Fluville on WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban

Folks, I'm thrilled to announce that I'm now doing a weekly show on WFMU's Rock 'n' Soul Ichiban. It streams to your computer, mobile device, internet radio, as well as the tinfoil you've attached to your skull LIVE on Wednesday nights from 8-10PM EST. Or, you can listen to the ARCHIVE at your convenience anywhere, anytime.

You can hear my first show from January 25th HERE and more as they're added weekly. I'm still working out the kinks and the mic breaks from show #1 are a little rough. It'll get better, I swear. There's great music streaming there 24 hours a day and live shows being added to the line-up soon, as well as the Ichiban overlord Debbie D on Fridays from 3-5PM EST.

I played this record last week...



Download:

"Nobody's Fault But Mine" mp3
by Otis Redding, 1967.
available on Immortal Otis Redding

artwork by Takeshi Tadatsu

Only Women Bleed

by Polly Bresnick

Etta James, who passed away last week, could not only sing with searing soul that simultaneously strikes fear and sorrow and strength into the hearts of anyone who hears her voice, but she also bridged the gap between R&B and Rock & Roll back when people were still impressed by that kind of feat, way back when a band of light-skinned black girls was called the "Creolettes," way back when the song title "Roll With Me Henry" was so suggestive for a fourteen-year-old girl to sing, that the title was changed for the radio. Her songs have helped me muscle through serious heartsickness, and her signature wolf/owl howl/hoot grace notes give me chills even though I know each one by heart. I won't go into her haunting and solemn vocal opening to a performance of "Something's Got a Hold On Me" in 1966 on a television show called The !!!! Beat. And don't even get me started about all her songs about being heartbroken at a wedding and desperately wishing to speak now instead of forever holding her peace.



She was 73 years old, mentally and physically ill, but her death was a strange thing in my mind. Each time I listen to her soul-wringing, tear-salted mournfully lonesome rants it sounds a bit like the intimate sound of someone dying a little death, having a petit mort, an orgasm or paroxysm or all of the above. Her songs so convincingly chronicle her experience of emotional murder by loves who left her — got married or cheated or lied or didn't listen or didn't trust her or just didn't love her back — that in my mind, she died and revived enough times to achieve immortal status. This isn't to say that I didn't feel sad to learn she'd died. I did, a nagging bit of sad, like a pebble in my boot. I hadn't been following her later career very closely. I only knew she'd recently released an album because my father asked for it for his birthday. What she did with her voice and her soul when it was still so street, so raw and ambitious and broad, like her life actually depended on getting the pain out — "W.O.M.A.N.," "I'd Rather Go Blind," "All Could Do Was Cry," "Stop the Wedding," "Something's Got a Hold on Me" — these are the songs that go and put a hurtin' on me. But, when Etta died, a friend pointed out to me a late-career recording of her cover of Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed." Admittedly, it caught my ear initially for what I thought to be it's absurdity. But then it lingered.

Maybe I'm being an overly sensitive post-post-feminist, but I hear an interesting note of old-fashioned chauvinism in the opening lines of this track: "Man's got his woman / to take his seed, he's got the power / she's got the need." It quickly becomes clear, though, who's side this song is on. Etta's version is a pained and sweating, R&B/gospel, unsentimental sermon/anthem for abused women, while Alice Cooper's (especially next to Etta's) sounds more like a soundtrack for a domestic violence PSA or a commercial for a charity to help battered women in inner city Detroit. Etta owns the lower register of this song with rumbling force that is bigger and louder and more convincing than any garden-variety "girl power" or feminism, the surface of which Alice Cooper seems to be attempting to scratch with his wimpy and predictable smooth rock growl-harmonize-falsetto-hook-bridge-jam. Etta James breathes life into the song's disturbing subject matter with more bone-rattling truth and with more survivor's spirit than Alice Cooper (or perhaps any other singer for that matter) can.

I like thinking about how in the weird world she ever came across the song. It makes me think she was more open-minded about music than I might have thought. Maybe she heard it on the car radio. Or maybe someone at Betty Ford played it on the boombox in the common room. Or maybe her manager was friends with Alice Cooper's manager. However she found her way to those lyrics, it doesn't shock me that, once she heard them, she understood she'd sing them. Her songs bring you back to times the world opened up beneath you, and you fall in with her, but then her voice finds your hand in the deep darkness and yanks you up to where you find a sturdy stone to grip at the edge of the crevasse. Her voice and that stone save you from falling every time. She was an expert on bleeding women. I'm glad she found this song. She found its truer cry.

