowie.
He suffered a massive heart attack on a Spanish golf course.
His last words were famously to me, at least that

(36:16):
was a great game of golf, fellas, let's go have
a Coca cola. And he collapsed about twenty yards from
the clubhouse entrance and died instantly. Do you think Coke
paid him for that? Can you have your last word? Sponsored? Wait,
this gets even weirder because Mark Boland died in a
car crash a week after Bowie appeared on his show

(36:38):
around the same time, and Bowie later commented on this quizident, saying,
I was getting seriously worried about whether I should appear
on TV because everyone I was going on with was
kicking it the following week, kicking it in the farm
sense and not hanging out with your bros, not I

(36:59):
trib quest sense.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, if if someone asks you can they kick it,
you say yes they can, rather than the bing Crosby
sense where he asks you can I kick it and
you say, please God, not on the carpet.

Speaker 1 (37:14):
The broadcast should have been the end of this hastily
arranged song because it was essentially just a throwaway song
for a one off TV special, and a tape of
the recording was erased, but fervent Bowie fans swapped bootlegs,
and five years after the broadcast, an official version of
Little Drummer Boy slash Peace on Earth was released just
in time for Christmas nineteen eighty two. It became one

(37:37):
of Bowie's fastest selling and hilariously best selling singles ever
in the UK, having sales over two hundred and fifty
thousand within its first month of release. Damn being certified
silver by the British Phonographic Industry one month later.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Two hundred and fifty thousand in the first month is like,
that's enough to get you a sophomore record in today's
music industry. Yep, side though, I'm sure this is something
you maybe know about, but if not, I'm really excited
to tell you.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
Heigel, now hit me, I don't know anything about this.
Did you know that? Bing Crosby played a pivotal role
in popularizing tape recording in the mid twentieth century. In
the forties, being sought greater flexibility in his radio show performances,
which are typically broadcast live. All the radio executives said,
you know, people really want to hear things live. That's
part of what makes this medium special. They want to

(38:27):
believe that what they're listening to is actually happening somewhere.
Bing he didn't care. He wanted to be able to
do it on his own time. He was dissatisfied, though,
with the inconsistent quality of disc recordings, but he became
interested in the emerging magnetic tape technology developed by German
engineers during World War Two. Kind of makes sense that

(38:47):
he would collaborate with the Nazis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In
nineteen forty seven, bing Crosby was introduced to the Ampex
Model two hundred, which is an early tape recorder that
offered superior sound, fidelity and editing capabilities. Recognizing his potential,
he invested fifty thousand dollars in Ampex, which is like,
she's probably close to a million dollars today, helping the

(39:09):
company refine and commercialize the technology. Crosby support was instrumental
in introducing high quality tape recording to the American entertainment industry.
He became the first performer to pre record his radio
shows on tape, revolutionizing broadcasting by allowing seamless edits and
precise scheduling. This innovation transformed how radio and eventually TV

(39:30):
programs were produced. Imagine all these things having to be live.
I mean, he was basically the one who said, no,
we can do this all in advance and make it
exactly right. That's pretty incredible. Crosby's adoption of tape recording
catalyzed this widespread use in music, broadcasting and filmmaking, and
its influence actually extended beyond entertainment because his investment in
Ampex also spurred advances in tape technology, paving the way

(39:53):
for multi track recording. Like we were just talking about
with Les Paul and the modern music industry as a whole, and.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
I want to say that Alan Lomax took an Ampex
tape recorder on his Southern journey, So in a way,
he bing Crosby, who is surely racist and in hell
and in hell, paved the way for basically one of
the people who broke the concept of Southern Black American
music to the rest of the country.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
How much you think that chapped his ass? Boy, it
was like withered hand clawing out of like a hell crater,
like give me back the impects. Is that nuts? Though?
I didn't mean you could use it to tape black folks. Uh?
Was he really racist? I don't know. I just kind

(40:43):
of those eyes. I kind of assumed, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with
more too much information after these messages. Did you have
a segue or should I just plow right into this.
I don't have a sick quite No.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Great Philly's Navidad pferano e. I want to wish you
a merry Christmas, felicidad, I want to wish you a
merry Christmas.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
Alana isumemericus. Anyway, I know that this is another song
with a kind of melancholic undertone to it. Jose Feliciana
was born in Puerto Rico and moved with his family
to New York when he was five, where he grew
up in Spanish Harlem. By nineteen seventy though, he was
a successful recording artist, and he recalled to The New

(41:46):
Yorker that he and his producer Rick Gerard were at
Feliciano's place in California. They were planning a holiday album,
and Girod said that there hadn't been a huge Christmas
song since Brenda Lee's rocking around the Christmas Tree. Yo
didn't put much thought or effort into their attempt at
a iconic Christmas song. He missed his family in New York,

(42:07):
and inspired by memories of their Christmases together, he penned
Philis Navidad in ten minutes, telling The New Yorker that's
why it's the simplest song ever written. It contains a
total of nineteen words, six in Spanish phileis Navidad, prospero
annoy pelicidad and thirteen in English. I want to wish

(42:28):
you a merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart,
over and over and over again. He and Gerard then
recorded the tune at RCA Studios on Sunset Boulevard Baby
in a single take.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
Wow, well you thought they were going to go another
take at this song? Feliciano. This New Yorker interview is hilarious.
Apparently the man has quite a sense of humor. He
told them, if you know where your song is going
to go, you don't have to around with it.

Speaker 2 (42:57):
Too much to say to myself, jokum. If they can't take.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
A get it, he switched him around. He did a
whole reversal on you, because yeah, anyway. Design is technically
a continuation of the tradition of Spanish villanthios or villanthios,
which is basically just like an A line for the
Savidad and a B line I want to wish you

(43:25):
merry Christmas.

Speaker 2 (43:26):
Just repeated back and forth. These were originally written for
all occasions, but as they progressed into parts of the
Latin diaspora, they were starting to be linked to Catholic
feast and Saint days, particularly Christmas. Now, for some reason,
in this New Yorker interview Jose Feliciano, who I think
was then like seventy five, he decides to illustrate this

(43:51):
connection with the following joke. Three people die, and on
their way to heaven, Saint Peter stops them and says,
I need something from each of you that reminds you
of Christmas. The first man takes out a lighter signifying candles,
The second shakes some keys like bells. The third displays
a pair of women's panties. Saint Peter says, how did

(44:11):
these remind you of Christmas? And the mangoes? Those are carols? Anyway,
here's another way that that thing became horrible and racist.
In December two thousand and nine, a parody of Felisa
Navidad titled the Illegal Alien Christmas Song, was created by
radio producers Matt Fox and aj Rice posted on the

(44:33):
website for Human Events, an American conservative political website. The parody,
sung in English, played on the racial stereotype of Mexican
immigrants as heavy drinkers and said that illegal immigrants were
going to spread bubonic plague, and after a richly deserved
beating in the media, the song was taken down. Do
you have thoughts on Felis Navidad? It's annoying, let's not

(44:57):
let's not sure.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
Yeah, no, it's not one of my favorites. I do
have a fun the Holsday Feliciano fact. During the whole
Paul Is Dead rumor that Paul McCartney had died and
the Beatles were leaving clues on their albums, he recorded
a cash in song called so Long Paul under the
name Warblely Finster You're with me until that. No, Warbly

(45:22):
Fincer's a good, like fake British pop name. Actually, it's
tremendous damnway. That's all I have to say about that. Now.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
You know, we haven't done much on Elvis. Too much
information Factory.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
That was one of my early ones I wanted to do,
which was a TMI episode on the House Graceland, and
I still have like forty pages of notes that I've
been too afraid to call through.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
Well, I eagerly wait for that, but I thought it
might be time to address the elephant in the room,
which is not a fat joke. The lyrics to Blue Christmas,
the Elvis song that we are now discussing, we're written
by a guy named Jay Johnson. Jay Johnson was your
basic sort of Don Draper stereotype. He was an advertising

(46:07):
jingle writer who lived in Connecticut and commuted to work
in New York City. He was inspired by the success
of Irvin Berlin's iconic White Christmas, and Johnson reasoned that
a more melancholic take on the holiday was warranted. Dusty
he began writing Blue Christmas on the Train on a
piece of old hotel stationery for maximum poignancy.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
God he is don draper, Yeah right. He added more
verses and then proceeded to reach out to a composer
friend of his, Billy Hayes. Now Hayes also probably had
some thoughts on the lyrics, because the final version of
the song, Johnson's original two first verses were replaced, so

(46:47):
once they had their way with it, the finish number
was sent over to publisher's replacement not only in New
York but Nashville. This is where things get a little convoluted.
The first taker for Blue Christmas was a Roy Rogers
wanna be singing cowboy named doy O'Dell. I believe he
is also an actor, but he has barely an Internet presence,

(47:10):
but he did turn in the first recorded version of
Blue Christmas in nineteen forty eight. It went nowhere, but
it didn't take long for other people to pick up
the song. Hugo Winter Halter gave it an orchestral and
choral reading. Russ Morgan sang it's a pretty straightforward lead
vocal feature and most germane to our narrative. Nashville and

(47:31):
country music legend Ernest Tubb proceeded to twang it up
for his country version. These were actually all chart successes
to varying degrees. Ernest Tubb's version hit number one on
Billboard's Country chart, Hugo Winter Halter's version peaked at number
nine on Billboard's Most Played by Disc Jockey's chart, and
Russ Morgan's version reached number eleven on Billboard's Best Selling

(47:53):
Pop Singles, And by nineteen fifty even famed big band
kruoner Billy Eckstein had turned in a version. But we
have Ernest Tubb to thank for bringing this song to Elvis.
Ernest Tubb was one of Presley's early country music idols,
and they even met in Nashville after Elvis's first and

(48:13):
only appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in nineteen fifty four.
Depending on how steep you are in Elvis Lord, you
may or may not already know this, but apparently Elvis
didn't go over well at the opry, and so he
stumbled out, dejected and walked down to Ernest Tubb's thriving
record store, which was just a few blocks down on
Broadway in downtown Nashville. He proceeded to cry and commiserate

(48:39):
with Tub about his poor opera performance, and then Ernest
Tubb supposedly told him, Elvis, you just go ahead and
do what they tell you. Make your money, then you
can do whatever you want to do. Elvis apparently took
this advice to heart, because fast forward to nineteen fifty
seven and Elvis is prepping his own Christmas album, which
would end up being in magic and lovely titled Elvis's

(49:01):
Christmas Album The Man Had Away with Words.

