(edited since first posted)

Christmas music on the radio: some stations will play anything this time of year, as long as it’s plausibly Christmassy. Some of them try to fit it to their format, but others don’t care. I’ll never forget hearing, on Christmas Eve a few years back, the staggeringly inappropriate ”Funky New Year” by the Eagles, in the same quarter hour with Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole on a wobegone station in Michigan. I once worked at a station whose Christmas Eve and Christmas Day programming came from a pile of randomly selected holiday CDs, from which the jocks played whatever they wanted. (Free-form radio, baby!)

At my current radio station, we’re a lot more careful. You won’t hear “Funky New Year,” and here are five other things you probably won’t hear, in no particular order.

“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”/Elmo and Patsy. The tale that “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” came to light on an anonymous cassette sent to WLS in Chicago, as I’ve been told, isn’t true—it was discovered by a DJ in San Francisco in1979 after being recorded on a Bay Area label as a joke by a former veterinarian named Elmo Shropshire. It remained on tiny, regional labels for the next several years, although it got something approximating national distribution. CBS/Epic signed Elmo in 1984 and recut the song, whereupon it became ubiquitous.

“Jingle Bells”/Singing Dogs. They aren’t really singing together, they’re on tape. The barks were slowed down or speeded up to reach the proper pitch, then the whole thing was edited together. Originally released in 1955 as part of a medley with two other non-seasonal songs, “Jingle Bells” was excerpted as a single in 1971 and rose to the top of Billboard’s Christmas singles chart that year. (Cat people have their own version, by the Jingle Cats, released in 1991.) By some methods of accounting, this is the top Christmas single of the 1970s, which is somehow entirely appropriate.

“I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas”/Gayla Peevey. Although “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” was cut as just another novelty in 1953, Gayla actually got a hippo in response to it. Zoo officials in Oklahoma City hit upon the idea of asking children to send in money to get Gayla (who was from Ponca City, Oklahoma) a hippo, and when they did, she donated it to the zoo.

“The Twelve Days of Christmas”/Bob and Doug McKenzie. Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas of SCTV created these Canadian dimwits after the show moved to Canada’s CBC-TV from a regional network, to give it some identifiably Canadian content. A  resulting record album, Great White North, sounds almost completely improvised, which means moments of pants-wetting hilarity interspersed with stretches of stupidity—and that’s half the point, in a meta sort of way. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” is the best thing on it.

“Ho Ho Ho (Who’d Be a Turkey at Christmas)”/Elton John. The flipside of “Step Into Christmas,” “Who’d Be a Turkey at Christmas” seems to have gotten some airplay in the UK, but never received much over here. (Yah Shure suggests a reason why below.) Scores extra points for its first two lines, “Sitting here on Christmas Eve with a brandy in my hand/I’ve had a few too many and it’s getting hard to stand,” and then loses them for the rest of the song.

I just noticed that four of these songs have something to do with animals. Coincidence? I think not, but I’m not clever enough to figure out why.

Every once in a while the universe smiles upon us, and we get a week that’s filled with musical goodness such that in years to come, we can hardly believe it was real. Six years ago, Eric Boehlert, then writing for Salon, called the week of December 20, 1969, “the greatest week in rock history.” A year later, I cast a vote for the first week in November 1976. (Number of regular readers surprised that I’d pick a week in 1976: zero.) The other day I thought of another one: the week of December 9, 1972. If there was a greater week for R&B in the 1970s, you’ll have to tell me when it was.

It wasn’t perfect: “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy hit Number One in Billboard that week, and while her song of liberated womanhood satisfied certain souls, it’s not what we’re talking about here. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s terminally white babysitting tale “Clair” was at Number Nine. But most of the rest of the Top 10 belonged not merely to R&B, but to several of the finest R&B records of the 70s, if not all time.

2. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone”/Temptations (down from 1). An epic, in several different ways. Running almost 12 minutes in its original album configuration, the single ran 6:58, although some radio stations made their own shorter edits. In any form, it’s the Platonic ideal of “hypnotic.” One of the most arresting intros ever devised keeps you around just to hear Dennis Edwards sing “It was the third of September/that day I’ll always remember,” which keeps you around for the rest of the story, even though you’ve heard it a million times before.

3. “If You Don’t Know Me By Now”/Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes (up from 5). Was there ever a record on which a singer sounded more anguished and desperate than Teddy Pendergrass does here? This is what it means to rage against the dying of the light. Here’s a lip-synched performance from Soul Train:

4. “I Can See Clearly Now”/Johnny Nash (down from 3). Nash, born in Houston, scored some modest hits in the States in the late 50s, including “The Teen Commandments,” preachy advice for the kiddies recorded with Paul Anka and George Hamilton IV. He became a reggae star in Jamaica in the mid 60s and took “Hold Me Tight” into the stateside Top 10 in 1968 before hitting with “I Can See Clearly Now.” Probably the least monumental record on the list, it nevertheless did a month at Number One.

5. “You Ought to Be With Me”/Al Green (up from 7). Another practically perfect Memphis soul record from the Reverend Al, it features the Memphis Horns—who sound otherworldly good—and drummer Al Jackson of Booker T and the MGs.

6. “Me and Mrs. Jones”/Billy Paul (up from 13). The definitive Philadelphia soul ballad, elegant and sexy and even a little bit sad. The backing track, played by MFSB, is filled with notes and figures that linger, just as lovers might linger at the end of a furtive rendezvous, knowing it’s time to part but unwilling to break away. (Or so I’m told.)

1o. “I’m Stone in Love With You”/Stylistics (up from 11). This tune came up briefly about a month ago, so I won’t say much more about it here, except to suggest that if Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, then songwriter/producer Thom Bell ought to be there, too.

Also in the Top 40 during that December week of ‘72: “I’ll Be Around” by the Spinners at Number 18, Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” at 22, “Keeper of the Castle” by the Four Tops at 25, and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” at 32. Lurking further down in the Hot 100:

• Rod Stewart’s “Angel” (a convincing simulation of an R&B ballad) at 43
• The Isley Brothers’ “Work to Do” at 51
• “992 Arguments” by the O’Jays at 57
• “Why Can’t We Live Together” by Timmy Thomas at 62
• “The World Is a Ghetto” by War at 71

I am past being upset when people make fun of the music of the 1970s, except maybe when I think about weeks like this. You can’t dismiss a decade that resulted in such glorious stuff. Sure, a hater could dwell on “I Am Woman” and “Clair,” but neither of them really affects the greatness of the week of December 9, 1972, any more than the presence of Bobby Sherman’s “La La La (If I Had You)” or “Groovy Grubworm” by Harlow Wilcox diminishes that great week in December 1969.

Of course, maybe it helped to be there that week in 1972, with the radio glued to your ear every possible waking hour. Thank goodness I was.

“Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”/Temptations (album version, runs 11:46) (buy it here)

It’s the holiday season, so I’m taking a holiday. Here are five things to check out after you check out of here:

This year and every year, you’ll hear Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” until you can’t stand it anymore. If you’d like to hear Springsteen take on some other holiday tunes, click here. (Yesterday I posted a so-bad-it’s-not-bad version of “Blue Christmas.” Had I waited one more day, I could have posted Springsteen’s, but I don’t believe it’s an improvement.)

At Popdose, Matthew Bolin, a Rod Stewart fan, reviews Rod’s latest album, Soulbook, which is so wretched that even a sympathetic writer can’t be sympathetic.

At SHH/Peaceful, Kinky Paprika opens a package he wasn’t supposed to see until Christmas, and ends up writing a terrific appreciation of a classic album.

At Echoes in the Wind, whiteray remembers a vanished gas station/diner, but leaves an even better story hanging.

