John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Musical advent calendar: A Christmas Gift For You

Let's deal with the elephant in the room: the full title of the album, as you can see above, is A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector. For some reason, likely Spector's then-pending murder trial, this record had been pulled from the marketplace, and was becoming a bit of a collector's item.

In October, though, Sony reissued the album, warts and all in the title, and we're all better for it. Regardless of the murderer that Spector became, this record is rightly regarded as not only one of the best Christmas recordings ever, but one of the best pop albums ever, period. (It ranked relatively highly on Rolling Stone's 2003 survey of the 500 best albums of all time.) The reissue is great, and features a booklet that puts the importance of the album in context.

Released in 1963 (and with a slightly different title, ... From Philles Records), A Christmas Gift For You is stacked with recordings that at least a couple of generations know by heart, whether or not they know they all came together in Los Angeles in a summer recording session. First, there's Darlene Love's orginal, unbeatable recording of Christmas (Baby Please Come), which was written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, with an assist from Spector. On top of that, iconic Wall of Sound recordings of Santa Claus is Coming to Town (the Crystals), Frosty the Snowman (the Ronettes) and White Christmas (Love again), plus many others. These versions, anchored by arrangements by Jack Nitzsche, have essentially been recreated again and again by various other singers; even Bruce Springsteen lifted the Crystals for his own wonderful version of Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. You could look at it another way: I bet every Santa Claus parade since the Sixties has had a dance school marching to a tune put down first on this record. (A trivia note: Sonny Bono is one of the musicians playing layers of percussion on the album.) 

If you're a David Letterman fan, you probably know he closes his broadcast year with a Christmas episode, featuring Darlene Love singing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home). Love is booked to perform on the show this Dec. 23; here's a performance from four years ago.

Largely because of her performances on the album, Love has developed a further niche as a Christmas singer over the years, recording the under-heard All Alone on Christmas for the Home Alone sequel (with no less than the E Street Band backing her up). More recently, former Saturday Night Live animator Robert Smigel recruited Love to sing lead for his Spector spoof/tribute Christmas Time For the Jews, which combined the Wall of Sound with another Sixties entertainment staple, claymation, albeit with a tone that only Smigel could pull off.

I snapped up a copy of A Christmas Gift For You when it appeared. I heartily recommend it.

This is the 15th instalment in a musical advent calendar I'm putting together this month. Check back every day for something new.

Musical advent calendar: The Waitresses, Christmas Wrapping

The Waitresses had one of the best-ever record titles (I Could Rule The World If I Could Only Get The Parts, for the EP that gave us today's tune, and their retro-aware album Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful wasn't shabby, either) and an indelible single of the new wave era in I Know What Boys Like, and picked up some cred for doing the theme for the funny, smart TV sitcom Square Pegs. But the Ohio band, which flourished briefly in the early 1980s, has currency to this day because of a Christmas song. 

Christmas Wrapping is one of those songs that stays funny no matter how many times you hear it. And though it's from the era of skinny ties, sneakers and fedoras (I know of which I speak), it doesn't feel dated at all, even though it is one of the rare Christmas records to precisely date itself ("most of '81 passed along those lines"). It's a tale of cynical moderns finding love and the Christmas spirit, in a supermarket, no less. 

While Christmas Wrapping has endured, the band itself has not. Indeed, I remember how sad I felt when I read that singer Linda Donahue (that's her on the bottom right, next to bassist Tracy Wormworth) died of lung cancer in 1996. She was only 40. 

The song has become a staple, providing an annual bit of income for former Waitresses leader Chris Butler (read his blog here), who wrote the song fairly quickly. Click here to read the story behind the song. 

While it would be fun to see the band do the song, you can at least hear it in this video, accompanied by a choreographed lighting show.

This is the 14th entry in a musical advent calendar I've been working on this Christmas season. Another 10 days to go, so check back daily. 

Customary treatment: Prepping for the holidays

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, Dec. 3, 2009. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

The Christmas season kicked into gear this week at our house: the Santa parade downtown on Sunday, and on Tuesday, a multiple number of things: the opening of the advent calendar, a hectic but tasty Festive Special at Swiss Chalet (a true marker, for our family) and the first chapter of Kevin Major’s The House of Wooden Santas, an advent calendar in its own right, albeit in hardcover. 

Many of the social cues in our house are made by our nine-year-old son, who already has a list of things needed for a complete Christmas. I’m not sure if the weather will co-operate with one of them, but his snowman-in-a-box kit stands by at the ready. 