I like to believe she succeeded at this because she felt she had sung out so much pain that she'd begun to channel the collective pain of all women. She drank the sorrow and carried it inside of her, bore the burden on behalf of all women who didn't think we were pretty or lovable or didn't think we deserved to be treated like shit and knew exactly how it felt, but didn't quite know how to vocalize those feelings until Etta did it, and we all said, "YES!" and we maybe even said, "YES, GIRL!" and sometimes we whispered, "Sing it," and, "Mmmhhmm," and other times we were without words because our breath had been taken away by the glowing truth bleeding out of the voice pouring out of Etta's lungs and through our speakers and into our ears and deep down into our souls which were healed, if only for a short time, if only until the end of the song.

Download:

"Only Women Bleed" mp3
by Etta James, 1999.
available on Heart of a Woman

Five Years in Fluville

Today we celebrate five years of the Boogie Woogie Flu, and while this strange endeavor may be limping along at a limited capacity, we are, still here. And, what better way to celebrate this miraculous event than to listen to the the b-side of James Brown's 1978 smash hit, "The Spank." JB's own version of "Love Me Tender," because, after all, it's Elvis' Birthday too.

Happy Birthday Elvis from all your friends in Fluville.



Download:

"Love Me Tender" mp3
by James Brown, 1978.
available on James Brown: The Singles Volume 10: 1975-1979

Jerry Ragovoy in the Cathedral Of Soul

by Andy Schwartz

When Howard Tate died on December 2, 2011, most obituaries for the great soul singer mentioned the name of another man who’d passed on in July of this year. Jerry Ragovoy (September 4, 1930 – July 13, 2011) was a songwriter, producer, pianist, and the studio Svengali behind Tate’s career masterpiece, the 1967 Verve album originally issued as Howard Tate and later retitled Get It While You Can.

Arguably, Ragovoy never made a better album in his career. In fact, Rags didn’t make that many albums: Much of his most influential music appeared on singles released before 1967, when Sgt. Pepper broke the “album market” wide open. Howard Tate/Get It While You Can features superb vocal performances by Tate, whether singing church–flavored ballads (the title track, “I Learned It All The Hard Way”) or blues standards (“How Blue Can You Get”); sturdy arrangements by Ragovoy, frequent partner Garry Sherman, or Artie Butler; and tough, committed playing by a cast of NYC session players including pianist Paul Griffin and guitarists Cornell Dupree and Eric Gale.

Finally, Howard Tate/Get It While You Can contains the original versions of some of Ragovoy’s best and most–covered compositions including “Ain't Nobody Home” (B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt), “Get It While You Can” (Janis Joplin), and “Look At Granny Run Run” (Grand Funk, Ry Cooder). Several notable non–LP singles emerged from the Tate sessions including “Stop,” written by Ragovoy with Mort Shuman, later covered by both Sam Moore and Jimi Hendrix.

But if Jerry Ragovoy had never worked with Howard Tate…had never written “Get It While You Can” or “Ain’t Nobody Home”…we’d still be hanging his name in the Soul Hall of Fame. Here are some of the reasons why:

GARNET MIMMS & THE ENCHANTERS – “Cry Baby” mp3
Written by Jerry Ragovoy (as “Norman Meade”) and Bert Berns (as “Bert Russell”) Released July 1963 as United Artists 629. No. 1 Billboard R&B (three weeks), No. 12 Pop. available on Cry Baby

In his liner notes for the 1993 CD Cry Baby: The Best of Garnet Mimms (all 25 tracks produced by Jerry Ragovoy), Robert Pruter wrote that prior to the July 1963 release of this landmark single, the sporadic soul hits of the period were “mainly easily digestible songs by Sam Cooke and Chuck Jackson that fitted well into the pop mainstream of the day, so that nothing seemed alien or new about them. ‘Cry Baby’ was different. The song was a gospelized production so full of the soul–saving, fire–and–brimstone ecstasies of the black sanctified church that it singularly stood apart…Never had the public heard anything so intense and so emotional on Top 40 radio.”

Ragovoy told Pruter he’d worked on the song “on and off for about two years” and, in his efforts to place the finished master, had been given the brush–off by executives at various labels: “Typically, in the record industry, if it doesn’t sound like anything the record executives are familiar with, they turn it down.” With Jerry as writer and producer, Garnet Mimms placed eight more songs on the Billboard R&B Singles chart. The consistent excellence of their output was such that even Mimms’ commercial misfires later became ideal cover material: “Look Away” for the Spencer Davis Group with Stevie Winwood, “My Baby” for Janis Joplin.