I hadn’t listened to anything by the Alan Parsons Project in a long while, but I grabbed a cassette out of the box in the car yesterday and there they were. Later in the day I learned that Eric Woolfson, Parsons’ longtime collaborator, had died at age 64. I dug the Project from the first thing of theirs I ever heard (“Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” 1976), through “Damned If I Do” (on your radio 30 years ago this week), to “Don’t Answer Me” (1984), which features Woolfson on lead vocals and might be the best thing they ever did. The video’s great.

I’m on the run today, so here’s all you get:

Yesterday we talked about Neil Diamond’s “A Cherry Cherry Christmas,” which cops his old song titles and turns them into holiday greetings. 30 Days Out thinks Diamond didn’t go far enough, and offers some additional possibilities.

Diamond’s music is no doubt all over those radio stations that have gone wall-to-wall Christmas music already, even though he’s Jewish. So he himself might be interested in this: a web-only station calling itself “Smooth Hanukkah,” playing nothing but “the wonderful music surrounding the Festival of Lights,” which begins on December 11. Chicago media watcher Robert Feder has the story.

As a media geek, I’m fascinated by the way television used to look. One of the greatest things about YouTube is the way it allows broadcasting ephemera to live on—station IDs, old commercials, and in the following case, a marvelous CBS-TV holiday greeting. This began running in 1966, and if I’m recalling correctly, it aired into the 1970s. Few channels would air anything like it today—it’s too slow, too quiet, too thoughtful, and nothing swoops in or zooms through.

The ad was designed by R.O. Blechman, an acclaimed illustrator who drew a number of New Yorker covers and who also designed a famous Alka-Seltzer commercial at about the same time as his Christmas greeting. (H/t to Matt at Scrubbles.net, who found it first.)

As I’ve noted a million times before, the fall of 1970 is where time really begins for me—when the record charts first became the calendar of my life. I heard the season like the 10-year-old I was, gravitating toward my generation’s answer to the Jonas Brothers or Hannah Montana—the Partridge Family and Dawn. But while I was buying that stuff, I was also buying “Love the One You’re With” and “Domino,” and digging “Tears of a Clown” and “Share the Land” and “Immigrant Song.” And in the lifetime since, I’ve discovered the context in which those first beloved records appeared. And there’s context aplenty on the survey from WIXY in Cleveland, dated November 27, 1970:

3. “Back to the River”/The Damnation of Adam Blessing (up from 4). A Cleveland band from the same scene that produced the James Gang and the Raspberries, the Damnation of Adam Blessing made three albums between 1969 and 1971 before renaming itself Glory and eventually disbanding. The group’s bassist, Ray Benich, has an extensive website covering his and the group’s history, in which he mentions that he did nearly 18 years in prison (1982-2000) for a domestic shooting, “despite having no prior criminal record (except for that Glory album).” You gotta respect a man able to retain his sense of humor after all that. I’ve cooked up and discarded a whole string of metaphors describing what “Back to the River” sounds like (crappy example: “like ‘Run Through the Jungle’ done by Iron Butterfly, only without the organ”), so click the link, see if you can do better, and share in the comments

10. “No Matter What”/Badfinger (up from 15). Here’s a record that loses something in pristine stereo sound. It’s meant to be processed for AM radio and blasted, preferably from a few hundred miles away, into a little speaker you can hold in your hand. It was produced by Beatles’ road manager Mal Evans, and it should have made Phil Spector proud (although it more likely made him envious and bitter).

12. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”/Neil Young (down from 8). According to Young’s biographer, the After the Gold Rush album, from which this comes, was Young’s attempt to merge the sounds of Crazy Horse with Crosby Stills Nash and Young. If so, “Only Love” comes pretty close. Here’s Young with Graham Nash and David Crosby performing it live in 1970:

Plus, it’s a waltz, which you hardly ever got on the Top 40.

13. “You Better Think Twice”/Poco (down from 10). The clip below is from a TV series called Something Else, hosted by comedian/impressionist John Byner that ran in the early 70s. It featured an impressive array of then-current stars, many of whom didn’t appear on television much, including the Flying Burrito Brothers, Canned Heat, the Ides of March, Richie Havens, Melanie, the Turtles, CCR, Taj Mahal, and others. I’ve been able to find precious little about this show online, but I intend to keep looking.