Christmas customs and traditions 
From a site called Why Christmas? comes this collection of explanations of many of the things – from pointsettias to pudding – that we find around us at this time of the year. Curious young minds (and, yep, the older ones) will learn plenty of things here. There’s more to be found, too: check out the navigation bar on top to see how Christmas is celebrated in dozens of countries, as well as some fun and games, such as a drag-and-drop way to virtually decorate a tree. 

   

Christmas in France 
The above link will tell you about Christmas in plenty of countries (including, to my surprise, China), while this one focuses at length on French customs and traditions, including a history of the Christmas tree that’s pretty detailed. 

Woodland’s Advent Calendar
The Woodland junior school in Kent, England, has earned a reputation worldwide for offering an annual online advent calendar that is as engaging as it is fun. Each day, a new fact about Christmas around the world will be unveiled, so bookmark it for repeat visits. 

 

My musical advent calendar
I like online advent calendars so much, I started my own. Each day through the season, I’ll be writing about some of my favourite Christmas albums and songs. Check it out through the season, and send me your suggestions!

Cookie sheet advent calendar
You can make your own advent calendar, of course, with simple materials. I saw one online made with matchboxes and fabrics that looked surprisingly fancy. This one is appealing for families with busy kitchens: decorate (and sacrifice) a cookie sheet, and use metallic objects for the fun. You’ve missed a few days, but you can still have a blast with the kids.

Brainfroth advent calendar
Lots of websites are adapting the advent calendar theme this year, as always; I’m going to be following this science-minded blog’s revelation of information (starting with an explanation of caffeine) through the month.

HGTV decorating ideas
Got a bag of red candies, some glue and a Styrofoam wreath? (Don’t worry: I have none of those things, either.) The decorating maniacs at the specialty channel HGTV have that and many other ideas for sprucing up the house, with step-by-step galleries to guide the way.

Elsewhere this week 

Muppets Bohemian Rhapsody
A good sign that the Muppets still have a huge following? Their hilarious take on Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody attracted eight million views on YouTube in its first week, largely through word of mouth. Gonzo & co. make the song family friendly, too, by having Animal handle (well, skip over by way of mangling) the more contentious lyrics, about Mama, a trigger and such. In other words, something even the youngest can enjoy, including Beaker’s high notes, and Sam the Eagle handling the line (“No, no, no, no, no!”) that in almost seems to have been written just for him.

Big Ben on Twitter
How do you know when it’s, say, 3 p.m. in London? This Twitter feed tells you, like so: “Bong. Bong. Bong.” Genius. (I’ve spared you the all-caps treatment it uses, but the most famous, and one of the loudest, clocks in the world is entitled to get your attention.)

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and is currently on leave from his job with CBC News in St. John's. John is on Twitter right here. 

Musical advent calendar: Rufus Wainwright, Spotlight on Christmas

Some years ago, one of my friends commented that he figured Christmas albums would eventually peter out, because "all the good songs have already been written," with the implication that future records would basically just be retreads of the same canon of several dozen songs. It does indeed feel that way sometimes, but new songs do pop up, and sometimes they astound you.

Rufus Wainwright's Spotlight on Christmas is a good example. It's a song with universal themes (money doesn't buy happiness, etc.) but with a call to set aside differences during Christmas - all 12 days, thanks very much.  The lyrics are a prize, like this set:

Don't forget Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
Running from the law King Herod had imposeth
And they were each one quite odd:
A mensch, a virgin, and a God

The next lines spell out the song's real meaning: the unconditional love families (and everyone) need to survive.

The song has already been anthologized a few times, although a great place to buy it is on the McGarrigle Christmas Hour, a holiday album from 2005 produced by his mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The family has been doing annual Christmas extravaganzas, this year in London at the Royal Albert Hall. 

Below is a video of Wainwright performing it solo on U.S. television a few years ago.

This is the 13th entry in a musical advent calendar I'm compiling this year. Click on the link to read the rest, and check back each day through Christmas Eve.

Musical advent calendar: White Christmas

What do you say about a song that was an absolute classic for years and years ... and then was given a whole new life because of a kid putting on after shave? Well, quite a bit: White Christmas is not only consistently ranked highly among people's most favourite Christmas songs, it's been recognized as one of the best popular songs ever written, period. Bing Crosby's original, Academy Award-winning version of the Irving Berlin tune (that's the two of them, in a Wall Street Journal illustration published this month) remains the best-selling record of all time.