ERMA FRANKLIN – “Piece of My Heart” mp3
Written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns
Released 1967 as Shout 221. No. 10 Billboard R&B, No. 62 Pop.
available on Piece of Her Heart: Epic & Shout Years

Ragovoy co–wrote this soul classic with frequent collaborator Bert Berns and probably played the piano part that forms the bedrock of the arrangement. One of only two singles ever charted by Aretha Franklin’s older sister, “Piece Of My Heart” is probably Rags’ best–known song thanks to Big Brother & the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), whose cover version reached No. 12 in 1968 and has remained a staple of classic rock radio ever since. Erma’s original was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1968; twenty–five years later, in 1992, after renewed exposure in a British TV commercial for Levi’s, her recording entered the UK Top Ten.



THE ENCHANTERS – “God Bless the Girl and Me” mp3
Written by Samuel Bell & Lorraine Ellison. Produced & arranged by Jerry Ragovoy. Released March 1966 as Loma 2035.
out of print

Garnet Mimms and Sam Bell were members of a Philly vocal group, the Gainors, who left to form the Enchanters. The success of “Cry Baby” pushed Mimms to the forefront, however, and soon the other members (including Zola Pearnell and Charles Boyer) were cutting tracks without him. The Enchanters’ “I Wanna Thank You” struggled to No. 91 R&B in the fall of ’64, but with Ragovoy producing and Sam Bell as a contributing writer, the group came up with two more deep–soul stunners, “I Want To Be Loved” (Loma 2012, released February ’65) and “God Bless The Girl and Me.” I’m pretty sure Sam Bell is singing lead on these sides; if so, then he’s nearly the equal of Garnet Mimms for church–bred intensity and passionate articulation. The combination of piano and organ is another key element derived from gospel music and a trademark of Ragovoy’s sound in this period.

MIRIAM MAKEBA – “Pata Pata” mp3
Written by Miriam Makeba & Jerry Ragovoy. Produced by Jerry Ragovoy.
Released 1967 on Reprise 0606.
available on Pata Pata

Ragovoy’s biggest crossover hit of the Sixties after “Cry Baby” was also among his least typical. Thanks to the support of Harry Belafonte, by 1967 South Africa’s Miriam Makeba was already established in the US: She had released several LPs on RCA and been nominated for a Grammy the previous year. I’m not sure if Makeba was signed to Reprise at the time she recorded “Pata Pata,” or if Ragovoy independently produced and then shopped the master.

In any case, singer and producer retooled a South African folk song (that Makeba had first recorded in 1956) and the result was a sui generis hit that reached No. 7 R&B/No. 12 Pop in 1967. “Pata Pata” was the first song of South African origin since “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” to make a major impact on American audiences. Makeba’s hit preceded by about a year the Number One success of “Grazing In The Grass” as recorded by her then–husband, trumpeter Hugh Masakela.



LORRAINE ELLISON – "Stay With Me" mp3
Warner Bros. LP 182, released 1969. Produced by Jerry Ragovoy.
available on Stay With Me

Along with Howard Tate/Get It While You Can, this is the other great Jerry Ragovoy album.

Its creation began with the title single, “Stay With Me,” co–written by Ragovoy and George David Weiss. Sometime in 1966, Frank Sinatra canceled a New York recording session, potentially leaving his label Warner Bros. with the bills for a 46–piece orchestra and no music to show for it. On two days’ notice, Ragovoy, arranger Garry Sherman, and singer Lorraine Ellison (born 1931, Philadelphia PA) hustled into the studio and recorded “Stay With Me” – a towering, operatic ballad that many consider the pinnacle of East Coast “uptown soul.”

“To many people, ‘Stay With Me’ still typifies the basic idea of what real soul music is all about,” wrote UK soul music maven David Nathan in a 1974 article for Blues & Soul. “And there aren't too many soulful people around who don't get that spine–chilling tingle when they hear it, even to this day.”

“‘Stay With Me’ was a song that Jerry Ragovoy had written with Mr. Weiss, and I thought it was going to be a monster smash,” Lorraine Ellison told Nathan in Blues & Soul. “It certainly looked that way – the record had twenty-six national breakouts in the States, and it did make it onto the soul charts and made some headway onto the nationals.

“But at that time, Warners was just not into black music, period. They really had no idea how to promote the record and they had no real way of getting into the R&B market.”