19. “Be My Baby”/Andy Kim (up from 27). This is one of the greatest made-for-AM-radio productions of all time—the echo, the ringing piano chords, and the skittering bass guitar, and that’s just the first 10 seconds. And whatever’s playing the instrumental break before the final refrain—string section? Theremin?—came sizzling out of your little speaker and straight into your brain. I can’t hear it without thinking about how WLS sounded at night—or about the 10-year-old me, listening on one little speaker, 135 miles away.

“No Matter What”/Badfinger (buy it here)

I’ve got a few things on my mind today but nothing that adds up to a whole post, so here’s the odds and ends.

The news that the Who (or what passes for it these days as long as Keith Moon and John Entwistle remain dead) might be playing at the Super Bowl halftime this year is baffling. (The NFL isn’t confirming it, yet.) The NFL has been going with safe classic rockers ever since Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, but at least people like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen have scored hit singles within the last decade or so, and the Rolling Stones are recognizable to fans under 40. The Who, not so much. How much do you want to bet they got the gig because Aerosmith wasn’t available?

The Mrs. and I watched Saturday Night Live over the weekend for the first time in a while because Mad Men star January Jones was hosting. We don’t expect much from SNL anymore, but we were surprised at how dreadful this episode was. Throughout its history, SNL has frequently been juvenile, but last weekend’s episode was aimed almost solely at 11-year-old boys who think that fart jokes and gay panic represent the height of humor. Jones was awful, too—she seemed scared to death at the start, while in succeeding sketches, she plastered an inappropriate smile on her face and just stood there looking pretty. Afterward, we needed to watch a couple of episodes from the first-season DVD collection to hose out the taste.

Rosanne Cash has announced a handful of tour dates in support of her album The List, including a February 10 show in my much-missed former hangout, Iowa City. And so there’s a road trip in my future.

After I mentioned Elvis Costello’s racist slur on Ray Charles here last week, a couple of readers noted that it wasn’t a case of a punk looking for publicity, which is how I remembered it. So for this week’s Rock 101 at WNEW.com, I looked into it.

The Daily Mirror is a feature on the Los Angeles Times‘ website that looks back at vintage stories and columns from the paper. Here’s a spin around the LA radio dial from November 1969. Key line: “Most FM announcers sound as if they’re bored—and underpaid, which is true. People covering a funeral display more verve.”

Also worth reading is another commentary on an American Top 40 countdown, this one from November 1972, at SHH/Peaceful. Apart from being mighty entertaining, these chart reviews are always a good reminder that my taste isn’t the same as everyone else’s. But seriously, dude, how can you not like this?

Everybody hates something, and often, our choices are highly personal. Nevertheless, there’s a certain consensus about the most reviled Top-40 hits of all time: “Muskrat Love,” “You’re Having My Baby,” “Run Joey Run,” and “Seasons in the Sun” would make most people’s lists, I think. And “You Light Up My Life,” too. In my experience, that’s one people tend to forget.

“You Light Up My Life,” recorded by Debby Boone, daughter of Pat, was released on August 16, 1977. (That’s the same day Elvis Presley died, although the autopsy showed no correlation.) Its chart debut came on September 3 at Number 71, and it embarked on a respectable-but-not-spectacular climb up the chart. The week of October 8, however, it took an enormous leap from 15 to 3, and the week after that, “You Light Up My Life” hit Number One, where it would stay for 10 weeks, the longest stretch at the top for a single song since 1956. It also hit on the country chart, reaching Number 4.

Week after week during the fall of 1977 other songs stormed the castle, but none could take it: “Keep It Comin’ Love” by KC and the Sunshine Band, “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon, “Boogie Nights” by Heatwave, and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” by Crystal Gayle all peaked at Number Two, Carly and Crystal for three weeks each. Finally, during the week of December 17, the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” reached the second spot, and it took out the queen on December 24, 1977.

