"A Very Special Christmas" Jump Starts Rock Music's Christmas Connection

Back when I was growing up, our family had a stack of Christmas albums that we kept in a special section of the bin beneath our stereo console. I'd guess there were maybe 30 holiday albums of various different styles including a couple by the Boston Pops, one by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and another by organist E. Power Biggs, a favorite of my Dad's. Many of the albums were picked up from various gas stations where you could often score free Christmas albums, cutlery, or glassware with every fill-up. One thing you wouldn't find in our collection was anything by the bigger stars in pop music. Sure, a few pop groups released their own holiday albums back in the 1960s and '70s; we later added one by The Partridge Family to our collection. But few of the rock groups that were regularly topping the charts back then had much of an association with the holiday genre. That all changed 35 tears ago, however, with the release of "A Very Special Christmas" in 1987. Within several years, nearly every serious rock fan who was also into Christmas music had this album or one of the nine later records in the series in their collection.

(l to r) Jimmy Iovine, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen

Today's Washington Post features a terrific article about the first "A Very Special Christmas" album, which was coordinated by famed rock producer Jimmy Iovine to benefit the Special Olympics. Iovine, who had  produced records for such performers as John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, U2 and Stevie Nicks, conceived of the idea shortly after the sudden loss of his father in 1985. Starting with Springsteen, he approached a number of his rock contacts with the idea of a charity Christmas album. There was immediate and enthusiastic support. Finding a beneficiary took a little more time. Iovine was insistent that all of the proceeds go to a respected charity, and as it happened his girlfriend knew Bobby Shriver, the son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics, the world's largest sports organization for developmentally disabled persons. Over the past 35 years, Iovine's vision has not only raised $145 million for the Special Olympics but also helped establish that organization's high profile and worldwide reputation.

As the Washington Post story explains, "A Very Special Christmas" and its progeny encouraged artists from a variety of musical genres to create holiday songs of myriad styles and removed whatever stigma may have existed about making Christmas records. 

"This is such a huge album in terms of its impact, just because there hadn’t been anything like it. It changed the place of Christmas in pop culture,” says music critic and author Rob Sheffield, who believes “A Very Special Christmas” represents “a before-and-after moment in the history of Christmas in pop culture. It’s a thing that had never existed before, and afterwards was never going to not exist again. Pop stars now all want to do Christmas albums."

The article is by features writer Travis Andrews, and it's a great reminder of the quality and diversity of the music on this iconic record. 

“There’s just something about those songs, man,” Iovine says. “When you sing them, you can’t be the Grinch.” He adds, “It was my least favorite time of my life, and I did something positive with it. When I see that album, I see one guy, and that’s my father. That’s all that mattered.”

Iovine and the other artists who contributed to "A Very Special Christmas" deserve a lot of credit for their work.

Read "How a 1987 Christmas album changed the way the holiday sounds" from the Washington Post, December 20, 2022 (Subscription or free preview account may be required)

Purchase "A Very Special Christmas"

Visit the website for the "A Very Special Christmas" series