The single made it to No. 11 R&B/No. 64 Pop, and these stats – along with some positive reviews and a certain underground buzz – were enough for Warner Brothers to green–light a full album. Heart and Soul: Introducing Miss Lorraine Ellison was released as WB 1674 in 1966. Produced by Ragovoy but arranged and conducted by jazz man Oliver Nelson, it was an uneven set that found Ellison singing familiar standards (“Cry Me A River”) and other people’s hits pop (“A Change Is Gonna Come,” “If I Had a Hammer”). “Stay With Me” was buried in the middle of Side Two, and only one other song, “When Love Flies Away,” bore a Ragovoy writing credit. Heart and Soul did not chart and was soon deleted.

“Then interesting things began to happen,” West Coast rock critic John Mendelsohn wrote in his liner notes for Stay With Me – the second Lorraine Ellison album, unexpectedly issued by Warner Bros. in the fall of 1969. “[Such] diverse musical figures as Laura Nyro and Carl Wayne [of The Move] listed Lorraine Ellison as their favorite female vocalist. And in Harlem...an enterprising pirate tape–duplicating operation found mobs of takers when they offered tapes of ‘Stay With Me’ at the somewhat outrageous price of $5.00 apiece.”

“… Having realized that they had an artist of almost limitless potential, both commercial and artistic, sitting around their house, [Warner Bros.] got Jerry Ragovoy busy producing a straight–ahead album of gospel–based soul, the music that Lorraine had been doing for years with such unrewarded brilliance.”

Indeed, this was the album that should have followed the single. Stay With Me is eleven tracks of pure uptown soul, with an unswerving stylistic focus and the sustained mood of a secular cathedral. Ragovoy arranged and produced the entire set; he co–wrote seven songs with (variously) Mort Shuman, Doc Pomus, Sam Bell, Bert Berns, and Ellison herself. The title song closes Side One with a bang, in a manner analogous to the placement of “Get It While You Can” on Howard Tate.

It was all too little too late, however, and Stay With Me followed Heart and Soul into the cut–out bins. But Janis Joplin must have gotten hold of a copy: She later covered “Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)” on Pearl, along with four other songs co–written by Jerry Ragovoy.



LOU COURTNEY – “What Do You Want Me Yo Do” mp3
Written by Lou Courtney. Arranged by Jerry Courtney. Produced by Lou Courtney & Jerry Ragovoy. Released 1973 as Epic/CBS 5–11062. No. 48 Billboard R&B in spring 1974.
available on I'm in Need of Love

By 1973, hardcore Southern soul was pretty much a spent force, commercially if not inspirationally. Otis Redding had been dead for years, Atlantic had dropped Wilson Pickett, and Aretha Franklin was cutting jazz–flavored material with Quincy Jones. Ragovoy hooked up with R&B journeyman Lou Courtney, whose biggest chart record – the quasi–Motown dance novelty “Skate Now” – was six years behind him. Together they came up with a flute–flavored, proto–disco sound that was closer to Johnny Bristol’s “Hang On In There Baby” than to the glories of Garnet Mimms or Erma Franklin. Still, “What Do You Want Me To Do” is a genuinely infectious record with an arrangement that positively pops, and Courtney sings the hell out of it. The single crawled to No. 48 R&B and died, but not before singer and producer managed to squeeze out a pretty good album, I’m In Need of Love, also on Epic/CBS.


***************************




“Open Up Your Soul” mp3
by Erma Franklin, 1968.
available on Piece of Her Heart: Epic & Shout Years



“I Want To Be Loved” mp3
by Loraine Ellison, 1969.
available on Stay With Me



Garnet Mimms – “Look Away”
by Garnet Mimms, 1964.
available on Warm & Soulful



"Malayisha" mp3
by Miriam Makeba, 1967.
available on Pata Pata



“Ain’t Nobody Home” mp3
by Howard Tate, 1967.
available on Get It While You Can

“Stop” mp3
by Howard Tate, 1967.
available on Get It While You Can

Jeff Chandler: My Second Cousin Removed

by Dave the Spazz

“Don’t ever let them operate on your back. That’s how we lost Jeff Chandler.”
--Don Van Vliet 1

Today’s Hanukkah’s Jew answers to the name of 1950s movie star Jeff Chandler. My Aunt Penny used to swear that Chandler was her cousin from the old neighborhood; however, his absence from any and all family functions caused some concern at the time that Aunt Penny might be full of shit. Claiming familial ties to Jeff Chandler was just schlubby enough to be true so I believed her. Aunt Penny’s son David changed his name from Abramson to Chandler so you can count him as another believer. 2

Jeff Chandler was one of the biggest box office leading men of the 1950s but any enduring fame seems locked into that nervous decade. After serving in World War II, the East New York native sharpened his acting chops in radio comedies and dramas (most notably as doofus biology teacher Philip Boynton on Our Miss Brooks). By the early fifties the former Ira Grossel reinvented himself into the tall, dark and Semitic matinee hero Hollywood had apparently been searching for.