I have 26 versions of White Christmas in my laptop's iTunes library, and those are just the ones I've burned; there are doubtless others in the stack of Christmas records I've accumulated over the years. The versions range from Darlene Love's soul waltz of the early Sixties to Dean Martin's croon to Esquivel's batchelor-pad-ready martini mix to Aimee Mann's dirge to ... well, the list goes on.

But the version I like best is from the Drifters, and is one of their earliest and best singles, with doo-wop harmonies, a bass part that everyone wants to imitate, and Clyde McPhatter soaring above everything. The song got a whole new lease in life in 1990's Home Alone, thanks to the famous aftershave scene, in which Macaulay Culkin sings along to the song while using his dad's grooming products, resulting in the iconic hands-on-cheeks scream. 

A while back, this animated version of the Drifters' version showed up on online. Still makes me laugh; my thanks to Russell Bowers for reminding me of it this week.

Darth Maul cooks Christmas dinner for the whole family

The Space channel is airing this promo for a Star Wars marathon, tied into a promotion called the 12 Days of Spacemas. The title doesn't matter much, though, when you see Darth Maul fret over his kitchen, and Vader and the other unhappy Christmas guests at the table. (Best touch: a stormtrooper with a napkin.)

Five-fact Friday

One of the most famous phrases in A Christmas Carol - "Tiny Tim, who did not die" - was not in Charles Dickens's original manuscript. Dickens added the phrase, among many other changes, in handwritten notes and revisions before the instant classic was published. [I was disappointed that Robert Zemeckis dropped the phrase from the otherwise applaudable animated version of A Christmas Carol that came out last month.]

The Airbus A400M, which had its inaugural flight today in Spain, has a range of as much as 6,400 kilometres, or about 4,000 miles. It has about double the cargo of older aircraft like the C-130 Hercules aircraft, not to mention significant budget overruns.

Greg Lake wrote Lucky Man, the best-selling song for Emerson Lake and Palmer, when he was only 12 years old. ELP recorded it only because they needed a short song to fill one side of their first record, and had a day to do it.

Amazon allows publishers to set their own prices for Kindle-ready digital editions of their books, but keeps 65 per cent of the revenue.

Bobby Vinton not only remains a symbol of pre-Beatle America, he holds the distinction of having held the No. 1 chart spot before the British Invasion. His rendition of the David Mann song There I've Said It Again was bumped from the top by I Want To Hold Your Hand in 1964.

Musical advent calendar: Kate Bush, Home for Christmas

Kate Bush has released one great song about Christmas, but unfortunately not as a properly launched single. She did, many years earlier, release a proper Christmas single, but it, well, is a bit of an acquired taste, which is par for the course with the British singer, who has done things her way throughout her career (including taking a dozen years - 12! - to make her last record).

The good song is Home For Christmas, which was released in 1993 ... as a B-side, to the single Moments of Pleasure. Most people were not able to get the song commercially until the 2005 compilation Plugged In For the Holidays. (Interestingly, a cover version, by Diamond Jim Greene, was included, at almost twice the length, too, on the 1998 tribute album, I Wanna Be Kate.) 

I love the song. It's short, charming, like a strummed gem perfect for late on a pre-Christmas night. I have a different reaction to Bush's one and only official Christmas-oriented single, December Will Be Magic Again, which was released in time for Christmas 1980, but was recorded a year earlier, as she set out to make songs like Babooshka and Army Dreamers. The song has that feeling, and the video below doesn't help it.

Here's the video (well, actually, it's just the audio) for Home For Christmas:

Almost for fun, here's the video from a much earlier, loopier time, and December Will Be Magic Again:

This is the 10th posting in a musical advent calendar I'm compiling this year, consisting of songs and albums I'd recommend. I'll have another one tomorrow, and each day through Christmas Eve.

Musical advent calendar: Great Big Sea's Seven Joys of Mary

One of the better-known Christmas tunes from Newfoundland and Labrador is Great Big Sea's rendition of The Seven Joys of Mary. I wasn't aware of the song until the boys recorded it 15 years ago,when they were still a quartet, but have noticed it in various settings in the years since. It's often sung gently and quietly ... which of course makes the GBS version, which has a rollicking instrumental break, pretty different. (You can find another version by Kate and Anna McGarrigle, as well as a classical setting by St. John's-raised soprano Meredith Hall, performing with La Nef, among other renditions.)

