“One more time, yeah! Santa Claus is comin’ to town. Oh, yeah!”
“Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Plastic Ono Band and the Harlem Community Choir, released as a single, 1971. A remastered version is available on “Gimme Some Truth,” a 4-CD compilation released in 2010. Also available digitally.
“And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?”
Enjoy your holidays, everyone.
Please visit our companion blog, The Midnight Tracker, for more vintage vinyl, one side at a time.
There once was a time when you’d find Christmas music posted here pretty much every day before Dec. 25. Those days are long gone.
My passion for Christmas music has waned. It seems like the soundtrack to all the insanity, all the hype of the Christmas retail machine.
Instead, I’m going zen, remaining open to random, inspired moments of Christmas music. The unexpected. The genuine. One such moment when our son and his fellow university chamber singers performed “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” a week ago. Enjoyed that.
“I found out about Alice McClarity’s ‘Go Tell It On The Mountain’ from a friend’s Christmas compilation and haven’t been able to find anything about it online. I’d love to hear some other tracks.”
There we go. Some random inspiration at Christmas.
Six years ago, we featured some cuts from “Christmas Gospelodium,” which was released on the Verve label in 1967. That Alice McClarity song was one of them. I’d found it in a thrift store in Madison, Wisconsin. Had never seen it before. Haven’t seen it since.
It’s a compilation that was co-produced, arranged and conducted by Robert Banks, a gospel singer, pianist and choral director.
Robert Banks is best known among soul fans, and Northern Soul fans particularly, for the rocking “A Mighty Good Way” on Verve. … Banks recorded an album for Verve, “The Message,” which featured Banks and other soloists doing gospel tunes with touches of soul and pop.”
That pretty much describes “Christmas Gospelodium,” too. Hear, then, five more cuts not included in our long-ago post (which has been updated with the three cuts posted back then).
When we were kids, there always were a few baseball or football cards that just never turned up. Not for you, not for your friends, seemingly not for anyone where you lived.
So it was in the spring of 1968. No one in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, had Cookie Rojas, No. 39 from the first series of that year’s Topps baseball card set.
Fast forward to the spring of 1972. We had moved to Wausau, Wisconsin, about 150 miles to the northwest. My new best friend Glick and I bonded over many things, music and baseball cards among them.
As we talked about hard-to-get cards one day, I mentioned Cookie Rojas from 1968. Glick gave me his best you-must-be-shitting-me look. Cookie Rojas? He reached for his cards and said something like “Here, how many do you want?”
Somehow, Cookie Rojas was much more widely distributed in packs sold in Wausau than in packs sold in Sheboygan. Go figure.
Which brings us back to record digging, as usually happens here.
Last month’s vacation provided my first opportunity to go digging in the South. As you’d expect, there are lots more soul records in Mississippi and Tennessee than in Wisconsin. Not quite the same as the random Cookie Rojas distribution model, but there are similarities.
While digging through the soul records at one stop, I looked up and had my own you-must-be-shitting-me moment. There, on the wall, was a copy of this record, priced at $25 or so.
The Esquires, from Milwaukee, on the Bunky Records label out of Milwaukee. As you’d imagine, this is one of the soul records we see in Wisconsin. They likely don’t see it as much in the South, even if it was distributed nationally by Scepter Records.
I’ve found two copies of this LP in Wisconsin, and I don’t think I paid more than $5 for them combined. Can’t imagine paying $25 for it. I mentioned that to my friend Larry, who runs the fine Funky 16 Corners and Iron Leg blogs.
“It’s the regional discount,” he sagely advised.
That said, this summer, I think I’m going to get on up …
… seeking records (and perhaps a regional discount) not found in Wisconsin.
(“And Get Away” was the soundalike follow-up to “Get On Up,” the Esquires’ biggest hit. It also did well on the charts, peaking at No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reaching No. 9 on the black singles chart.)
(Three years ago, Larry told me his copy of this LP “was among the many fine albums sacrificed in the vinyl-to-CD purge in the 80s.” So, after I found a second copy, I sent one to Larry in New Jersey.)
Please visit our companion blog, The Midnight Tracker, for more vintage vinyl, one side at a time.
It was late 1969, when I was 12, that I really started listening to music. That year, I got a Panasonic AM-FM radio for Christmas. This model, though this is not my radio. I still have mine. It still works, even though the antenna long ago was bent, then broken off.