Chandler was generally typecast as the affable, prematurely gray, leading man sort of chap--a stack of good looks with the charisma of a goldfish. He was Cary without the Grant, Gregory sans Peck, he was more Clark Kent than Clark Gable. Tanned and bland, Chandler was just a yutz with a granite chin.

In the seventies I remember he would occasionally pop up on Channel 9's Million Dollar Movie or whenever the Mets got rained out. Unfortunately, Chandler's movies were unremarkable and predictable affairs. If it sucked, he was in it: turgid romances, drab military dramas, sword and sandal epics, crappity-crap horse operas. If Warhol ever sat through a Jeff Chandler epic then maybe his eight hour Empire State Building movie might have seemed unnecessary.

For a blank sheet of paper, Chandler surprisingly shared the screen with a litany of leading lady goddesses of the 1950s: Kim Novak, Liz Taylor, Carol Lynley, Susan Hayward, Lana Turner, Julie London, Joan Crawford, Jane Russell, Dorothy Malone, and Anne Baxter were among the lucky gals who kissed up on ol' Jeff. At one point he was romantically linked with M-G-M swimming star Esther Williams until the day she allegedly caught him in a dress. In her 1999 autobiography Williams recalled telling him at the time "Jeff, you're too big for polka dots."

In or out of polka dots, Chandler was well-liked and he swung with the swingingest chums that Hollywood had to offer. When good pal Sammy Davis, Jr. lost his left eyeball after a horrific car wreck on Route 66, Chandler famously offered him one of his own. (A few years later Sammy served as a pallbearer at Chandler’s funeral.) Jeff's generous offer, along with constant noodging from Eddie Cantor and Tony Curtis are likely responsible for Sammy turning to the Jewish faith.

Chandler had a singing career as well--who didn’t back then? He released a few tuneless LPs and in 1955 opened at The Riviera in Vegas to celebrity-studded crowds and tepid reviews. Comedienne/singer Rose Marie was at the opening and remarked "Jeff Chandler was a great guy, but he was no singer… he came with a conductor, a piano player, light man, press agent and manager. None of it helped."

On the set of his last film Merrill's Marauders (1961), Chandler herniated his spinal disc while playing baseball with U.S. Army soldiers who served as extras in the movie. He entered a Culver City Hospital on May 13, 1961 and due to a botched surgery he never checked out.

At age 42 Jeff Chandler joined the lost-in-time stars of Hollywood's last golden era, remembered today for nobody knows-quite-what, except from this point on for being my Aunt Penny's cousin from the old neighborhood.




"I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm" mp3
by Jeff Chandler, 1955.
available on Spotlight on Jeff Chandler


1. The Book of Changes: Interviews by Kristine McKenna, Fantagraphics Books

2. My first cousin removed, David Abramson (hailing from East New York) could pass for Italian and frequently did. He changed his name to David Roya and eventually David Roy Chandler in a nod to his movie star cousin once removed. He did walk-on bits (usually as an Italian American thug) on Mission Impossible, The Rookies, Black Sheep Squadron and other TV shows. He abandoned his Fonzie image to play an Apache savage who tries to kill Henry Gibson in a very special episode of F Troop. Returning to his bad-ass roots, David found enduring psychotronic fame as Bernard Posner, the spoiled Sheriff’s son in the extremely dated hit Billy Jack (1971). David is currently a 4th degree black belt Tae Kwon Do instructor in Rockaway Beach.

The Atheist Who Stole Christmas

by Nicole Audrey Spector

How a guy who once pulled over the car upon espying a black glitter rosary on my neck (I was 12 and the rosary was from Claire's Accessories) was ever impelled to give the world a self-declared “Christmas Gift” is ironic. Yet my dad, in making A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector was hardly a grinch won over. I don't exaggerate when I say that he'd rather have a tick burrowed in his ear than a sentimental Christian on his back. Or a sentimental Jew for that matter (though one may elicit from him a gentle smirk, a boyhood memory). My dad is so outrightly disgusted with religion that when something bad doesn't happen he says “Thank Darwin!”, a phrase I taught him when he told me he'd give me $500 if I read all of On The Origin Of Species. That's roughly a dollar per page. Add the exhaustive intro and afterthoughts I was also required to read and you have about half that. Not to mention I'd have to provide written notes. Still, not a bad deal for a kid, right? Well, I was 23 and unable to finish it. Point is, my Pops' Christmas music has nothing to do with Christian folklore – it indeed dispossess Christ from Christ-mas, and is concerned only with a mirth and merriment that is wholly secular.