Speaker 2 (49:05):
According to the king's own website, it was a month's
long battle with RCA to even get him in the
studio to cut anything Christmas themed. He finally went in
in September. That was the turnaround time we're talking about
back then, so Accurrding to singer Millie Kirkham, who is
part of the Jordanaires, Elvis Press's longtime backing vocalist. She

(49:26):
sings the high soprano part on Blue Christmas, Presley had
already cut one take and didn't want to do another one,
and producers were strong arming him into doing another take.
At the Country Music Hall of Fame in twenty twelve,
Kirkham said he turned around to us, the musicians and
the singers, and he said, okay, let's just get this

(49:47):
over with. Just do anything, have fun, have a good time,
do something silly. So I started going woo and he
motioned for me to keep doing it, and Grin did me.
So I just did it all the way through the
whole song. When we got through, we all laughed and said, well,
that's one record the record company will never release. But

(50:09):
they did, and if I was getting royalties, i'd be
a rich old woman.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Oh yeah, there's always that bit that's really sad, where
the people who make a key part of the recording
don't actually get cut into the sales. I will say
I am the backing vocals on that I like. I
like the Jordan nerves, but I hate THEO. I just
don't like it. It's just too busy. I love creepy
falsetto in Elvis songs. I have all the early ones

(50:37):
that he does for in the Sun, This Blue Moon,
that's like so quest mister yes, yes, that's very good.
But Elvis's Christmas Album was actually controversial upon its release.
The idea of Elvis the Pelvis as he was known
at the time, recording religious Christmas material like Silent Night
and Old Little Town of Bethlehem did not go over

(50:57):
well in the Bible Belt. It was interesting because Elvis
included straight up gospel material on the second side of
the album with those carols. Now, many people were equally angry.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
But Elvis who grew up singing all of this stuff
in the Church of God Church of God in Christ. Kojik,
I think is the acronym for that, because that's what
Jerry Lee Lewis grew up in as well.

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Church of God in Christ.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Elvis grew up singing gospel material and he had a
great deal of love for it. His first full gospel
album would come out in nineteen sixty and his nineteen
sixty seven version of How Great Thou Art actually won
him his first Grammy. Anyway, Supposedly, the bigger controversy over
the Christmas Album was White Christmas, because Elvis patterned his

(51:42):
version of the song, at least his vocal delivery, after
a version that was cut by the drifters. The song's writer,
Grving Berlin, did not cotton to that, because the song
you see was Berlin's sober response to the death of
his three week old son who passed away and Christmas
Day in nineteen twenty eight, and understandably Berlin didn't appreciate

(52:05):
a faster and slightly irreverent take. There's even been a
rumor that persisted into the nineteen nineties, getting repeated in
a number of Elvis biographies that Berlin, when hearing this song,
told his staff to start calling radio stations and telling
them not to play it. That has been debunked by
some grade a Elvis nerves tougher men than myself, But

(52:29):
you can choose to believe it if you'd like. Whatever
the case, of course, Elvis laughed all the way to
the bank. According to the Recording Industry Association of America,
the RIBA Elvis's Christmas Album, along with its subsequent reissues,
has shipped at least seventeen million Jesus Christ in the

(52:49):
US of A, making it not only the first Presley
title to go diamond, but also the best selling Christmas
album of all time in the United States, and with
total sales of over twenty million copies worldwide. Elvis's Christmas
Album remains the world's best selling Christmas album and one

(53:11):
of the best selling albums period of all time.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Having said all that, I will say my favorite version
of Blue Christmas, and you will laugh at me, because
of course I would say this. Brian Wilson does a
beautiful version on the Beach Boys Christmas album from nineteen
sixty four, with a great orchestral arrangement by Dick Reynolds
who did all the Four Freshmen orchestral arrangements.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
And I'm going to go to the bathroom, and I
assume you'll be talking for the entire time, so I'll
just keep going.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
Oh, there's no way I'm not letting you get out
of this. Oh what do you know what, folks, He's

(54:21):
still at it. Or I was gonna let you miss
a moment of what I'm about to talk about. Hit it, baby.
You know this is one of my favorites, and my
favorites I mean a thing that I hate, will never
forgive for being foist upon the world like a plague
or Cuthulhu esque love crafty and madness. It may very
well be the most divisive Christmas song Last Christmas is

(54:42):
kind of up there also, so it is all one
for Christmas, as you, although I think most people generally
like both of those. This one's a real fifty to
fifty split. I'm talking, of course, about Paul McCartney's Wonderful
Christmas Time Awful. The Beatles did many things, but they
never had a Christmas release, at least for the general public.

(55:03):
The closest they ever came was the half song Christmas
Time Is Here Again, which was distributed to their fan
club the A Flexi disc during the nineteen sixty seven holidays.
That song has a simple, yet catchy arrangement that sounds
a lot like Hello Goodbye, which happened to be the
band's most recent single at the time. Sadly, nineteen sixty
sevens Christmas Time Is Here Again would be their last

(55:25):
annual fan club greeting that they'd record together as a group.
The final two leading up to the band split would
be pieced together from clips that they sent individually, so
you can really trace the band's working relationship through these
fan club Christmas discs. That's sad.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
I honestly thought they would have recorded something like an
Elvis album, you know.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Yeah, No, they never did. There's like some extremely rare
I forget if it's a bootleg, if it was through
the fan club that after the Beatles broke up, they
just assembled all their fan club releases on an LP.
But yeah, they never did, never did a real Christmas thing,
but all solo Beatles would release Christmas songs. John and
Yoko with Happy Christmas, War is Over, George with ding
Dong Ding Dong, Please tell me about that. I think

(56:08):
it's more like almost like a New Year's song. Yeah,
I don't know a lot about it. And Ringo God
Bless Him released an entire holiday themed LP in nineteen
ninety nine called I Want to Be Santa Claus. I'm
assuming he did that in nineteen ninety nine because he
was worried about Y two K. I thought it was
his last chance to do a full Christmas comp them.
I've only got one statement left to make to the world.

(56:30):
That remains the only Beatles related Christmas album that exists.
But none of these hold a candbell, both in terms
of popularity and vitriol to Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time.
He wrote it in nineteen seventy nine at a time
when there was a growing appetite for modern Christmas songs
on UKR waves. Johnny Mathis scored his first number one
hit with When a Child Is Born in nineteen seventy six.

(56:53):
In the UK, Bowie and Bing made waves with their
televis Christmas duet in nineteen seventy seven. And Mary's Boy Child,
Oh My Lord was a number one for bony M
in nineteen seventy eight. It actually didn't really come through.
Could you take that line again? And Mary's Boy Child,
Oh my Lord was a number one hit for bony

(57:14):
M in nineteen seventy eight. Great, thank you. I think
that's the one. Let me go again. We'll go again.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
Are you want you want me to do it as
Johnny Cash. I've been working on my Johnny Cash.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Yeah. Please. And Mary's Boy Child, Oh my Lord was
a number one for BONYM in nineteen seventy eight. You've
really refined that since we did it for Gladiator.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
You gotta get the tremolo in there, like he's he's
like really actually broken up about bony M. Sorry, our
Westminster clock is going. I love continue to know.

Speaker 1 (57:52):
I love that. So McCartney put it in on this
Holiday Bonanza in the late seventies, both because he's a
man of tradition, but also because he was becoming hip
to music publishing around this time. This is when he
started buying up full song catalogs by people like Buddy Holly,
and he recognized that he hit Christmas Song as a reliable,
annual income, stream capitalist prick. He hasn't spoken openly about this,

(58:17):
but I find it telling that he released Wonderful Christmas
Time as his first solo single in almost eight years
when he was in the middle of his Wings run.
So McCartney composed the song himself during what he'd remember
as a quote boiling hot day in July. And this
boiling hot day was so ridiculous that for some reason

(58:37):
I thought of Christmas. I thought it'd be just ridiculous
to write a Christmas song while it's this hot, and
it was. So I sat in the room and made
up a Christmas y backing track and wrote the song
all around it. And it was just ironic sitting there
going he he he, This isn't Christmas. It's a boiling
hot July day. What a rebel. And that's how I

(58:59):
did that one. This is all going on the transcript
when we put him up against the wall helter skelter. Oh,
I guess that has some bad things to it too.
What are you eating? Is that? Is that a strup
waffl or is that a giant host? They don't let
you take host in bowl? Comb from baptism I tried.
It's a pretty good butterscotch. That's my favorite cookie, butter

(59:22):
scott scotchies. Hell yeah, yeah, man, good stuff.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
Oh man, TMI listeners, if you want to tweet at
us later with what you're eating while you're listening to this,
I will respond to Jordan. We both love snacks and cookies.
I'm eating cherry hearts right now. Oh nice, man. They're
cherry brandy or just like.

