Enough Already With The Ancient Christmas Carols

 

One drudgery of Christmas season – which, as you know, is much, much too long, starting in mid-October – is the tired old Christmas carols the stores insist on playing. Perhaps they assume it makes people more, what, festive, to hear those sleigh bells in the snow, but mostly it just annoys people.

We need some new Christmas music, not just more tedious remakes by whatever singers happen to be popular today.

Every year I try to buy one or two Christmas CDs, or downloads the past two years, hopeful that the new recordings will make a difference, but generally they do not. This year was an exception, as I came across some pretty good music, and added two songs to my favorites list.

First was Christmas Cello by Steven Sharp Nelson, aka one of The Piano Guys. The entire set is wonderful, perfect for decorating the tree, as we did (at least one of our trees), or for just having as background while reading, or talking, or doing dishes. My favorite is Simple Gifts, which is simply beautiful.

Next was Christmas Island by the one and only LeonRedbone. The title track is excellent, but my favorite, barely beating out That Old Christmas Moon, is Christmas Ball Blues. Great for dancing in the kitchen with the one you love, and if you ender up under the mistletoe, even better.

So here’s my updated list of Five Favorite Christmas Songs, with a tie for the bottom spot:

 

1. Merry Christmas Baby, Elvis Presley (another great one for dancing in the kitchen, when the kids aren’t home)
2. You’re All I Want For Christmas, Brook Benton
3. Baby, It’s Cold Outside, Brian Setzer and Ann-Margret (although the Ann-Margret Al Hirt version is much more sensual)
   
4. Christmas Ball Blues, Leon Redbone
5. Christmas Wish, She & Him
   Simple Gifts, Steven Sharp Nelson

What are your favorites?

Another Problem With America: We Confuse Popular With Good

 

I don’t Google. Partly because Google is so pervasive, taking over most aspects of life online, but mostly because Google is not a verb.

I use a search engine called Swagbucks, which rewards users with Swagbucks (duh!) that can be saved up and used to buy stuff, everything from a computer wallpaper of Cage The Elephant (just 5 Swagbucks) to a new scale for the bathroom (6,795 Swagbucks) or full drum kit, with cymbals (37,825). All I ever buy are $5 Amazon gift cards for 450 Swagbucks.

 

Anyway, one way to earn Swagbucks is by answering the daily poll. One recent poll asked:

Which of these decades had the best music?

The results, I'm sad to say, are in the above chart.

What this means is, either it was opposite day when this survey appeared, or it was Moron Day, and 81 percent of these people have been nominated grand marshal of the parade.

As anyone older than 14 knows, the only truly great decade for music was the 1960s, starting with the Everly Brothers, Cathy’s Clown, through the Beach Boys, Good Vibrations, and Aretha Franklin, Respect, to Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bad Moon Rising.

The last half of the 1950s was good, what with Elvis and Chuck Berry and Ricky Nelson and Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, et al, but the first half was pretty lame. Patty Page, The Tennessee Waltz? C’mon.

Dozens of songs like Unchained Melody and Stand By Me and Hey Jude have proven that they will still be listened to and appreciated 50 years later. You just can’t say that about Lady Ga Ga and Justin Bieber. Does anyone even remember the Thompson Twins?

Put Your Head On My Shoulder For Only A Nickel

I’ve said before I was born too late for my favorite music, you know, Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry, Elvis. Thank goodness for Amazon, where I just bought 111 classic oldies as an MP3 download for $5.99. That’s not a typo. I got 111 new tunes for my iPhone for less than $6, or right around a nickel each.

The collection has a lot of obvious standards common to this type of album, generic favorites like Why Do Fools Fall In Love, The Great Pretender, Teenager In Love, Rock Around The Clock, Lucille, Rockin’ Robin, Tequila, Put Your Head On My Shoulder.

But it’s also stuffed with a terrific assortment of great, often overlooked tracks, like Sweet Nothin’s, Brenda Lee, Stupid Cupid, Connie Francis, Hey Paula, Paul And Paula, True Love Ways, Buddy Holly, Hello Josephine, Chuck Berry, 3 Steps To Heaven, Eddie Cochran, Born Too Late, The Ponytails, and perhaps one of the finest songs of the generation, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, by The Platters.

There are plenty of surprises, too, songs I’ve never heard such as True Love by Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, Halfway To Paradise by the unique Billy Fury, and Honey Love by Bunny Paul.

With few exceptions, these are the original recordings my parents listened to on the rcar adio when they were dancing on the picnic tables at the roadside park with all the headlights pointed toward them. Hello Mary Lou is a live version, probably recorded later in Nelson’s career. A couple of the Little Richards sound live, and some of the Carl Perkins songs sound like they were recorded about the time he played the Carl Perkins & Friends Rockabilly Session, so they sound great, but not like the original Sun recordings.