I put it atop the filing cabinet where I kept my baseball, football and basketball cards and tuned it to 920 AM — WOKY, the Mighty 92 out of Milwaukee. WOKY was one of the big Top 40 stations of the day.
When it came to this time of year in 1970, I heard a song that blew me away. This song.
I had no idea there was that kind of Christmas music — pop, rock, R&B and soul versions of Christmas songs, all played only at a certain time of year. I once was passionate about that kind of Christmas music. Now, not so much.
Today’s tunes are the ones I dug first. I still dig them. It wouldn’t be Christmas without them.
“Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Plastic Ono Band and the Harlem Community Choir, released as a single, 1971. A remastered version is available on “Gimme Some Truth,” a 4-CD compilation released in 2010.
“And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?”
Please visit our companion blog, The Midnight Tracker, for more vintage vinyl, one side at a time.
“Someday at Christmas,” Stevie Wonder, 1967, from “A Motown Christmas,” 1973. That tremendous compilation, one of the first Christmas records we bought back in the late ’70s, is out of print but is available digitally.
This is the title track from Wonder’s 1967 Christmas record. A Motown original written by Ron Miller and Bryan Wells, it addresses the social concerns of that time — and of our time — war, poverty, hunger, civil rights, injustice.
“Someday at Christmas, man will not fail Hate will be gone and love will prevail”
Someday.
Enjoy your holidays, everyone.
Please visit our other blog, The Midnight Tracker, for more vintage vinyl, one side at a time.
Driving home from the post office just now, the guys on the morning radio show were wrapping up an interview about football.
Then they took a left turn and asked their guest this: Which TV actress was your crush while growing up?
The guest reached back into his memory bank — way back, apparently — and mentioned an actress from a show that aired in the late ’80s and went off the air in 1990.
Another was Connie Stevens, who is one of the TV stars who sing on this Christmas record.
I have this record jacket, but not the record that’s supposed to be inside. I didn’t look closely enough when I picked it out of a dollar record bin a couple of years ago. This is “We Wish You A Merry Christmas: 15 Great Christmas Favorites Sung By Warner Bros. Stars,” from 1959. You can read about it here and here.
So I believe at this moment, I will embrace my older-than-dirtness, retreat to a more innocent time and drop a song that those of us of a certain age enjoyed when we were younger. It isn’t Christmas without this song, either. People still dig it.
The Royal Guardsmen, who got started in Ocala, Florida, in the mid-’60s are still around, still recording and playing the occasional gig. Three of the original six members, that is. Lead singer Barry Winslow and drummer John Burdett appear to have some kind of beef with the group’s management, but support the current lineup and wish them well.
Your Christmas music requests in the comments, please.
Please visit our other blog, The Midnight Tracker, for more vintage vinyl, one side at a time.
Heading out to lunch today, we saw a campaign sign stuck in the ground at the corner as we turned onto the highway. Heading home, we saw three more on the other side of the corner.
The only problem: You can’t plant campaign signs on the public portion of highway right-of-day in Wisconsin.
My friend Glick checked the law and sagely observed: “Fines: $10 to $100. The cynic in me thinks some will see this as chump change and a small cost of doing business.”
He could be right. Perhaps it’s all part of …
“The Plot,” Lalo Schifrin, from “Music from ‘Mission: Impossible’,” 1967. It’s out of print, even a 1996 CD reissue.
If you watched “Mission: Impossible” at all during the ’60s and ’70s, you probably heard bits of this as things got dicey. This is the full version, one you may not have heard, complete with groovy, mood-setting harpsichord.
This is just a little taste of what’s new at The Midnight Tracker, a lightly-traveled blog where we feature album sides brought back from the sweet blue haze of time. Your mission there, should you decide to accept it, is to enjoy our notion of a soundtrack for the political intrigue of the moment.
Just watched "Chef," the Jon Favreau movie from last year. Really good. Lots of pleasant surprises. Great soundtrack. Highly recommended. 1 week ago
Late to the party
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About the words
The text is copyright 2007-2015, Jeff Ash. Text from other sources, when excerpted, is credited.
About the music
These are mp3s from my collection, taken from vinyl whenever possible. Enjoy. They are intended to encourage you to get out to the music stores, real or virtual, or out to support live music.
If you hold the copyright to something posted here, and you don't want it posted, please e-mail me at jeffash at new dot rr dot com and I'll remove it. Then again, who else is exposing your music to a new audience today?