Speaker 1 (59:42):
No, they're like big jelly beans, but the shape like hearts,
and they all different like some cherry call up black
cherry wild cherry. Is that a Boston thing? I don't know.
I don't think I know those. No, they're they're hard
to find. I just like randomly will find them at
different candy stores. Far yeah, no, I really go save
some some strandos from my chic Iago, my Chicago family.
Cis Franco mints. It's a mint, nothing more nothing less.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Paul wrote the lyrics the Wonderful Christmas Time and do
you want to guess ten minutes? Yep, that's correct. The
party's on, the spirit's up, we're here tonight, and you
know that's enough. Dude. You got to punch in that
guy's TikTok oh. Yeah, the guy who does the John
Lennon song, and then the Paul song. Yes, I will

(01:00:29):
do that every Christmas.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
People that die and go for yourself, and then the
Paul mcgardney one's It's Christmas Time break Out, the one
Uncle Jimson's favorite jumper.

Speaker 1 (01:00:42):
Yes. Much has been said of the fact that John
Lennon's entry into the Christmas canon doubled as a poignant
anti war anthem, whereas Paul's was about having a wonderful
Christmas time. Paul would say, to me, Christmas is mainly
all the parties and the good humor everyone gets into
suddenly for those few days a year. The song's just

(01:01:03):
basically about the mood is right, the spirit's up, We're
here tonight, and that's enough. It's very simple. It's ironic
that he gave a more poetic set of lyrics in
that interview question that he did in that whole song.

Speaker 2 (01:01:17):
Yes, I hate this song, man, it's so annoying. Was
he like hanging out with? I mean like Stevie Wonder
who other synth like guys? Is just some of the
worst sounds I've ever heard keyboards make. Maybe it will
be answered in the suck sect.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Kay. Sorry? Sorry, So now at least I know you
hate the song, but we get to talk about synths.
That's true, I know, Okay. So Paul recorded Wonderful Christmas
Time on August thirtieth, nineteen seventy nine, at his home studio,
which he'd recently decked out with synthesizers. Many of the
recordings he made during this era would surface on his
nineteen eighty solo album McCartney two, on which he played

(01:01:56):
all the instruments, which were mostly synths himself. This was
less an attempt at recording a bedroom pop album and
more just him screwing around with his new electronic toys.
There's a viral anti Wonderful Christmas Time tweet that says,
a Wonderful Christmas Time, Sir Paul McCartney set out to
make a timeless Christmas classic and also to figure out

(01:02:16):
what all the buttons on his synthesizer did and he
absolutely succeeded in one of those. And that's kind of
not far from the truth. This sounds uncharitable, but one
of the tracks from this era is called check my Machine,
and it's literally just him checking his machine. Yeah, that tracks. Yeah.

(01:03:00):
The synth in question that he was using was called
a Sequential Circuits Prophet five, which was later used on
Kim Carn's Betty Davis Eyes. Hallo notes, I can't go
for that and the Doobie Brothers what a fool believes?
Profit five is a pretty legendary synth. Gotta say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think there's also a Yamaha CS eighty on there too.
I don't know much about that. Does that mean anything

(01:03:22):
to you?

Speaker 2 (01:03:23):
Well, some of those late seventies Yamahas have a lot
of good sounds in them before they were getting into
the I mean he was basically competitor for the Prophet
five and the Oberheim.

Speaker 1 (01:03:34):
OBX, Yes, which we talked.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Vangelis was a big proponent of the of the Yamaha
and that's what a lot of Blade Runner soundtrack is
composed with.

Speaker 1 (01:03:46):
We will be talking about Vangelis later as wal as
Chariots of Fire. So if it's a favorite of vangelicis Baby,
it's good enough for me. Paul not only wrote one
for Christmas time himself, but he also produced it himself
and played all the instruments himself. And his description of
the process sounds like a Dana Carvey impression. Would you

(01:04:07):
like to read this next session in your best Paul
got to get into a character. I'm a millionaire plunky punky.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
I'm a villionairem plinky plunky, and I'm also setting out
in my mission to acquire most of the world's written music.
I'm driving a tugboat. I immediately got out and got
the sleigh bells and went ching ching ching on them,
and I worked it all up from then, just got
things that suggested Christmasy sounds to me.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
Who that was very good, by the way. That's him
on keyboard, synths, bass, guitar, drums, percussion, and even the
so called choir of children singing their song. It's just
him double tracked singing falsetto I guess I prefer that
to actual children. You'll laugh at this. It's sixteen tracks,
he felt. Sixteen tracks. Yeah, that's what people do recording

(01:04:56):
at home. Oh. Though none of the other members of
Wings appeared on the song, they all they all feature
in the music video, which was filmed at the Fountain
Inn in Ashhurst, West Sussex, not far from his house.
Maybe some of our English friends will go and check
it out. Probably not, they have better things. Ye don't

(01:05:17):
do that. Yeah, McCartney recalled the NM in twenty twelve.
We went out to some pub somewhere and so that
was a laugh. We just run out of the PubL
occasionally filmed a bit and then went back into the pub.
So that was quite a nice evening. How does he
even make that sound so unappealing and awkward, Like he's

(01:05:39):
just a normal guy. This is no, he's just normal Laddin,
just normal men, which is innocent men run out of
the PubL occasionally filmed it. You know. He's a great
little band. He's got a great little band, just normal men.
The video was directed by Russell mulcahey, who also directed
the first ever music video to air on MTV in

(01:06:02):
nineteen eighty one, video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles.
Great Song, Great Song, Great Song, Wonderful Christmas Time was
released in November nineteen seventy nine, and it was McCartney's
first solo singles I mentioned earlier since Eat It Home
more than eight years earlier. It missed out on being
the Christmas number one in the UK. Pink Floyd's Another

(01:06:23):
Brick in the Wall had that honor, which is hell hilarious,
but it would peak at number six the very first
week in January nineteen eighty. It sort of flopped in
the US. It missed out on the Billboard Hot one
hundred entirely. It didn't crack the Hot one hundred until
December twenty eighteen, making it to forty seven. To date,

(01:06:45):
its highest chart appearance in the US is number twenty
six on the Hot one hundred as of last January.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
Folks, if you care about America, don't play this song.
We got to keep it way out. Don't do it.
Just don't play this song. If you are like a maga,
do it because you hate Britain. If you're anybody else,
do it because song. Don't let this song gets number one.
I'm begging you, there's a last bit of like patriotism

(01:07:13):
I have left in my old rotted bones. If this
song gets number one in the US, I don't know
what I'll do. I'll find out where it lives and
I'll pull Luigi, I swear, don't put that in, just
beep all that out and then just say and I

(01:07:35):
know that that'll.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
Get me rested. Man, these butterscotch who he's are growing
right to my head. All I'll say is I'm not
going to leave a body for them to find. Good

(01:08:00):
luck pinning something on me and pigs. McCartney has played
Wonderful Christmas Time and concert occasionally over the years, initially
during Wings First tour in the fall of nineteen seventy
nine and most recently in December twenty twenty four at

(01:08:22):
the end of his Got Back tour in the UK.
Wonderful Christmas Time has been covered by the likes of
Diana Ross, Harry Styles, Hillary Duff, Tom McCrae, Bare Naked Ladies,
Demi Levado, Kelly Rowland, the Shins their version, Whips Actually,
and Dog Dog Dog Dogged. Every one of these bands
covering this song have more self respect, even the Shins,

(01:08:42):
Yeah Straight, No Chaser, the Monkeys and Jam Flame and
half the cast of the West Wing. You saved that
last like it was supposed to be impressive. Impressive is
not the word I would use, surprising. Every single one
of these people suck, including royalties from comber versions. It

(01:09:03):
was estimated in twenty ten that McCartney makes four hundred
thousand dollars a year from the song Polly for Him,
which puts its cubulative earnings as of twenty ten at
least at over fifteen million. So let's see so with
another don't do this, don't over twenty million? Then okay,

(01:09:23):
now the quiet part loud. People really hate this song,
even Sir Paul apparently doesn't love it, despite its reputation
as a cash cow. Beatles author Robert Rodriguez has said
of the song, love it or hate it, Few songs
within the McCartney ouvre have provoked such strong reactions. A
twenty twenty four piece on mental Flaws by Kenneth Partridge

(01:09:45):
attempts to answer precisely why this is by speaking to
you by speaking to a musicologist and performer named Nate Sloane,
host of the podcast Switched on Pop. But before we
go to Nate Sloane, Heigel tell us why the song
provokes such hatred and people. It is simplistic. It has
the simplistic structure and rhyme scheme and hooks of a

(01:10:07):
child's song. You know, Paul McCartney is impressive because he
has this tremendous range, songs like let It Be Golden Slumbers.
He has this incredible ability to go from the very
bottom of his range, like a deep chest voice, up
into his head voice and do these big, soaring melodies.
And this song is just so squarely like in like,

(01:10:29):
it sounds like Pokemon music. It sounds like it sounds
like a it sounds like you're in hell and you
were a gambler in life, and you are forever.