When I visited my dad last Sunday and imparted the news of Christopher Hitchen's death, he gazed at my Einstein T-shirt and frowned. “Einstein should have been more outspoken about the non-existence of God,” he said. A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector may as well be called The Atheist Who Stole Christmas or, if you want to get silly, It's My Birthday, Too; So What? – for my father was born on Christmas Day. Around this time of year a lot of people tell me, “You know, it doesn't feel like Christmastime until I listen to your Dad's Christmas album.” The key word is feel. Christmastime, in again the secular sense, has a distinct essence and texture. It's busy, buttery, effulgent, and loud – pairing well with the lavish mania that distinguishes The Wall Of Sound. Nearly 50 years after its incipient release, A Christmas Gift For You is emblematic of an era long gone, but it's not the 1963 time stamp on the work that induces nostalgia. Songs like “Winter Wonderland”, “Frosty The Snowman”, and “Parade Of The Wooden Soldiers” (my childhood favorite) feel to have been born nostalgic, dreamed up in a reverie of how good it feels to be a child at Christmastime. The one original song on the album, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” pines for a Christmas past with Darlene Love belting, “They're singing 'Deck The Halls'/But it's not like Christmas at all/'Cause I remember when you were here/And all the fun we had last year.”



Perhaps my dad had a bit of the Christmas blues himself growing up. He and his older sister, Shirley, were brought up sparingly in a strict but struggling Jewish household. Christmas was of course not observed and though Hanukkah was I can't imagine it was a hugely happy affair. My paternal grandfather Ben suffered from acute diabetes and ended his life when my father was nine, leaving my Grandma Bertha (after whom my dad's record label Mother Bertha Music is coined) to raise the two kids on her own. She moved the family to L.A, where my dad snuck into jazz clubs and at 14, met his hero: jazz guitarist Barney Kessel. It wasn't long under Kessel's wing before my Dad decided that he would never be as good a guitarist as the remarkably under-recognized genius – “not even a close second”, he says, and so, he turned his ambitions toward record making. In my father's few shared memories of growing up, seldom do I get the sense that he was ever doing much of anything aside from growing up – working as hard as he could to assume responsibility for his family. Even the move to L.A from NY, when he couldn't have been more than 12, he remembers as a vehicle for equipping him with the tools he needed to become a young success – to make it big fast.

As far as the family my dad co-created with my mother, Janis, much later in life (he was 42 when my twin brother Phillip. Jr. and I were born) goes, we were raised on Christmas. Hanukkah was there, but off to the side, a corner piece of piety we were unsure how to regard. Phillip and I took turns lighting the menorah (Grandma Bertha probably had one for every light socket in her home), but we didn't quite know what to do with a holiday that, next to Christmas, was so complicated and sombre, so...holy. When Grandma Bertha gave us a dreidel to play with, Phillip and I just stared at it and exchanged worried glances, hoping Grandma would walk away so we could play with real toys.

Jewish as Grandma Bertha was (she took great care in teaching my Mexican Catholic mother how to be a good Jewish wife, mentoring her in the making of many a matzoh ball soup and potato latke), she indulged us our Christmas. Every year she dug the same plastic tree out of a closet, along with other customary Christmas junk – light up Santas and reindeer, boxes of candy canes. Always a sucker for kitsch, my dad would create his own mega marshmallow world in our foyer – replete with fake box presents under a dazzling Rockefeller tree. But the true Christmas fanatic, on either side of my family, was my dad's older sister, Shirley. A virtual Mrs. Claus, Aunt Shirley stormed into rooms with literal bells on, singing the Christmas hits. My father couldn't stand her. She seemed to physically make his skin crawl. Twenty minutes into her company and he was on the brink of a genuine eczema outbreak. To me she was the most wonderful person in the world. She was a brilliant woman, I later learned, but disturbed. She'd go missing for months and eventually years at a time, abducted by some secret darkness in her mind. I only ever saw her as ebullient, glowing. She was a guaranteed presence on Christmas day. She arrived at our house in the late afternoon (the earliest my father would let her in) with her annual trunk load of presents for me and Phillip, singing all the way up our driveway.