“You Light Up My Life” would remain in the Hot 100 until late February 1978. In the final accounting, it’s the Number One song of the 1970s. It was nominated for Record of the Year at the Grammys (and Boone won Best New Artist); it also won the Oscar for Best Original Song.  But the odd thing about “You Light Up My Life” is that it vanished from history almost as soon as it left the charts. The song was disappeared, like a Soviet official who was declared a nonperson and never officially existed. (Or like George W. Bush to the Republicans now.) Oldies stations don’t play it; easy-listening stations don’t play it—and if I’m recalling correctly, it stopped getting much radio play almost from the moment it left the charts. It’s as if collective embarrassment over our embrace of such bland schlock caused us to repress the memory entirely.

It’s arguable that the same impulse repressed Debby Boone’s career. She was unable to follow up on her mega-hit, returning to the Hot 100 only twice, with “California” and “God Knows,” both in 1978. She did a bit better on the country charts over the years, even reaching Number One with “Are You On the Road to Lovin’ Me Again” in 1980.  Eventually, she moved into Christian music (no surprise given that she had imagined the “you” in “You Light Up My Life” to be God), acted on the stage, raised a family, and wrote children’s books.

The song’s blandness and Boone’s faceless performance of it made it ripe for cover versions, and for a particular sort of cover version at that: Every easy-listening artist you can name recorded it, including Engelbert Humperdinck, Perry Como, Robert Goulet, the Ray Conniff Singers, and Mantovani. It’s also been cut by Leann Rimes, Kenny Rogers, Whitney Houston, and the Irish group Westlife, who turned it into a boy-band ballad for the generation whose parents were pre-teens in 1977. In 1979, the Three Degrees did it for a British TV special. Adding a little soul helped it a lot—hell, adding a harmony vocal line helped it a lot.

In the end, perhaps the only way we can explain the unprecedented success of “You Light Up My Life” is what explains many strange excesses: It was the 1970s. We couldn’t help ourselves.

One of my favorite posts in the history of this blog appeared three years ago this week, about the darkness audible on Top 40 radio in the fall of 1969 via the WLS chart from the week of November 10. There are other ways to look at the same week, of course—how dark could it have been if Sesame Street premiered on TV? Here’s how it sounded at WKNR in Detroit, the fabled Keener 13, on the survey dated November 13, 1969.

8. “Down on the Corner”-”Fortunate Son”/Creedence Clearwater Revival (up from 13). Has there ever been a better two-sided hit single? If we had a contest to figure it out, this one would definitely make the semi-finals, at least—with several other two-sided CCR singles.

16. “Get It From the Bottom”/Steelers (down from 7). The Steelers were a Chicago group that started out recording on the local Crash label, owned by DJ Al Benson. Even after Crash crashed in 1967, the Steelers carried on. “Get It From the Bottom” was good enough to get national distribution from Columbia, although it was popular mostly in the Midwest. The Steelers are still performing around Chicago, apparently.

25. “Midnight Cowboy”/Ferrante and Teicher (up from 28). WKNR lists two versions of this movie theme, by John Barry, who wrote it, and Ferrante and Teicher, who had a Top-10 national hit with it. There’s a hallucinatory quality to the F&T version, although most of the atmosphere comes not from the famous twin pianos but from Vincent Bell’s guitar and those ghostly choral voices. The vibe is nicely captured in this YouTube video, which features scenes from the Dustin Hoffman/Jon Voight film.

26. “The Music Box”/Ruth Copeland (up from 29). One of the first releases on Holland/Dozier/Holland’s Invictus label was by Ruth Copeland, a white girl from England whose debut album was recorded at the same time and features many of the same musicians as the debut album by Parliament. It’s weird stuff; the band is great, but Copeland’s performance is frequently over-the-top strange—like the sobbing that takes up the last 45 seconds of “The Music Box,” which is unobjectionable up to that point despite the presence of a children’s chorus.