Speaker 2 (01:10:46):
You're just forever, one inch away from being able to
pull a slot machine lever. That's what it's the music for,
like somebody being poetically tortured in one of the Dante's hells.
And I know you sent me like you were like, well,
you have to admit it's a lot of chords, and.

Speaker 1 (01:11:03):
I was, really I was.

Speaker 2 (01:11:04):
I was willing to engage with it because I went,
I went it and looked at for the chords of it,
and you're wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
It's not a lot of chords.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
It's a lot of pedal bass movement, just f sharp
C sharp F sharp C sharp descending chord progression.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
Uh, it sucks, it sucks, It sucks, it sucks. Iigel,
it's my birthday. Give me this? Is it your actual
birthday tonight? It sucks? Birthday for an air? Oh man,
is this where you're catching your coins in on?

Speaker 3 (01:11:38):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:11:39):
Yes, okay, Well it's great. It's got a really catchy melody.

Speaker 2 (01:11:43):
I have to say that the combination of synth voices
that are on there are really ahead of his time.
I mean, if you think about where sinths were at
the time, people like Stevie Wonder don't have to do this, No, no,
let me do it. Stevie Wonder, you know John Carpenter
and the Halloween soundtrames.

Speaker 1 (01:12:02):
I've been right around now.

Speaker 2 (01:12:03):
So Paul's actually is pushing the form forward with the
synthius on this stuff. And then he's really also inventing
a kind of basement in diy altern wale of music. Yeah,
it's positively chill wave, my man. And you know what,
what's more pure I'll say this, what's more pure and

(01:12:26):
paul like than Christmas? That is true with a rigidly
rictus grin sense of joy and a kind of fascistically
enforced general cheer. Yeah, what's more like Paul McCartney than
being forced to have a good time by one of

(01:12:48):
the richest men in the world.

Speaker 1 (01:12:50):
You will have a good time or I'll kill you.
Do you want to be black bagged into Ganton? Where
all of your reasons for hating the song are pretty
much the same ones that are cited by musicologist Nate Sloan.
Now I'm musicologist. I've been drinking scotch. He blames repetition

(01:13:13):
first off, saying that Wonderful Christmas Time is quote simple
to a fault as it consists solely of verse and
chorus sections. He says, it moves through the verse section
of the song faster than a sleigh with no breaks.
Before you know it. That's enough and we're off to
the titular chorus. The only variation comes with the bridge section.
The choir of children sing their song? Is their song

(01:13:34):
ding dong? Or are bells ringing simultaneously? Either way, it's
not the most inventive passage. He goes on to note
that over the course of the song, the title phrase
is uttered a deeply grading seventeen times. In broader terms,
he also makes mention of the inconsequential lyrics, contrasting them
with those of his former writing partner. While Lennon's song

(01:13:55):
wanted you to probe your inner depths and puts the
onus of world peace on you, McCartney opts to go
with we're here tonight and just's that's enough.

Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Well, you know, in the spirit of Jordan's birthday, you
could connect pop Buddhist philosopher Alan Watson's theory of be
here now, oh rom DAWs or rom Das or I
don't know, I'm reaching here. I don't believe in any
of those guys, but be here now. You know, We're
here tonight and that's enough. It's a way of appreciating

(01:14:29):
the present and being fully engaged with a moment with
the ones who are around you.

Speaker 1 (01:14:36):
Which at Christmas time tends to be loved ones in
the family. Yeah, you know, Paul McCartney was a truly
a truly a philosopher. Now this is interesting to me.
Nate Sloan also cites the sense that we were talking
about earlier as of reason that many people disliked this song.
He said, usually the Timbrel palette leans towards the acoustic

(01:14:59):
and by extension nostalgic sounds of real instruments. When you
encounter synthesizers in a Christmas song, as in Last Christmas
by Wayam, they tend to be lush, sustained paths that
lended almost orchestral sensibility to the track on Wonderful Christmas Time,
the prophet five by contrast istaccato, harsh and tinny. It's

(01:15:20):
a bold choice by McCartney and a testament to his
experimentation with that instrument that would soon become an industry standard,
but was less than a year old at that point
when he recorded Wonderful Christmas Time. Well, despite all this,
Nate Sloan also details things that make the song great,
at least in his opinion. In this case, it's a
lot of stuff that people hate about it. The things

(01:15:40):
that make it annoying to some people make it distinct
and even refreshing to others. He says, In the increasingly
rigid and annual rotation of holiday songs, Wonderful Christmas Time
stands out for its tambrel palette and eventive chord structure,
and for that reason I find it a welcome relief
from the familiar strains of Mariah and Bing. He also
notes that though the melody and structure are simple, McCartney's

(01:16:02):
harmonic patterns are quote diabolically complex. Those chords are deep
and jazzy, drawing on the rich, drawing on the rich
harmonic vocabulary of the nineteen forties and fifties pop music,
when most of the current holiday canon was composed. Yeah,
that's uh, that's generous. I actually do like some of
the chords.

Speaker 2 (01:16:22):
The whole thing is mood is right, the spirit's bright,
we're here tonight, and that's enough. That's actually all based
around a descending a major scale because it goes a
major seven A six U E with an A in
the base, so that's got a hole, just a pedal tone.
That's quite nice, simply having you know, that's fine. What
I like about it, though, I think what the guy's

(01:16:44):
talking about here in the analysis is the choir of
children singing their song. That section is just a straight
one two five, which is two to five chord progression
is minor two five major or five dominant, is like
one of the most common chord progressions in jazz. But yeah,

(01:17:04):
I like it. A seven to a six has a
nice kind of leading tone. Because a seven implies a
G natural at the top of an A major chord,
A sixth would then go down to F sharp A.
If you're just doing a tria, the top of an
A triad voice is e and then A with a
C sharp in the bass. That's the ding dong ding part.

(01:17:27):
So that's actually a quite nice kind of descending baseline
that within the context never changing from an A chord,
but it goes from G F sharp E to C sharp.
That's kind of a nice traveling little baseline that the
simply having is just as a two five three six.
Congratulations you've discovered Rogers and Hammerstein's chord changes.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):
Two five, three six four flat seven one. Yeah. Well,
in other words, in ten minutes, Paul McCart craft that
an innovative yet lasting holiday song that makes half a
million dollars a year. Yeah, you sure did so. Suck it,

(01:18:13):
as you wrote also in his twenty twelve piece for
Vice called three Reasons why Paul McCartney's Wonderful Crystal Time
is way better than you think it is. Writer Andrew Winnisterever,
I think that's how you say that, proclaims the track
quote the original and by far best chill wave song.
Chill Wave as we have someone to accept it is
a genre heavy on analog since a dose of detached

(01:18:36):
irony and lyrics that are nostalgic to the point of treacle.
Is this not how you describe wonderful Christmas Time? Is
this not your king a guy?

Speaker 2 (01:18:46):
That guy was paid ninety dollars and he still hasn't
been paid for it for that editorial.

Speaker 1 (01:18:53):
That is not the weirdest or dumbest fan theory concerning
this song. I'm referring, of course, to Ryan george viral
tweet from twenty nineteen that posits that Wonderful Christmas Time
is about quote friends practicing witchcraft, but then someone walks
in and they suddenly have to play it cool. He
cites the opening verse, the moon is right, the spirit's up,

(01:19:15):
we're here tonight and that's enough, and then a stranger
enters their mists and suddenly it's simply havy lot. You've
ever heard that? It's pretty good, It's great. Amazingly, this
theory made it all the way to Macca himself, who
was asked about it for a Q and A on
his official website. Paul says, oh yeah, well, thank goodness

(01:19:38):
they found me out. This is either completely true and
in actual fact I am the head wizard of a
Liverpool coven. Either that or it's completely nonsense, and you
know it's the latter. Oh my god, I hate him
so much. The interviewer continues. This theory may have come
from people mishearing the lyrics. Could you confirm if the
lyric is the moon is right or the mood is right. No,

(01:20:00):
it's the mood, he says. I'm thinking about Liverpool Christmas parties.
That's really all I'm doing with the song. The mood
is right, Let's raise a glass, the spirit's up. You know,
all the stuff you do at Christmas, particularly with my
old Liverpool family parties. This is interesting to me. During
this interview, he talked about a Christmas album that he

(01:20:22):
recorded to play for his family around the holidays. He spentally,
did a few times over the years, and it's grown
to somewhat mystical mythical proportions in Paul McCartney fandom circles.
Oh has it? Yes, he said, when the kids were little,
I suddenly thought there wasn't an ideal Christmas record. In
my opinion, there are some great Christmas records like the
Phil Spector one, the Nat King Cole one, and Bing

(01:20:43):
Crosby on the old standards. But I just wanted an
instrumental of all the tunes, so I ended up recording
one for the family and my studio and my engineer
at the time, Eddie Klein, helped me. I now have
this album I pull out every year and it's a
bit of fun for the kids when we're carving the
veggie roast. I'll stick it on and means I'll stick
it on and it means Christmas this here. It's quite

(01:21:04):
a cute little record actually, but it's just for the family,
and he's repeatedly denied any kind of requests to release it. Uh,
making a holiday album as a gift is a typical
Paul thing to do for Christmas. Nineteen sixty five, he
presented the other Beatles with a homemade Acetate record, which
is basically a primitive mixtape produced just for them, consisting

(01:21:25):
of sampled songs, original sketches, and avant garde tape loops.
I would kill myself if I were George Harrison and
Paul McCartney and John Lennon had been keeping all my
great songs off all these Beetle records. I've been sitting
on Here Comes the Sun for this whole time, and
you give me a Chris Mix mixtape you in prick.

