We've been looking at the tracks on my latest holiday mix, "I Wish It Was Christmas Today," and today I have a little background on the next three selections.
Track 7 Silent Night, He-5 (1969)
Quick: What's the most widely recorded Christmas song of all time?
Off the top of my head I probably would have guessed "Jingle Bells," but that's wrong. It's "Silent Night," which I understand has been recorded more than 130,000 times since it was first written in 1818.
I've featured seven different versions of the song myself on my previous holiday mixes. And of the seven, this version by the Korean psychedelic rock band He-5 may just be my new favorite.
I don't suppose many people know this right off, but psychedelic rock was all the rage in South Korea in the late '60s and early '70s, and the band He-5 was in the forefront of the craze. Led by rock guitarist Kim Hong Tak, He-5 enjoyed an impressive run and was best known for their energetic live performances. Sadly, this energy was missing from many of the band's studio records as their record company insisted they tone things down on their formal releases. The one exception was probably their 1969 album "Merry Christmas," which you can listen to below. "Silent Night" is the first track on the record.
Track 8 Christmas in Haight Ashbury, Dave Madden from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (1968)
Few television programs captured the freewheeling spirit of the late 1960s quite as well as Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, a lively and irreverent sketch comedy show that aired on NBC for six seasons beginning in January 1968. Hosted by Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, the show starred such comedy stars as Lily Tomlin, Goldie Hawn, Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson and JoAnn Worley. During its first several seasons, Laugh-In was one of the most popular shows on TV.
This short clip features Dave Madden, best known for portraying band manager Reuben Kincaid on the ABC series "The Partridge Family," offering a quip about San Francisco's Haight Asbury neighborhood.
The clip is teed up to start with Madden's joke, but it's part of a longer Laugh-In holiday retrospective called Past Christmas Present that NBC aired in 1993. You can watch the entire show by moving the video cursor all the way to the left (naturally). Enjoy!
Track 9 Sleigh Full of Toys, The '60s Invasion (2015)
Track 34 My Green Christmas Tree, The '60s Invasion (2012)
This year's mix includes two tunes from the New England-based group The '60s Invasion whose album Incense and Chia Petsis chock full of holiday parodies made from hit songs from the 1960s. In a previous post I offered some information about the band and the first of these two songs, "Christmas in New England," based on the Mamas and Papas' hit "California Dreaming." The second is a parody version of "My Green Tambourine," by The Lemon Pipers, called "My Green Christmas Tree":
This year's mix includes only one true "song poem," which I suspect a good many will say is one song-poem too many. What are song poems? Well, as the old saying goes, if you have to ask you probably don't want to know. Basically, they're just lyrics written by everyday people and set to music by commercial artists for a fee. I've included more than a few of these little gems on various previous mixes and I've written about them here several times, too, including a post from 11 years ago about the song "Santa Claus Polka," Track 31 from my 2011 mix "Gee Whiz . . . It's Christmas (Again)!"
This year's entry is "Ring Out the Bells," performed by Norm Burns and featuring lyrics by some unknown but no doubt earnest soul who paid a few hundred dollars to Sterling Records to have their poetry turned into a song. You can hear the result just as I did on Bob Purse's wonderful website The Wonderful and the Obscure. Bob's site is a treasure trove for song poem enthusiasts, featuring several hundred different song poems and lots of colorful background and commentary. Heck, there are more than 40 entries on Norm Burns alone, and Norm is just one of the many folks who made a living setting poems to music for regular folk like you and me.
For those who would like to know more about the wonderful world of song poems, the following video is a playlist that includes 22 different selections. It is not for the faint of heart, and it includes a couple of tunes that may not be safe for work because of adult language. Aw, who am I kidding, noneof these tunes is safe for work unless you want your coworkers to think you've lost your damned mind!
Give Me Your Heart for Christmas, Dora Hall (1965)
This is the second holiday song I've used by aspiring entertainer and corporate trophy wife Dora Hall following "Kissin' by the Mistletoe," which can be found on my 2016 mix Let It Snow. Hall is a former vaudeville performer whose dreams of stardom were rekindled when her husband took over the Solo Cup Company and started promoting her records on every package of Solo Cups. I previously provided some background on Hall, which you can find HERE. I love Dora's story and she brings a refreshing enthusiasm to her work as the spouse of a successful corporate executive. And I salute her husband, too. He used his position to advance his wife's singing career and singlehandedly created one of entertainment's greatest supplies of kitsch.
It's been mighty cold in Los Angeles lately, at least by Southern California standards. Hope you're keeping warm wherever you are. I'll be back with more sometime soon.
The principal raison d'être for this blog is to provide background on the various tracks on each of my annual holiday mixes. The current business at hand is a review of the 42 tracks on my latest mix, which is titled Hey! You! Get Off of My Roof! It's currently available to one and all on my holiday music website under the Tab marked "Latest." If you'd like to hear mixes from previous years, there are 17 of them available under the "Archive" Tab. Feeling adventuresome? Be sure to check out the tab marked "Extras."