Keener LP #3: Rock and Roll Music/The Frost. Another Detroit-area legend. The group’s leader was Dick Wagner, who would go on to play with Lou Reed and Alice Cooper, among others. (He started the band after the demise of the Bossmen, another Detroit band that had included Mark Farner, who later founded Grand Funk Railroad.) Rock and Roll Music was the group’s second album, recorded live at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, which hosted shows by Cream, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, and even John Coltrane in the 60s along with the full roster of Michigan acts, including the MC5, the Stooges (both of whom were house bands for a while) and the Rationals.

When it comes to Detroit music in the 60s, Motown was just the beginning, and not enough people know that.

“The Music Box”/Ruth Copeland (buy it here)

At this blog, I pride myself on offering not merely entertainment, but anything else you, the esteemed blog reader, might need. I have limits, however. Here’s a short list of six things I’ll do, and four things I won’t.

“I’ll Make Love to You Anytime”/Eric Clapton. From Backless, an album that many critics consider lifeless to the point of needing electroshock, but one I once dug quite a bit. (I’ve listened to a lot more Clapton in recent years, and I like Backless a lot less now as a result.) On this track, Clapton does not merely channel J.J. Cale, he does an impression of him.

“I’ll Remember April”/Miles Davis. The records Miles recorded for Prestige in the early 50s are about as good as he ever got. This is from Blue Haze, released in 1954 from sessions in 1953 and 1954. This track and several others feature Horace Silver on piano; Charles Mingus provides piano on one track.

“I’ll Understand”/Soul Children. An early single by the group Isaac Hayes and David Porter formed at Stax after their primary project, Sam and Dave, left the label. The group’s J. Blackfoot claimed Porter discovered him singing outside a liquor store on McLemore Avenue near the Stax studios, which is an R&B story if ever there was one.

“I’ll Close My Eyes”/Jimmy Smith. This was the flipside of the single release of “Organ Grinder Swing,” which crept to Number 92 on the Hot 100 in October 1965, a beautiful late-night ballad with Kenny Burrell on guitar.

“I’ll Always Love You”/Spinners. An early track from 1965 by the group known in England as the Detroit Spinners.

“I”ll Be Around”/Spinners. On the radio this week in 1972, when they were still known in England as the Detroit Spinners.

“I’ll Never Sail the Seas Again”/Detroit Emeralds. A group not known in England, or anywhere else to my knowledge, as the Emeralds, and also not from Detroit.

“I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”/Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. I have a couple of friends who are pained greatly by the knowledge that I generally have no use for Elvis Costello. It’s an opinion that goes back to the 1970s, and one that was reinforced by his early slur on Ray Charles, done in a craven attempt to get publicity. I gotta admit, however, that I admire quite a bit of what I’ve heard from him in recent years, especially this version of the Dionne Warwick classic, from a 1998 collaboration with its co-author.

“I’ll Never Be the Same”/Nat King Cole Trio. Recorded long about 1943. The trio at this time featured Nat at the piano, Oscar Moore on guitar, and Johnny Miller on bass, although this particular track is a piano solo.

“I Will Not Dance”/Chi Coltrane. Also on the radio during this week in 1972 was Chi Coltrane’s indelible “Thunder and Lightning.” She never did anything else quite as good, but she’s still gigging, and her website’s got the pictures to prove it. Here she is on German TV circa 1973:

One More Thing: You have probably noticed the Christmas-themed TV ads already. Some of our favorite blogs are getting ready for the holiday, too: AM, Then FM is seeking requests for this year’s Three Under the Tree, and Popdose is preparing another dose of Mellowmas. We’ll do something around here, too. But not for a while yet.

You may have noticed a distinct lack of activity in this space this week. My official excuse is that I’ve got actual remunerative labor to do, but not much of that been done either, as I’ve been fighting a cold that’s reduced my enthusiasm for everything apart from huddling under a blanket on the couch. I hope to get something together for tomorrow, however, and I’ve already written a Rock Flashback for WNEW.com that will run over the weekend.

In the meantime, please enjoy this video of a ferret and a guitar.