(01:21:48):
Oh my god, it would have been on site. I
said I'd be nice to Jordan, and I am. But
thet the image of a pleased his punch. That's the
only that's a funny turn of phrase, because that's the
only way paulm and McCartney could ever be. It's o'clock again,
you guys. I lo Jordan. No, seriously, everyone, I don't

(01:22:11):
know if you guys know that Jordan actually edits this
thing himself.

Speaker 2 (01:22:15):
You know, your various dog podcasts like how did this
get made? They just put mics on those guys and
let them ramble. Jordan makes us both sound so much
funnier than we are with his ending skills. And you know,
we gripe a lot about how long the writing for
this show takes, and it does, and the tapings and

(01:22:36):
they do.

Speaker 1 (01:22:37):
But then Jordan has to go through and make all
these thousands of micro cuts. Jordan, what's your record for
cuts in a TMI episode? Oh? Wow, I mean any
one minute. There are probably between six and ten cuts.

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
And that's not just because of the slurs that I drop.
I've got a lightning number of opinions that would get
me killed or blackbat in normal society.

Speaker 1 (01:23:02):
It's your birthday, buddy, keep going. Paul would describe this
mixtape as quote something crazy, something left field, just for
the other Beatles, a fun thing which they could play
late in the evening.

Speaker 2 (01:23:14):
Oh yeah, if somebody did that to me, who had
been keeping my beautiful songs off the records, and I
turned in a song called tax Man and then he
plays the guitar solo on my song, and then he
gave me a Christmas album of his own dumb voice,
I'd kill him.

Speaker 1 (01:23:33):
I also think that this year, maybe I'm wrong, that
the other Beatles like gave each other like Cardier watches,
and I was gonna say, actual of actual worth. He
made it, that's the thought. Yeah, his feelings, Yeah, the
little feelings. We were gonna hang it right up there
on the ridge, everyone can see it. Yeah, thanks, Paul.

(01:23:56):
I wrote about this for Rolling Stone a number of
years ago because for it's interesting to me because for decades,
all that was known about this recording were sketchy details
provided by McCartney himself. He said the tape was called Unforgettable,
and it started with Nat King Cole singing Unforgettable. Then
I came in over the top as the announcer. Ah, yes, unforgettable,

(01:24:16):
that's what you are. And today and unforgettable. It was
like a magazine program full of weird interviews, experimental music,
tape loops, some tracks I knew the others hadn't heard.
It was just a compilation of odd things like Nat
King Cole Unforgettable. Okay. An eighteen minute section of the
tape surface in twenty seventeen, featuring an inventive selection of

(01:24:38):
songs by the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Martha and
the Vandellas you know, odd artists like that, with McCartney
assuming the role of a fast talking New York DJ,
perhaps a nod to the so called fifth Beatle Murray
the kay.

Speaker 3 (01:24:57):
Okay, okay, that was the Beach Boys get around right,
and now to take this stand we movevving now to
Martha and the Man Dallace, the Monitor Van Dallas sing
a little song called heat Weave.

Speaker 1 (01:25:09):
How about it? Mother?

Speaker 3 (01:25:10):
How about it?

Speaker 1 (01:25:20):
Though the Beatles' latest album, Rubbert Soul, had only been
released a few weeks prior to Christmas nineteen sixty five,
McCartney's Gifts was likely intended to point the band towards
new musical horizons for their next work. It was a
peculiar overall sound. George Harrison once said of this mixtape,
John Ringo and I played it and realized Paul was
onto something new. Paul has done a lot in making

(01:25:42):
us realize there are a lot of electronic sounds to investigate.
When they reconvened in the studio the following April to
begin sessions for what would become the album Revolver, my
favorite album of all time, the first song they worked
on was Tomorrow Never Knows, which was built on a
bed of McCartney's tape loops. So the spoofy Little's Gift
actually kind of has a very important place in the Beatles'

(01:26:04):
creative arc. Do you just want to talk about Trans
Siberian Orchestra? Oh? I sure do, Bud, Oh bring it on.
What do you think about Trans Siberian Orchestra? It's kind
of funny to me. It's so so over the top,
and so will love that in the sense of like,
let's put on a show. Yeah, Yeah, No, that's true.

(01:26:28):
It's just it's so dramatic that it's like it almost
makes me laugh, like winning it's great. It's like meat
Loaf should be singing over it. Oh my god, I
can't believe he's dead really of COVID stuff. Oh yeah,
I thought it would have been a lot of other
things on a much longer list that would have gotten
them first. No, wasn't he like an anti vaxxer. Wasn't

(01:26:51):
that the whole thing? I believe? So?

Speaker 2 (01:26:53):
Yeah, because he should have. He should have sung for TSO,
as the fans call it. You know, I don't know
if you're I don't know if you're a fan Jordan,
but we call it TSO. The most important thing about
TSO is that they began as a hair metal band
from Florida called Sabotage.

Speaker 1 (01:27:11):
They're not from Siberia. It's like sabotage, but they're savages.
That's actually pretty good sabotage and regretta believe I don't
have time to trace their entire prog metal, prog hair
I guess I would determine them as through the eighties
getting into tours bands like Armored Saint, some of their kind.

Speaker 2 (01:27:29):
Of almost hits and so forth. The really important thing
about Sabotage is that they had a guy named Paul
O'Neill as one of their songwriters and lyricists. Paul was
a bit of a jack of all trades in the eighties.
He managed and produced bands including Aerosmith, Humble Pie, Ac DC,

(01:27:49):
Joan Jet and Scorpions. O'Neill and Sabotage actually originally recorded
a song called Christmas Eve Sarajevo twelve twenty four. As
you might recall it being its formal title, it's the
one that has Carol of the Bells in it. They
recorded that as part of a concept album Dead Winter

(01:28:10):
Dead in nineteen ninety five, which was based entirely around
the concept of having a story from the perspectives of
a young Serbian boy, a Bosnian girl, and an old man,
all set during the Bosnian War, which was going on
at that time. This was the kind of high falutint
programming that would probably get you kicked out of any

(01:28:32):
self respecting artistic board of a major opera or symphony,
but you know, not rock and roll baby. Christmas Eve
Sarajevo twelve twenty four is an instrumental medley of various
carols in the public domain, starting with God Resty married
Gentleman and Shedrick, which is an eighteen something hundreds German melody.

(01:28:56):
It's the Carol of the Bells thing, that's what it's
called here in Carol the Bells Jesus Christ their concept
album as part of the plot that this melody was
played by a lone cello player in war torn Sarajevo.
Now Paul O'Neil kind of based this on the real
life story of a celli's named Vedrin Smelovich, who is

(01:29:18):
thirty six years old. During the bombing of Sarajevo, Smelovich
embarked on a twenty two day visual of playing Remo
Gizato's Adagio and g minor every single day among the
bombed ruins of Sarajevo in honor of each person killed

(01:29:38):
in the bombing. So yeah, tso, this bombastic song has
somewhat real life roots in the tragedy of war in
Eastern Europe. Now, this song was not actually offered as
a single, but it ended up becoming something of a
life raft for Sabotage because DJ started requesting it once

(01:29:59):
it had been played once, people said I want to
hear that Christmas one again. And Atlantic Records was actually
terminating Sabotage's contract, but they were offering Paul O'Neil an
opportunity to launch his own band. So Paul O'Neal took
this opportunity to simply dissolve Sabotage, or at least put

(01:30:20):
them on the back burner and create trans ps Ibeian
Orchestra in their stead, and they got to work on
their nineteen ninety six debut album, Christmas Eve and Other Stories.
O'Neil once told Christianity Today, I've always been fascinated by Christmas.
When we were really, really young, my friends and I

(01:30:40):
were walking home in New York City on Christmas Eve
when suddenly we heard the slamming of breaks. We turned
around just in time to see two yellow cabs sliding
into each other. The two drivers got out of their cars.
One looked like a longshoreman, the other looked like he
just got off the boat from a foreign country. My
friends and I were kind of nervous, thinking that there
would be a fight any other day of the year.

Speaker 1 (01:31:03):
It would have been War War three with blood on
the street. Especially in New York City instead, the first
guy says, this is completely my fault. Let me pay
for it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:12):
The other guy responds, no, this is something I could
have gotten into in a parking lot. Next thing you know,
they're looking at pictures of each other's kids, talking and joking. So,
at a really young age, I learned there was something
about this day that makes people more compassionate. So, born
from a young Paul O'Neil's experience of a Christmas vender
bender between two New York cab drivers and a real

(01:31:36):
story of a cellist going out to play a lonesome
midnight concert for all of the dead in Sarajevo was
born this strange, surprising pop hit from the Trans Siberian Orchestra,
and since then the band has blossomed into one of
the most beloved touring holiday institutions of all time. They

(01:31:56):
have a full string section, occasionally blossoming into a full orchestra,
a rock band with over twenty members, multiple vocalists, an
off stage narrator, pyrotechnics, a laser light show, and snowfall.
This is a really heartwarming detail. Trans Siberian Orchestra doesn't
sell tickets for seats that have blocked sitelines. They simply

(01:32:17):
don't allow their fans the opportunity to purchase bad seats.
Bow Past concerts from TSO have featured guest vocals from
Roger Daltrey of The Who, Paul Rogers of Free, Greg Lake,
John Anderson of Yes, upwards of two hundred singers, and
again the aforementioned light show and pyrotechnics. And I couldn't

(01:32:43):
find very much about the recording of this. I was
just sort of blown away by the fact that out
of Paul O'Neill's love of Christmas and a parlor interest
in what was happening in the Serbian Bosnia conflict at
the time, that launched the a of one of the
most cheesy and but let it be said, successful holiday

(01:33:06):
bands of all time. And I just love the idea
that they took Carol of the Bells and made it
super metal. Yeah, this has been fresh air with Terry
Gross signing off. Oh no, we got a lot more stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:33:21):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more. Too much information in just a moment.
Precious little eleven year old Brenda Lee. That's quite a transition, Jordan,

(01:33:44):
what do you think about Brenda Lee. You know, she's
got a cool voice, she's got a cool style.