Now, back to the task at hand:
Track 14
Christmas in New England, The '60s Invasion (2015)
The '60s Invasion
I grew up in a house where music was almost always playing, and the first music I remember getting excited about was the stuff I heard coming out of my AM transistor radio in the late 1960s. Popular music in those days was exciting, novel and diverse. Stations weren't hyper-focused on narrow demographics as they are today — you'd often hear songs by such disparate acts as the Doors, the Temptations, Herb Albert, Cream and The Lemon Pipers one after the other on the very same station. To this day I'm not sure there's ever been a time when there was better music coming over the radio airwaves. Small wonder then that I was immediately taken by the sounds of a New England-based covers band called The '60s Invasion when I first heard them several years ago. I was even more excited to learn that they'd recorded an entire album of holiday songs based on various '60s classics. The album, released in 2012, is called Incense and Chia Pets, and it features 13 clever holiday take-offs on popular '60s hits that even most Millennials are sure to know. I've used two selections from this great album on my 2022 mix, the first of which, "Christmas in New England," is a holiday version of the Mamas and the Papas smash hit "California Dreaming."
The '60s Invasion consists of Gino DiMaio on keyboard and vocals; Jack Little on bass and vocals; Artie Shannon on drums and vocals; Rich Ranalli on guitar and vocals; and Jake Smith on guitar, keyboard and vocals. The guys are primarily based in Massachusetts and Maine, and you can find out more about each of the members on their website, HERE.
Another song from the '60s Invasion pops up as Track 34 of this year's mix, which still leaves 11 other holiday-themed songs from the '60s to mine from their album. I have to confess, they're all great songs, so picking even two tracks to feature was no easy task.
God Rest Ye Free Speech, U.C. Berkeley Free Speechniks (1964)
While it didn't really start off this way, the 1960s also became known as a time of increasing activism and political protest, and one of the first major protests to attract widespread and serious attention was the so-called Free Speech Movement (FSM) that began at the University of California's Berkeley campus in 1964. Historians have noted that the FSM was the first significant protest to utilize some of the tactics developed in the civil rights movement on a university campus.
Prior to the Fall of 1964, the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph in front of the southern entrance
to the Berkeley campus had served as an informal gathering place for students to distribute political information and set-up tables for petitions and the distribution of literature. With increasing numbers of students becoming active in off-campus causes, however, the area had become somewhat unruly. In addition, increasing numbers of the activists who gathered there had no connection to the university. In late September, the school administration announced that tables would no longer be permitted in the area and collecting money or distributing information for or about outside causes would no longer be allowed.
Mario Savio Addresses Protestors
On September 30, students set up tables for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality.(CORE) in violation of the new rules. The students staffing the tables were referred for formal discipline by the school. The next day, a former student named Jack Weinberg who was staffing a table for CORE was arrested when he refused to take down the table. Hundreds of students mobilized in response to these actions and the FSM was born.
Describing the events that played out at Berkeley that Fall would require hundreds of pages and obviously take us far from the focus of this blog. Suffice it to say that while it took until the Christmas vacation, the forces that opposed the school's crack-down ultimately gained the upper hand. But it was a difficult fight that required the hard work of many committed participants. One of the most forceful and articulate of these was Mario Savio, whose remarks on the steps of Sproul Hall on December 2, 1964, are often cited as among the most powerful orations of the 20th century.
As events neared their climax in December, a group of students who called themselves the Berkeley Free Speechniks reworked the words to a number of Christmas carols to press some of the points they were arguing in their struggle against the administration. I happened to discover a number of these short clips this year and I've included three of them in this year's mix. Each clip lasts only about 30 seconds, and I thought it would be useful to have these short snippets from history to remind us of what a dedicated group of students was able to accomplish against a powerful university administration 58 years ago.
It may be worth noting that the Free Speechniks released the following statement at the time their short carols were released:
In the spirit of farce, and of Christmas, these songs were written and sung. We of the FSM are serious, but we hope we are still able to laugh at ourselves, as well as those who would restrict our Constitutional freedoms.
The first clip is based on the familiar carol "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," and while the name of this clip strikes me as odd, it really is titled "God Rest Ye Free Speech." The lyrics are as follows:
Track 12 Santa's New Bag, Rudi and the Rain Dearz (1966)
As noted in yesterday's posting this year's mix includes three different versions of "Santa's Got a Brand New Bag," and that count does not include "Santa's Got a Bag of Soul," at Track 4, or this number at Track 12, "Santa's New Bag," by Rudi and the Rain Dearz. In fact, a close listen to this tune reveals that it seems to be based more on "Jingle Bells" than anything by James Brown.
This tune
appears on Volume 3 of the terrific compilation series "Santa's
Funk and Soul Christmas Party," released on the Tramp Records
label in 2015. Unfortunately, Rudi and the Rain Dearz appear to have released
only this one tune before calling it quits. They didn't even record the B side
of their own single — that
went to a song called "I Stole Away on Christmas Day," by a group
called Pretty Polly Pinecone.
I'll be back with more before too long. Only 24 more
shopping days until Christmas!