A fragment of one such Christmas afternoon exists on VHS, when Phillip and I were about 6 years old. Before the Record button was hit Aunt Shirley somehow guilted my father into getting out his electric guitar. She starts to sing a pitchy falsetto “Silent Night” and my dad strums obediently along, each chord appearing to hurt his face. “All is caaallllm,” Aunt Shirley sings, with proud bravado, “All is brighhhht.” He doesn't let her get very far, abruptly transitioning into “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”. Aunt Shirley wavers but catches on – used to him changing things up without prior consult. Two verses into that song and my dad ditches Christmas altogether, digressing into an improv jazz bit none of us understand. Aunt Shirley, jilted, but ever-joyous, takes the camera from my mother and interviews her niece and nephew, truly her favorite people in the world, about their Christmas day. “Such a beautiful family,” she says. The camera shuts off.

That video is the only evidence of my mother, father, brother, and me together. There are no family photos. It's the only recording of Aunt Shirley, as far as I know, that exists. She's at least 50 years old there, and as fragile and beautiful as I imagine she was as a girl, that remarkably bright girl whose mind shattered when her father left. It's one of the only videos of Phillip, Jr. A few years later, when we were nine he succumbed to a complicated illness. He died just a few days before Christmas. I don't remember our last Christmas together, but this one on tape looks like it was pretty good, and it's the one that makes every Christmas since feel not like Christmas at all.

Download:

"Sleigh Ride" mp3
by the Ronettes, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"Parade of the Wooden Ships" mp3
by the Crystals, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" mp3
by Darlene Love, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

"White Christmas" mp3
by Darlene Love, 1963.
available on A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector

Good Tidings: Christmas In The Heart

by Polly Bresnick

I'm half Jewish, half Christmas. Jew-ISH. My family lights the menorah when we remember to, usually uncertain of which night we're on, and we mumble out the prayer that even my father barely remembers, with a crescendoing finale of SHALL HANUKKAH! Or is it with a "Ch-"? Does it have an "h" at the end? (I'm barely "culturally Jewish," which is to say that I'm not really religious at all.)

In grammar school I learned that, for Hanukkah, kids traditionally received eight presents — one on each of the holy, candle-lit nights. Also, there was a dreidel and gelt. That all sounded pretty good. On Christmas, of course, children awoke to find piles of gifts under the tree. Also a very appealing concept to my greedy little kid mind. Since I was both, I was thrilled to realize that maybe I'd get to do both! I did. Sort of. But then the deep holiday laze kicked in, and the Hanukkah gifts were skipped. I didn't complain — there were still plenty of Christmas gifts. One year the laze deepened and I was just on the brink of losing track of my belief in your favorite fat man and mine, the one and only chimney diver, bearer of brightly wrapped and bowed boxes, still cold from the icy pole from whence they came, Mr. Santa Claus. My parents figured they could get more sleep on Christmas Eve if they got some of the wrapping done in the weeks before the special day and put them under the tree as they wrapped. I must have gotten confused about my combo-faith (or just uncontrollably impatient for toys), because I started to sneak one present a day back to my bedroom to unwrap in the solitude of my room, hushed and high on the adrenaline of a child's crime. Didn't take long for my parents to notice. They were pretty mad. As Dylan himself laments on his Theme Time radio show, "Some people just don't have the spirit of Christmas. They think it's all about gift-giving. Though, to be more honest, I think a lot of 'em think it's more about gift-getting. Christmas is not about runnin' around the stores, spendin' money, and tryna' buy people's love and affection." It's about a lot of things. Including comfort, joy, figgy pudding, and music.

I love Christmas music. My mom was/is an old-school, screamin' and faintin' Elvis fan, so we have plenty of Elvis Christmas music. I like that "Silent Night" can sound kind of sexy in Elvis's voice. I can't seem to sing along to his "Blue Christmas" without lowering my eyelids and letting my top lip quiver. And I know the lazy velvet of Bing's Christmas repertoire like I know the smell of fresh baked bread. I impatiently look forward to it all year long like a little kid waiting for the first snowfall sticky enough for snowball wars and snow forts and snowmen. But those guys were church-going, God-fearing Christians, right? They can sing those songs however they want to and it will all sound like golden gospel. Those same songs in Bob Dylan's (née Zimmerman's) voice come out as a different gospel, and one that feels no less true. Dylan's voice singing Christmas songs is sweet and comfy. It conjures the gauzy memory of sitting on the rug next to the teetering, over-ornamented tree, when I was too young to even quite know who Santa was or what Christmas meant or that those big shiny colorful boxes had toys in them, but knowing all the words to all the songs and smiling with easy joy because if Christmas music is playing, it must be Christmas.