Speaker 2 (01:33:49):
Yeah, but it's weird that she was that young, right,
Oh yeah, extremely yeah, yeah cool. So Rocking Around the
Christmas Tree was written by another guy who we have
mentioned on TMI before, Johnny.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
Marx, who wrote Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. Marx also
did we cover this in this episode. Marx earned a
Bronze Star and four Battle Stars as an Army captain
in the twenty sixth Special Service Company during World War Two.
We did the fucking Diane Warren of Christmas music. He
also wrote a Holly Jolly Christmas recorded by the Quinto

(01:34:24):
Sisters and later Burl Hives, Silver and Gold for Burl
Hives and I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, which
is a hit for Bing Crosby. That's wid well.

Speaker 2 (01:34:34):
He apparently sent Rocking Around the Christmas Teach to Brenda
Lee sight unseen in a twenty nineteen interview with The Tennessee,
and Lee recalled that she had no knowledge as to
why Marx wanted her specifically to sing it. I was
only twelve, she said, incorrect, and I had not a
lot of success in records, but for some reason he

(01:34:55):
heard me and wanted to do it. And I did,
and I did, and I did and I did. I
gave your arrange there. The players who cut Rocking around
the Christmas Tree were a real murderers of Nashville session guys.
He had guitarist Hank Garland, who cut a million selling
hit on his own called Sugarfoot Rag when he was sixteen,

(01:35:18):
and he worked with Elvis from fifty eight to sixty one,
and then from that gig he went on to record
with jazz heavy hitters like George Shearing, architect of bebop,
Charlie Parker, and vibraphone virtuoso Gary Burton. He also had
guitarist Harold Bradley, one of the most recorded country session
players in history, Floyd Kramer, who has an entire school

(01:35:42):
of Nashville country piano based around his use of incorporating
faux blue notes into piano playing. You know, you can't
actually hit blue notes in piano because he can't ben
bend them, but no trills.

Speaker 1 (01:35:58):
It's like in the opening of Crazy Patsy Cline's Crazy.
He played on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He also played
on Heartbreak Hotel.

Speaker 2 (01:36:05):
How about freaking that I didn't know that Boots Randolph,
who played in Yackety Sacks about ten million other people,
was also on this song. Bob Moore, who in nineteen
ninety four was named best Country Bassist of all time
by Life magazine, and drummer Buddy Harmon, who is Patsy
Klein's drummer for nearly two years. So that was the

(01:36:27):
backing band on this. Now I like to pick up
my boy Jordan, who's done far better interviews than I
ever have. Jordan, you interviewed Brenda Lee twice, right, twice?

Speaker 1 (01:36:39):
Yes? Yes? Was she kind, extremely kind? She was really cool.
She signed off on both of them. Now, fil thank
you God bless you. You know I was wishing you
a merry Christmas, and I want you to tell your
readers and yourself keep on Rockets. She always signs off
with that He's great. God pleas her well.

Speaker 2 (01:37:01):
She told Jordan this very year in an interview that's
currently up on people dot Com. Of that recording session,
it was almost like telepathy. We just knew what each
one of us was supposed to do. Some songs just
have magic to them, and I think that's what Rockin has. Finally, enough.
It was an instrumental version of the song that appeared
in the Rank and Bass Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

(01:37:24):
For more on that, we did a whole podcast on it.
So Brenda Lee's version of the song, though, didn't really
take off until about two years later, when the rest
of her fame followed suit. In nineteen sixties holiday season,
Rocking Around the Christmas Tree hit the Billboard Hot one
hundred for the first time. It peaked at number fourteen,

(01:37:45):
then remounted the charts every year, peaking at number three
on Billboard's Christmas Singles Chart in nineteen sixty five. Now,
it received a pretty big bump from its use in
Home Alone in nineteen ninety, and we love a long
term success story. It wasn't until twenty twenty three that
Rocking Around the Christmas Tree hit number one on Billboard's

(01:38:07):
main chart, becoming only the third Christmas song to do so.
Now at that time, she told our own Jordan Rundog,
I knew it was a great song, and I was
happy to get it, but I never thought it would
be my signature song.

Speaker 1 (01:38:21):
Never It's the longest gap between number ones. I believe
in the same interview. She reminisced about the song's recording producer,
Owen Bradley, had the studio, the live room all decked
out with Christmas decorations and a Christmas tree. Back then
you cut all Christmas songs in the heat of the summer,
so oh, and had the air conditioner turned down to
zero to set the mood and honey that quantcet hut

(01:38:42):
got cold. It added to the spirit though. It was
really a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (01:38:47):
And then my favorite and most heartbreaking aspect of this
interview that again our own Jordan conducted with.

Speaker 1 (01:38:54):
Icon Brenda Lee. She said, when I was growing up,
we were not financially stable. We did the best we could,
but we didn't have a lot of accoutrement. So our
house was filled with relatives and everybody cooking and stuff
like that.

Speaker 2 (01:39:06):
Instead of presence. It was more family oriented. And then
this year again, what was this in November you talked
to her, talked to her like two weeks ago. Jordan
talked to her in December twenty twenty four, when her
song surpassed one billion streams, just a day before Brenda
Lee's eightieth birthday. Her reaction, I was dumbfounded when I heard.

(01:39:32):
I can't even think that high, much less say it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:36):
I mean, that's a great note to end on. But
I do want to assure this like slightly haunting story
that I left out of the main piece. Baby. So,
as you mentioned, she was very young. I think she
was thirteen when she cut rocking around the Christmas Tree,
and one of her idols was another child star singer
Judy Garland. Oh god, yeah, yeah. So when that was

(01:40:00):
playing Vegas, Judy was also out there, and Judy by
this point, was on her way out I guess it was.
I think she would have been probably in her late thirties,
and Brenda ran into her out by the pool, and
so she kind of gathered up all of her courage
to go and speak to her idol and said, you know, Judy,

(01:40:21):
my name is Brenda. I'm a singer just like you.
Jim was wondering, do you have any advice for me,
because you know, she's like a teenager. And Judy thinks
for a minute and it looks her right in the
eye and says, don't let them take your childhood. Oh
I know, And she said that always stuck with her brutal,
which kind of prepares us smooth wise for this next

(01:40:42):
entry in our holiday cannon. Oh my god, I just
love Charlie Brown. A nice music. I know you do.
It makes me so happy how much you love this?
And the craziest thing was how random this was.

Speaker 2 (01:40:54):
Yeah, Groldy at the time is up and coming jazz
pianist who happened to get connected to one of the
biggest comic strips of all time. The story goes back
to a guy named Lee Mendelssohn, who is a TV
producer making a documentary on Charles Schultz's Peanuts strip titled
A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Shortly after he wrapped the
visual half, he heard Giraldi's Cast Your Fate to the

(01:41:16):
Wind on the radio.

Speaker 1 (01:41:18):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:41:18):
Giraldi, who was an impressively mustachioed pianist, had just had
a breakthrough with an album called Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus.
Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus featured both originals and covers
of songs from the nineteen fifty nine French Brazilian film
Black Orpheus.

Speaker 1 (01:41:33):
You should check it out.

Speaker 2 (01:41:34):
It's a great movie from the period, but also just
a great film period that won an Academy Award for
Best Foreign Film and then Cast Your Fate to the
Wind won the nineteen sixty three Grammy Award for Best
Original Jazz Composition. Here's the depressing part. Though a jazz
musician named Jose Gonzalez. He specializes in covering doing versions

(01:41:58):
of Giraldi's tunes. He told Stranger that the first pick
for the composer of the Charlie Brown documentary was Dave Brubeck,
Oh take five Fame, not Giraldi. Brew Bec couldn't do it,
so then he recommended Vibraphonis cal Tatter, who I think
is Dutch, who is turned down obviously for being Dutch,
but also because he couldn't do it either. So Mendelshn

(01:42:21):
reached out to his third favorite pick, Vince Garaldi. I
think Garaldi was considered something of a pop.

Speaker 1 (01:42:28):
Pianist at the time because the success of Black Orpheus,
but he turned out fucking Linus and Lucy Dude, That's insane.
That's one of the tunes that he banged out for this.

Speaker 2 (01:42:40):
It's a really fascinating song because of all the different
feels that they go through. It's important to remember that
Bostonova was sweeping the American pop music charts and also
jazz at the time. So when they go into a
BOSTONOVA field, that's actually quite cutting edge stuff. But the
networks turned down this whole thing. They got all of
it and they were like, no, we don't want it.

(01:43:01):
But their fortunes changed as the strip continued to gain popularity,
and so by April of nineteen sixty five, Time magazine
featured Peanuts on his cover, and the Coca Cola Company,
of all people, coughed up the money to commission a
Charlie Brown Christmas Garaldy came back and sessions began on
the music for the special. There were two sessions that

(01:43:24):
made up the soundtrack. At one of them was recorded
at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California, where in laws live
in October of nineteen sixty four. Friend of the pod
Charles Drucker, who I know, listens to this while I
was walking dogs. This was with longtime Vince Garaldi trio
mates Monty Budwig on bass and Colin Bailey on drums.