I wrote to Bob Hallett, Great Big Sea's wizard of many instruments, to learn more about how they came to record the song. It was to be their contribution to Atlantic Standards Christmas, a compilation album first released in the fall of 1994.Their version appears on at least two other Canadian Christmas compilations.

"The arrangement was something we came up with ourselves," Bob wrote back. "We did not have a traditional version as such, but I knew that the song was sung by traditional carolers [in] Green's Harbour, TB, from family sources. I dug around and found lyrics in an old carol book which came from England. We adapted the lyrics to a more local dialect."

Bob says the band pulls the song out occasionally, usually for shows at Christmas. The video below shows an almost a cappella version, accompanied only by bodhran, from a program hosted by Wayne Rostad.

This is the ninth entry in a musical advent calendar I'm writing this year, leading up to Christmas Eve. Check back every day for something new.

Monkey business: How a balloon game can pop away a day

[Surf's Up, as published in the St. John's Telegram on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2009. Click here to read more Surf's Up.]

I’ve been trying to clear a few hurdles with my work this last week, but have been falling prey to a little vice that’s hard to resist. I can keep my hands off the cookies, can resist the call of a trashy TV show, but have had a hard time ignoring a bunch of little monkeys with darts, bombs and glue-guns.

Bloons Tower Defense 4
“Bloons” is a well-established franchise on the web, at least among cheap (i.e., free) and easy-to-play games. This is the fourth iteration in the series, and it’s pretty sophisticated. If you’re new to tower defence games, they follow a pattern: you establish towers, or weapons, along a route to defeat some kind of invaders. In this case, the invaders are balloons – hence the title – and your weapons involve monkeys. And darts, bombs, planes, glue, tacks and all kinds of other fun stuff. This series is more complicated and varied, with more patterns, skill levels and upgrades.

And, as I said, it can become a major drain on your time. I think I’ve invested (I can’t bring myself to say “wasted”) a few hours over the run of the last week or so. Because the games can run on for dozens and dozens of turns, I recommend registering (it’s free) so you can save a game for later resumption.

A final point: I was loading Bloons the other evening when my son took notice. “I didn’t know you knew this game,” he exclaimed, evidently unaware that grown-ups can definitely compete with the kids for mindless online fun. I don’t know whether my stock had risen with my son, or my credibility as an adult had sunk. I didn’t worry about it, and got on with my game.

Elsewhere this week

Santa parade
The Downtown Santa Parade in St. John’s is this Sunday; click here for route and bus information, photos and more. A suggestion for the sponsors: let parade users post their own pics to the galleries, or create and then link to a feed at a service like Flickr.

Starbucks Drinks Simplified (Kinda)
Ever been dazzled or confused while overhearing the sometimes-complicated drink orders at a Starbucks? This unofficial page collects the many, many drinks you can apparently order from a barista. (Good luck getting a ristretto, evidently.)

50 Most Important Recordings
Year-end lists are one thing, but we’ve already been seeing a lot of decade-recapping lists, of movies, cultural points, etc. In its review of music in the Oughts (it says something about a decade when people don’t even agree on what to call it), NPR opted not to list the best, but the most influential. How else could you explain the inclusion of both Arcade Fire and Britney Spears?



Best commercials
In a similar vein: From AdWeek, an interactive feature on some of the best television advertising – that is, the ones not created to appear on Super Bowl broadcasts. Some very clever work here; my vote went on Cadbury’s fascinating ‘Gorilla’ spot, featuring a gorilla drumming along to Phil Collins. This is just feature among many; click on the banner to go to an index to explore other materials.



Aldous Huxley vs. George Orwell
Here’s a thought-provoking illustration about the dystopic visions of Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with a compare-and-contrast text borrowed from media critic Neil Postman’s still-relevant 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman, who died six years ago, published the book long before many of the technologies depicted in the pictures shown here even existed, but his message is as clear as ever.



Star Wars status updates
From College Humor, a set of five faux Facebook status updates, with comments from various characters in the Star Wars universe. See why Obi-Wan Kenobi, for instance, jumped in with a rapid comment when Luke Skywalker got stoked with romantic thoughts about Princess Leia, or how a stormtrooper had remorse after a battle with the Ewoks.

John Gushue is a writer in St. John's, and is currently on leave from his job with CBC News in St. John's. John is on Twitter right here.