Except for Hound Dog, the Elvis offerings are obscure, buried treasures like Harbor Lights and I’ll Never Let You Go. There are only five Everly Brothers songs, all classics, but there could have been more. The set is light on Roy Orbison and heavy on Bill Haley, but I could not be more pleased. If it included Birthday Party or 442 Glenwood Avenue by the Pixies Three, it would be perfect.

Check it out here.

Note from John: I saw yesterday, July 8, 2012, that Amazon had this download listed for $2.99. That's so cheap, I'm thinking of downloading it again.....

Mind Long Gone, Now I’m Losing My Time

Watching a documentary of the Traveling Wilburys, at the point where Roy Orbison dies, I remember it like it was last Thursday. Then they flash the date, and it takes a minute to register. 1988.

1988. A lot of things had happened to me by the time I was listening to the Wilburys in 1988. It didn’t seem that long ago, until the math kicked in.

In 1988, the year 2000 was 12 years away. Now, it is 24 years later. That’s 43 percent of my life, and 2 years away from being half of Orbison’s life. A long time, but it doesn’t feel that long ago.

I remember November 22, 1963, and the Beatles on Sullivan. I remember Neil Armstrong on the moon, the U.S. Bicentennial, and the Cardinals in the World Series, 6 years later, all a long time ago.

Elvis died ages ago, seemingly long before John Lennon (although only 3 years), but Roy Orbison dying, that doesn’t seem that long ago. Bob Dole running for President and Martha Stewart going to prison, those seem far in the past, although both happened much more recently.

Why does Roy Orbison still feel current, while John Lennon does not? Is it the 8 years between their deaths? I don’t think so. I think it’s more of what was going on with me in those days, as Kelly suggested it might be.

Personal and professional struggles unlike any I’d had before 1988 left me, well, struggling for the next few years, a portend of things to come, it turned out. So I turned to music, which I listened to constantly, especially Orbison, and my CD collection, which absorbed any extra time and spare change I had.

I decided to buy every Orbison CD, an impossible task, and watched A Black & White Night hundreds of times. Orbison’s music was a security blanket in ways that Lennon’s was not, and he has stayed more current in my mind.

Could it be that simple? Am I missing something? Or is this just something we all go through once we are people “of a certain age”?

Were Elvis And John Lennon As Happy As You?

Elvis would have been 76, and John Lennon would have been 71. All these years later, we still listen, we still care.

While both were hugely successful commercially, I don’t know that either of them was especially happy. We went to Graceland for Elvis Week last year, and while we marveled at his awards and his costumes and his palace, I walked away with only a feeling of loneliness, of isolation, of a sad man-child lost in or hiding behind a caricature of the what people thought of him.

Obviously not John Lennon, but Kevin Mantegna playing
the Beatle with Liverpool Legends in Branson, Missouri.

Lennon, on the other hand, spent much of his last ten years trashing the work he had done with that little band of his. The party line is that he was a happy house husband for the five years following his second son’s birth, but many accounts describe his day-to-day existence as grim and lonely, tortured by dark fame, drugs and loss of self-esteem.

It is hard to believe that either man enjoyed his celebrity, and the money didn’t seem to buy anything but more distance from who they really were.

Both Elvis and John Lennon appear on the annual lists of top-earning dead celebrities, but I suspect they both would resent it.

I wonder if they would have pursued their paths had they known where they would end. I wonder if they would have preferred a life of contentment in anonymity, like most of us. Like me.

What do you think? What would you do?

A Word In Your Ear

Like some of you, perhaps, I used to wish I had been born 10 years earlier, so I could have been part of the music scene I just missed, the rise of all my favorites: Elvis, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Ricky Nelson. But now, with the fantastic audio technology we have today, I'm happier than ever to be alive. The irony is that I rarely listen to music anymore.



I have 86 audio books, not counting the cassettes, 50 of which are in my iTunes library. I have apps on my iPhone that link me into many, many more - hundreds of titles, most for no charge. I can easily move from A Christmas Carol to Anne of Green Gables to As A Man Thinketh to The Psychology of Achievement to Ben Stein's How to Ruin Your Life.

I listen to them all the time when I'm alone: when I shave and shower, when I iron my shirts, when I clean the kitchen, when I drive by myself.

Every day I have those delightful moments of inspiration and motivation and education, when the best thoughts of others stick in my head and make me a better teacher, a better husband, a better man - all while doing other things.

Today I'm listening to Lonesome Dove , my favorite book, which at 36 hours is not enough. I just finished Made to Stick and Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. A wonderful lecture on rhetoric was a recent favorite, plus a couple of Michael Crichton novels, and a used, 18-disc copy of All the King's Men, which I got for $4 at a flea market.

Our Audible.com credits restock in a couple of days. My wife recently finished Water for Elephants, The Help, and The Kitchen House, and is today listening to Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.

I have The Dream of Reason and Richest Man in Babylon queued up in my library, as well as a David Baldacci novel.

Maybe I did miss out on being nothing but a hound dog hanging out at the soda shoppe with Little Susie after school, but I sure enjoy the immediacy and convenience of audiobooks.

As Jim Rohn says, miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

How about you? What are you listening to these days?