(01:43:46):
Then they picked up again essentially a year later September
and October of nineteen sixty five with bassist Fred Marshall
and drummer Jerry Grinnelly. This was because Giraldi, as a
leader of a piano trio, was actually swapping in a
bunch of different bassis and drummers during this time, supposedly
trying to find the right combination most Germane to what

(01:44:07):
we're talking about right now. Linus and Lucy was recorded
on October twenty sixth, nineteen sixty four, and then Garaldi
composed two new original pieces to fill out the ranks,
Skating and Christmas Time Is Here. Skating took actually several
takes to complete. He had that cascade effect no no.

Speaker 1 (01:44:26):
No no no no no no no no no no
no no.

Speaker 2 (01:44:29):
That proved difficult for the other musicians to grab onto
and then originally titled snow Waltz. Christmas Time Is Here
also took multiple takes. But the singers on that album
and here this will interest you. The choir on Christmas
Time Is Here is the San Raphael's Saint Paul's Episcopal

(01:44:50):
Church Choir, and this was actually their second collaboration with
Vince Garaldi. San Francisco's Grace Cathedral had opened in nineteen
sixty five, and to commemorate this, Giraldi had composed a
quote unquote jazz mass, and that San Raphael's church choir

(01:45:10):
came in and sang with him as part of that
jazz mass where he was playing piano and going through
the whole program, and so they knew him and came
back to sing on Christmas time is here, So familiarity
or not, though the kids were paying in the ass,
never record with dogs or children. The recording sessions were

(01:45:33):
held at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley in late autumn nineteen
sixty five, spanned three sessions over two weeks and often
extended late into the night. And they literally started swapping
out different children at each session because some children's parents
were like, this is taking too long. You can't have
my kidneymore. But all the children were given a shiny

(01:45:53):
five dollars bill each for their participation. This is what's
crazy to me. Presented all of this to the network,
and the network all over it. Lee Mendelssohn, the aforementioned producer.
Lee Mendelssohn, showed it to network executives, and his son
Jason told CBS in a recent interview, the network hated everything.

Speaker 1 (01:46:14):
The music, what is this jazz? The animation, This is
not what we expected the story. There's religion in it,
and there's feelings.

Speaker 2 (01:46:26):
But as always, the C suite is wrong and should
be hung for their crimes in the public square. Sorry,
I just had to interject that. Just a good practice
for anyone out there. But the Charlie Brown Christmas Album
has a truly rarefied place in jazz legend. On May

(01:46:47):
tenth of twenty twenty two, the RIAA certified that quintuple platinum,
while sales of five million copies, Charlie Brown's Christmas Album
by Vince Garalti Trio is the second do best selling
jazz album in history, behind Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.
And as a person note, I live in San Francisco,

(01:47:09):
I used to live in Berkeley. Vince Graudy I got
a shout him out as a Bay Area icon. He
lived in Mill Valley where he composed the music for
the Peanuts series, and he played out at a lot
of San Francisco Bay area clubs, and he died of
a heart attack at forty seven. Literally, he died in
between sets while playing at a club called Butterfields in

(01:47:31):
Menlo Park in February of nineteen seventy six.

Speaker 1 (01:47:35):
Well, that is the second most poignant but fitting death
that we will talk about in this episode. Set me
up perfectly for the most points, quietly do this in
the background the whole time. I mean, the rest of
the development kind of ruined that for me, because now

(01:47:56):
I just think they made it a gag ruined it all. Right,
go ahead, I'm gonna see you up for Uh, I'm
gonna see you up for this. And speaking of arrested development,
we now are talking about George Michael and Wham. Of
course we are ending on things cool Whipham, Wham. Weorth

(01:48:21):
ending things today with last Christmas. Now, I have to
admit I didn't know a lot about Wham before researching this,
but the basis of Wham was the friendship between George
Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. They became friends in grade school.
George was the new boy, and Andrew was the only
one in his class who answered the teacher's request for
volunteers to look after him and show him around. Isn't

(01:48:44):
that great? Yeah? They were already stars when they were
visiting George's parents' house in nineteen eighty four, and it
was there, out of the blue that George had the
idea for Last Christmas, and he patted off to his
childhood bedroom to write it. Recently recalled to the Mail
on Sunday in twenty seventeen. We had a bite to
eat and we were sitting together, relaxing with a television
on in the background, when, almost unnoticed, George disappeared upstairs

(01:49:09):
for an hour or so. When he came back down,
such was his excitement it was as if he discovered gold,
which in a sense he had. We went to his
old room, the room in which we'd spent hours as kids,
recording pastiches of radio shows and jingles. Again nerd the
rue Marie kept the keyboard and something on which to

(01:49:29):
record as sparks of inspiration, and he played me the
introduction and the beguiling, wistful chorus melody to Last Christmas.
It was a moment of wonder. Georgia performed musical alchemy,
distilling the essence of Christmas into music. Adding a lyric
which told the tale of betrayed love was a masterstroke,
and as he so often did, he touched hearts. I

(01:49:52):
wonder if he waxed poetic about I Want Your Sex
a few years later. The lyrics provide the emotional counterweight
to Last Christmas. MA, we have noticed that there's really
nothing especially Christmasy about it. It's simply about a doomed
romance that began on December twenty fifth. In a twenty
seventeen piece for The Guardian called Still Saving Us from Tears,
The Inside Story of Wham's Last Christmas by Rachel Rott

(01:50:16):
notes that lyrically, however, Last Christmas is a hugely sophisticated
song that teams with mixed signals and the potent of
logic that defines the best pop. There's a tension between
the music and the lyrics. You've got the happiness of
the rhythm track, but against that you've got the sadness
of the unrequitded love, says the song's engineer, Chris Porter.

(01:50:37):
But the real cleverness can be found in the words themselves.
Not only does the nursery rhyme style chorus take in
a cerbically bitchy turn this year to save me from tears,
I'll give it to someone special, but it's also an
inherently contradictory one. The narrator is trying to undermine his
ex by dedicating an entire song to how crushed he

(01:50:58):
is by their breakup. But Last Christmas isn't just about
the lies we tell ourselves in order to cope with rejection.
It's also about the cognitive dissonance of obsessive love. At
the end of the first verse, Michael pithily sets out
this kind of double think. Now he knows, quote what
a fool I've been. But if you kissed me, now
I know you'd fool me again. It's just one heart

(01:51:21):
rendering epigram and a song full of them, capturing the
way defiance masks hope and how easily love and desire
can dilute us into forgiveness. That's a great bit of writing.
When I'm recorded Last Christmas in August nineteen eighty four,
and to create a festive atmosphere, George decked ad Vision
Studios out with Christmas decorations, just like they did for

(01:51:42):
Brenda Lee, which you recorded rocking around the Christmas Tree.
I wonder if that's just like received studio lage from
like Timey memorial, like cutting a Christmas song put him
a bunch of Christmas crap. The singers love that. When
John and Yoko were doing Happy Christmas, War is Over
and the Harlem choir. I think it was came in
sing Je almost to say to the kids, all right,

(01:52:03):
pretend it's Christmas. And a couple of the kids are like,
we're Jewish, and he was like, pretend it's your birthday.
Then it's just great. George had entered into his alteur
phase by this point. In addition to writing and producing
the song, he insisted on singing both lead and backing

(01:52:25):
vocals himself, as well as playing all of the instruments himself,
including the Roland Juno sixty synth, the lind drum, synth,
and the sleigh bells. He insisted on playing the sleigh
bells himself well.

Speaker 2 (01:52:37):
The Lynd drum is also one of the most iconic
pieces of recording technology to the eighties. It's on like
half of Prince's things. And is it the leading drum
that's based on the on Tom Petty drummer. Yes, yes, yes,
I believe.

Speaker 1 (01:52:52):
I think that's exactly right. Yeah, it's sampled from it.

Speaker 2 (01:52:55):
Yeah, yeah, it is the lin drum, which is made
by Roger lee In. Is that the clap in the
original Drummond Machine was a recording of Tom Petty and
the Heartbreakers clapping backstage as a favor to Roger Lynn,
who is attempting to get a good clap sound.