I first heard Dylan's polka-romp cover of "Must Be Santa" when it was meming around as a music video. It's the stand-out song on Christmas in the Heart, for me. It has a Santa-gone-wild, runaway sleigh energy that truly warms my halfie heart. And it's a weird roller-coaster dream to hear Dylan clowning the "ho, ho, ho's." The video is a little unsettling: Dylan's at a holiday house party and he keeps popping up unexpectedly. He's out of place, but comfortable, still enjoying himself, even amidst the maniacally smiley (super goy) partiers and the drunken chase-brawl that careens through things, sacrilegious and hip and honest in its interruption of the celebration of — what is it? — Christ's birthday? No one other than the camera notices the throwing of glasses or even the man swinging from a chandelier on his way out the door. Everyone, including Dylan, continues the song, knows all the words. The song itself, in humorous contrast to the adult-beverage setting, is a nursery rhyme list of Santa factoid essentials, an instruction manual for how to believe in Santa, a dictation of what to see in your mind's eye as you imagine him. So Dylan singing this song seems like proof that he may not exactly fit in at this Christmas party, but he still knows all the things there are to know about Santa. And really, what American doesn't?

This may offend some die-hard Dylan fans (and/or Tom Waits fans), but "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" comes out sounding a heck of a lot like a Tom Waits song (Dylan drawls it as "HAYrald Angels"), until his angelic back-up singers slip in, mugging sweetly in close harmonies, like the Boswell Sisters or some other assemblage of voices from another time that would sound just right on an old record player, the dustier the better. "Little Drummer Boy" is a bit over the edge for me. Hearing Dylan do the "ba-rum-ba-bum-bum" made me feel embarrassed for him. Though, again, the female back-up singers find some haunting slant-matched harmonies that give this track its own, new idiosyncratic personality. And, perhaps, maybe I just never liked singing this one. In junior-high chorus, I always imagined the little drummer boy as the baby Jesus — a personage I knew far too little about — which made me feel like I wasn't in the club, and maybe Santa wouldn't put anything but coal in my stocking that hung festively next to the rusting and tarnished menorah. Singing "Little Drummer Boy" in chorus as an awkward preteen atheist was about as comfortable as singing the same token Kwanza song every year, which is to say that it was no fun at all.

In "O' Come All Ye Faithful," "The First Noel," and "O' Little Town of Bethlehem," Dylan really does sound to me like a self-conscious Jew in a church (a feeling I have experienced on the few occasions I've been inside of an actual church during an actual service with singing and praising and whatnot). These are the songs I remember my gentile grandfather singing in a booming, choir-trained baritone beside a piano in a living room in Delaware with a fire roaring and "bubble-lights" (which, I believe, have been recalled due to the serious fire hazard they pose) bubbling merrily on the Christmas tree, though I'm not sure this did, in fact, ever happen in my life.

The rest of the album is perfectly reasonable 'round-the-yule-log fare, with some trickster flourishes here and there. Dylan's poetic sensibility sneaks in as he relishes the swinging alliteration of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland," letting all the w's wash together into a warm and cozy lullaby mumble. There's something deeply satisfying about the cheesy key modulations and boozy swaying rhythms of these songs that I really do know as well as some people know their prayers. I know them so well I don't remember learning the words, as if I were born with the knowledge of them — I know them in a way that really deserves to be described as "by heart" because I know them in my heart and not in my brain. One doesn't get in the Christmas "mindset" one gets into the Christmas spirit. It's reassuring to hear Dylan humoring this cross-section of melodies that I hold so dear. It's as if he's agreeing with me, that Christmas is not in the church or in Macy's or in Daddy Warbuck's Nutcracker-scale living room. It's truly in the heart. And I'm not afraid to say it if my ol' pal Bobby Zimmerman isn't.

Dylan has surprised us so many times, that even a Christmas album wasn't all that shocking to me. The man loves the music of the American everyman. And in this country, where, starting the day after Thanksgiving, it's difficult to find much else on the radio, it doesn't get much more universal than Christmas music. As silly as some of the songs may sound in Dylan's lupine sneer, he sings as if he loves these songs in the same ways I do — and he seems to be proving that these songs are for everyone to sing. As Christmas does in this country, these songs also, for the most part, transcend religion. They're part of the weird warm collective memory of Home and Childhood and Magic.

Download:

"Must Be Santa" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

"Hark the Herald Angels Sing" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

"Winter Wonderland" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

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"Mistletoe" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

"Figgy Pudding" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

"The Night Before Christmas" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year


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