Track 34
Getting In The Mood for Christmas, Brian Setzer Orchestra (2000)
Brian Setzer's musical interests cover a fair stretch of territory, and there's no doubt that holiday tunes have a place near the top of his list of favorite styles. I think of him mostly as the front man for the Stray Cats, the rockabilly group that made a real splash in the early '80s with songs like "Stray Cat Strut" and "Rock This Town." But Setzer's career has included forays into a wide array of styles and he seems to enjoy each twist and turn of the road.
Born and raised on Long Island, New York, Setzer started out playing jazz in high school before developing an interest in rock and punk. By his early 20s, he'd started to get more into rockabilly and started a band with his brother that ultimately became the Stray Cats. After moving to London, they hooked up with Dave Edmunds, who produced their hit debut album. After the Stray Cats disbanded in 1984, Setzer joined Robert Plant's short-lived group the Honeydrippers, followed by work on a couple of blues/rock-style solo records and a tour with George Thorogood.
By the 1990s, Setzer turned his attention to big-band swing music and formed the Brian Setzer Orchestra (BSO). The group has recorded nine studio albums since 1994 including three Christmas records: "Boogie Woogie Christmas" (2002), "Dig That Crazy Christmas" (2005), and "Rockin' Rudolph" (2015). In 1999, the BSO won a Grammy award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group for its version of the Louis Prima classic "Jump, Jive an' Wail." In recent years, the BSO has launched several holiday-themed tours during the Christmas season, and they've become well known for their performance of big band holiday sounds.
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| Kenmore Square, Boston |
Track 35
Christmas in Kenmore Square, Billy West and Tom Sandman for WBCN Boston (1985)
This track is the third of three WBCN-FM 1980s holiday promos I've included in this year's mix, and it's another of the awesome clips created for the station by Billy West and Tom Sandman. It brings back some great memories for me, not only of WBCN's golden era but also of the Christmas I spent in Kenmore Square myself.
Although I attended and graduated college in Baltimore, I spent my junior year in a special program on urban government at Boston University. I had a dorm room in a complex known as The Towers on Bay State Road, and as I recall I spent nearly the entire holiday vacation on or around campus. I loved being in Boston that year, and I was starting to get into live music in a big way and enjoyed being able to hang out at clubs like The Rat, Spit and The Paradise without the crowds of students from outside of Boston that typically filled the Square when school was in session. It was a crazy time. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, John Lennon had just been killed, and there was all sorts of amazing music in the air. Bruce Springsteen released his double-album masterpiece "The River" in November, and I played that album, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Double Fantasy," and "Remain in Light" by the Talking Heads almost non-stop — also "Catholic Boy," the debut album by The Jim Carroll Band, and a bunch of great local bands including Third Rail, The Neighborhoods, Ron Scarlett and more.
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| Billy West |
As this is the last of this year's WBCN promos, I should add at least a couple of words about the two guys responsible for them. Billy West was hired by the station primarily as a voice actor, and he worked there from roughly 1980 until 1988. He voiced various characters for the "Mattress Mishigas" feature that wound down Charles Laquidara's "Big Mattress" show each morning, and he created promos and other comedy bits for the station. A native of Boston's Roslindale neighborhood, West also played in a band called The Shutdowns during this period. After leaving WBCN, West became a regular on the Howard Stern program on K-Rock Radio 92.3 FM in New York, voicing a wide array of characters from Johnny Carson and Rudy Giuliani to Lucille Ball and Sammy Davis, Jr. In 1995, he moved to Los Angeles and became a successful voice actor and performer for film and television. He's probably best known for his work on The Ren and Stimpy Show, Futurama and Doug.
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| Tom Sandman |
What's interesting is that both [WEBN and WBCN] also had, from day one, a commitment to offbeat, creative, eccentric, weird, humorous production — produced elements in between the records, some of them commercials, but some of them not commercials — just production for the sake of entertainment, image production. That also attracted me to 'BCN, and I had a very happy and productive eight years there.
Here's another great holiday promo Sandman and West created for WBCN, "Christmas in Kenmore Square":
Track 36
Merry Christmas Santa Claus, Max Headroom (1986)
I remember first hearing about Max Headroom in early 1987, by way of a single off-hand comment by one of the reporters at a small monthly newspaper I edited in Boston. It's funny the things we remember about people. This reporter was a bright, interesting and all-around terrific guy and the one thing I remember most clearly about him was his telling me that he'd seen the first episode of the Max Headroom show on TV the night before and thought it was really funny. No reflection on him, but I have yet to see a single episode.
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| Max Headroom |
The U.S. version of Max Headroom was a mid-season replacement that aired on ABC beginning March 31, 1987. Based on a British TV movie, the show takes place in the future, when the world is controlled by a powerful web of television networks. Investigative reporter Edison Carter is the last remaining check on the hegemony of the networks. Despite his network employment, Carter files a series of inside reports on their many abuses of power. Fearful of his safety, Carter attempts to flee but is seriously injured in a motorcycle accident. Carter's brain is downloaded onto a computer, from which he can communicate, albeit with occasional glitches of stuttering. The computerized version of Carter adopts the name Max Headroom, as the last thing the real Carter saw before his accident was a moveable gate in the parking garage bearing those words of warning.
The series did well enough in its first half season to be picked up for the fall, but scheduled opposite Dallas and Miami Vice it was pulled before the end of the year.
Max remained a cultural icon of sorts even after his show was cancelled. There was something about a computer-generated character stuttering as his data buffers that portended a dangerous future, and who doesn't enjoy an occasional preview of our dystopian future? But Max Headroom never quite achieved the same sort of cachet in this country that he had in Britain a short time earlier.
Before invading American shores, the British producers of the show even scored with their own holiday special, the "Max Headroom Giant Christmas Turkey Special, which aired in late 1986. It was from that special that Track 37 from this year's mix was commissioned as a limited edition 7" single on Chrysalis Records. Enjoy:
For those brave folks who can handle it, here's the complete "Max Headroom Giant Christmas Turkey Special" for your holiday enjoyment:
There's been talk of a Max Headroom reboot now in production at AMC. I guess we'll have to wait and see on that.
We must also wait and see about my reports on the remaining five tracks from this year's mix. They'll be posted before Christmas, but I can't say exactly when. Mystery makes life more interesting.
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