Speaker 1 (01:53:15):
Why couldn't he just do it himself? Great question? Great question.
Jordan engineer Chris Porter later told The Guardian George wasn't
a musician. It was a laborious process because he was
literally playing the keyboards with two or three fingers. One
of the really clever things about George was that he
realized that he wanted the focus of the listener to

(01:53:35):
be his voice, not the musicianship. So the music's very
often stark on Last Christmas, there's a very simple foundation
for the vocal and the melody to sit on, and
it's interesting to note that this is a rare song
that has the same tune and chords for both the
verse and the chorus with no bridge. Now, of course,
no mid eighties song by a British pop act would

(01:53:58):
be complete without a video. The visuals for Last Christmas
were filmed at sauce Fee, Switzerland in November nineteen eighty four.
What was that again? My attempt is sauce Fee SaaS
dash Fee, Switzerland Beautiful in November nineteen eighty four. The
video depicts a cozy ski trip tainted by tension from

(01:54:19):
a love triangle. You recall from a video that Andrew
Ridgeley is wearing a brooch originally gifted by George Michael's
character to his ex. Andrew originally has described the video
shoot as mayhem. He said he got so drunk during
the dinner party scene, which used real wine, that his
eyes puffed up from laughter and he was forced to
sit out the next scenes. I have never in human

(01:54:41):
history heard of that occurring, but okay. Video director Andrew
Morahan admitted to encouraging the drinking. He said, I encouraged it.
I have to be honest. It made for a more
realistic shoot. Some of the outtakes are pretty good. Supposed
to be a bunch of friends on a ski trip.
That's nice. Yeah. Kathy Hill played George Michael's love interest

(01:55:02):
in the shoot, she recalled Gopher. She recalls bonding during
their shoot over wine and George Michael's love of Van Cellist.
She said, I wouldn't normally drink on a shoot, but
during that scene at the dinner table, it was all
getting a bit silly. I was dating the composer Vangelis
at the time, and George was so interested in his music,

(01:55:25):
so he kept asking me about that. He had an
amazing sense of humor. There's a scene when we're walking
up the hill, and every time he went up, he
just fell down, so every time I burst into laughter.
That shot while we're rolling around and he ends up
sitting on me, I'm genuinely laughing my head off. It
was great. Yeah. There's a new documentary on Netflix that
premiered this year for the fortieth anniversary of this song,

(01:55:47):
called Last Christmas Unwrapped, where Rigeally and the rest of
the cast of the video returned to the very same
swisky Shelle I believe and reminisce, which I think is sweet.
I haven't seen all of it, but the clips are cute,
obviously tinged with sadness due to the absence of George Michael,
who you'll recall died on Christmas only sixteen for reasons

(01:56:10):
that I'm still not totally sure about. One of the
less nice moments for George during the filming of the
Last Christmas video was his fussiness over his hair. This
made him a frequent target, understandably so kind of for
Snowball attacks. One of the actors on the video recalled.
During the shoot, we decided that George, who was very,

(01:56:30):
very sensitive about his hair all throughout his career, was
going to get it. So he loaded up with Ammo
and snowballed him to death. He took it, not literally,
he took it very well. He always took it very well.
He had this way of raising his eyes to the
heavens but smiling. All this would explain why he wore
a hood in the final video, because his famous hairdo

(01:56:51):
is quiffy hairdoo was ruined by the snow. Also speaking
of George Michael's appearance, this video, apparently, according to listicles
across the Web, marks the last time in his life
that he was filmed without a beard. When I say beard, oh,
I walked right into that No, like an actual beard.

(01:57:15):
He remained deeply insecure. Poor George. During post production, he
ordered many shots cut because he didn't like the angle
on his face, and they cut so much that the
band's management worried that the video was incoherent. Last Christmas
was released on December third, nineteen eighty four, and it
stalled at number two on the UK charts, behind another

(01:57:36):
song featuring George Michael band aids. Do they know It's Christmas?
Which was released to raise money for the Ethiopian famine.
George donated his royalties from Last Christmas to the same cause,
and he continued to do so every year with the
about half million dollars it raised annually. He was, by
all accounts a genuinely really good guy. Damn man.

Speaker 2 (01:57:57):
I didn't know that he threw all of his Last
Smith's money at charity. Bullsh Yeah, I mean not the
bullsh was the charity? The bush is that song?

Speaker 1 (01:58:06):
Yeah? Do they know it's Christmas?

Speaker 2 (01:58:08):
Probably? It's an internationally famous holiday. I know when Boxing
Day is?

Speaker 1 (01:58:18):
Do you know who Ramadan is? Got my ass? February
to March? A happy early Ramadan. Thank you and also
to you. For more than thirty five years, Last Christmas
had the distinction of being the highest selling UK single
of all time not to reach number one, but on

(01:58:39):
January first, twenty twenty one, thirty six years after its
original release, Last Christmas finally nabbed the top spot in
the UK. For some reason, the song wasn't released as
a commercial single in the United States and therefore wasn't
eligible for the Billboard Hot one hundred chart until the
rules were changed in nineteen ninety eight, and finally, in
the wake of George Michael's unexpected death on Christmas Day

(01:59:01):
twenty sixteen, the song finally made its Hot one hundred debut,
and it reached its peak position of number four on
January third, twenty twenty three. We've said this before. There's
a phrase in the UK where there's a hit, there's
a writ, meaning a lawsuit, and the uber successful Last
Christmas drew plagiarism accusations in the mid eighties. The publishing

(01:59:22):
company Dick James Music, which owned a lot of the
Beatles songs in the early days, sued Michael on behalf
of the writers of Can't Smile Without You, which was
a love song recorded by The Carpenters and Barry Manilow,
among others. Have you ever heard this? No? Do you
want to hear it? Do not know this song? You know? Why?

(01:59:48):
Can't SMI Lamb came same fun lane Plan I hear

(02:00:14):
what they're saying, But the suit was dismissed after a
musicologist presented sixty plus songs that have a similar chord
progression and melody. Yes, Last Christmas has drawn more than
its fair share of covers over the years from everyone
ranging from Jimmy Eat World, Hillary Duff Good, Charlotte, Ariana Grande, Coldplay, Apparently,

(02:00:36):
Carl Red, Jebson, Gwen Stefani, Backstreet Boys, and Taylor Swift.
Its ubiquity has led to an internet game known as Wamageddon,
in which players attempt to avoid the song between December
one and December twenty fourth. According to the very simple
rules of the game, once you hear the original wham
version of Last Christmas. Remixes and covers don't count. Once

(02:01:01):
you've been whammed, you then admit defeat on social media
with the hashtag wham Ageddon. Note the rules prohibit you
from quote deliberately sending your friends to whamhlla wam Halla.

Speaker 2 (02:01:14):
That's pretty fun. That is an incredible turn of phrase.

Speaker 1 (02:01:17):
Yes. Finally, I like to end on the story of
the Austrian DJ Joe Kolhoffer, who began his eight am
radio show on December eighteenth, twenty fifteen, by complaining that
he felt like his listeners were not in the Christmas spirit.
He then barricaded himself in his studio, shoving a wooden
chair under the doorknob, and proceeded to play last Christmas

(02:01:40):
on loop for upwards of two hours as a quote
Christmas protest. His co host and station producers tried to
break down the door, but to no avail. He eventually
stopped playing Wham only after his four year old daughter
called into the station to tell her father give up
that she didn't like the song. Please, just I'm begging you,

(02:02:02):
give up peacefully. I don't know how much this was
a promo like it clearly must have been some kind
of hype event. But in a lot of ways, I
feel like that DJ right now holding you and listeners
hostage with my holiday cheer. No, this has been good.
I enjoyed this.

Speaker 2 (02:02:20):
I not only because it's your birthday, but because you
clearly love Christmas songs so much I do, and I
hope you can all just see this holiday with your eyes.
My friend, Ah, thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:02:33):
I you know what I will take.

Speaker 2 (02:02:35):
As it keeps as it keeps going. Yes, well, Grandfather
clock going again in my house.

Speaker 1 (02:02:43):
I think that's a great way to end it. Well,
Father Time does make fools of us. All twas not
quite the night before Christmas, and all through the house.

Speaker 2 (02:02:52):
All through the house, the podcasters were stirring because we
don't have anything better to do.

Speaker 1 (02:02:56):
Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house
a slow of obscenities from Heigel's mouth. Oh well hopes
that Johnny Katzenberg soon wouldn't be there.

Speaker 2 (02:03:09):
Peace, honor, I think, goodwill to all men, especially my
co host. And on this the anniversary of his birth,
he's turning a whopping seventeen. One day he'll be able
to vote and buy liquor, and until then he has
to console himself with his rare beatles and Beach Boys
records and talking to all of you are fine listeners

(02:03:31):
here at too much information. So everybody wish Jordan a
happy birthday wherever you can find him, and give his
birthday presents to me, because I can be trusted with
somes of money and I will pass them on to him.

Speaker 1 (02:03:45):
And Jordan. Did you have anything to add to that? No,
just thank you for oh, thank you Heigel for taking
the time for doing this with me, and thank you
all for listening and just being there for us and
reaching out to us with the kind words and and
jokes and insights and ideas for episodes. Let me that
really is the best gift of all, just your time

(02:04:07):
and sharing the space with us. It really means a lot.
And Jordan, thank you. No, I thank you first, well,
but Jordan, thank you. Can we have a sincere off
right now? I don't know who would win? Jordan, thank you? Okay,

(02:04:28):
I can't do it. I can't do it. Come on,
come on, give me one. Hit me, hit me. I
will thank you for doing this with me. It really
means the world. Oh that was really good. I know.

Speaker 2 (02:04:39):
All right, all right, all right, let me see if
I can an actor prepares unique New York, New York's
Unique Jordan.

Speaker 1 (02:04:52):
Thank you, thank you, Master Wayne.

Speaker 2 (02:04:57):
Let me do the broken voice br Evoke and broken
voice Cigar and Brandy's Poosy's voice Tom which it gets
very very broken.

Speaker 1 (02:05:07):
Thank thank you, Master Pruce. Thank you for listening. Folks.
I can't believe you put up with this. Our whole year,
really our pleasure. We love hearing from you, guys. I
love hanging out with Jordan. Wish him a heavy birthday
wherever you find him, and I wish all of you
wonderful holidays with your family and happy New Year. I'm

(02:05:28):
Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan RUNTGG. We'll catch you next time.
Happy Holidays. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show

(02:05:49):
was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and
Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum. I'm a
Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please
subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcast us
on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows

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