Christmas is a time of music, unfortunately. Nowadays they start in October, and by November they are inescapable: Christmas carols, Christmas songs, Christmas jingles. Merchants long ago discovered the commercial value in pressing Christmas into our skulls through every orifice, and the music business was not far behind it: Christmas songs sell. Most are dreadful, but then most of everything is dreadful. A few, a very few, have entered the canon. But there is only one Christmas song that truly matters.
Dave Bidini: Fairytale of New York is the only Christmas song that matters
The Pogues’ Christmas masterpiece, Fairytale of New York, is the one seasonal hymn I can hear over and over without feeling like I’ve eaten too much caramel bark. I know about David Bowie and Der Bingle and Run, Run Rudolph and I Want a Beatles for Xmas and The Dickies version of Silent Night, and I like these, too. I used to like Do They Know It’s Christmas? until they remade the song and dropped Bono’s “Thank God it’s them, instead of you” line, which best expressed the complications of the season. I also very much like The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping, which is my dad’s favourite Christmas song, and which we try to listen to every year. My dad is in his eighties and the song is from 1981, although, for us, Dec. 25 isn’t an ’80s revival. As you can see, the decade never actually left us. It’s the rest of you who are late.
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My once stablemate at the National Post, Dave Bidini, has made the case for The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, and it is indeed a perfectly listenable song. Others might stump for Bruce Springsteen’s version of Santa Claus is Coming To Town, or The Pretenders’ 2000 Miles. Bob Seger’s tender, wistful Sock It To Me Santa (“Christmas just won’t be a drag/Cause Santa’s got a brand new bag! WHAAAAOOW!”) has its moments, as does James Brown’s Go Power At Christmas (no, I don’t know what it means, either). I would not kick you downstairs for suggesting Merle Haggard’s If We Make It Through December, or even Chuck Berry’s Run Rudolph Run.
But all of these are mere songs. Only one is an event: part emotional journey, part call to arms, part sonic restaging of the invasion of Normandy. I’m talking about Darlene Love’s incomparable 1963 recording of Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), a song almost nobody heard when it first came out but which has grown over the years into not just a classic, but the classic, the greatest Christmas song ever.
Nothing in Ms. Love’s career before then would have suggested she was destined for such things. Though an undoubted talent, she had been largely confined to singing backup. (That’s her somewhere in the mix on The Monster Mash). When she finally recorded her first hit, He’s A Rebel, with her backing group The Blossoms, it was as The Crystals — a surprise to the real Crystals, no doubt.
She was, however, part of the stable of artists around Phil Spector, the reclusive musical genius (and paranoid murderer, but that’s another story) responsible for some of the greatest recordings of the rock ’n’ roll era. And so she came to be among those assembled in a Los Angeles studio in the summer of 1963 to record the album A Christmas Gift For You— a shimmering, perfect expression of his famous Wall of Sound production style, featuring some of the best performances his roster of girl groups ever gave. There’s The Ronettes doing Sleigh Ride and The Crystals doing Santa Claus is Coming To Town (the model for Springsteen) and a dozen other favourites. And towering over them all is That Song.
Written by the husband-and-wife team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich (Spector’s contributions also earned him a writing credit), the song is a simple statement of longing for an absent lover, made the more acute because, well, it’s Christmas. It starts innocuously enough: strings vibrating expectantly, a tentative bass line or two, the occasional bell. Then, Gallipoli. A barrage of drums layered over a honking saxophone, a vast chorus intoning “Christmas” over and over, and — nothing quite prepares you for this entrance — Ms. Love herself.
The story is told that Spector originally wanted Ronnie Bennett of the Ronettes, his hottest commercial property and future wife, to sing the song, but that she just didn’t have the pipes for it. Ms. Love, let it be said, has miles and miles of pipe. There is no quiet yearning here, no soft imploring. From the first line (“THE SNOW’S COMING DOWN…”), she is bellowing at the top of her world-class lungs. The Please in the title is purely rhetorical: whoever Baby is, he is under strict orders to Come Home this instant, and wherever he is I am willing to bet that he can hear her, unaided.
Her frustration builds through three verses of rising discontent, the dismal absence of Baby repeatedly contrasted with the oppressive happiness of her surroundings. Drums boom, bells chime, the “Christmas” chorus drones, and Ms. Love rampages through her checklist of infuriation — church bells… pretty lights… happy sounds — and the refrain:
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.
At length a saxophone intervenes, bringing hopes that peace might yet be possible. But then Ms. Love returns, and it is clear her condition has deteriorated further. “IF THERE was a WAAAAY…” she wails, “I’d HOLD BACK this TEEAR… But it’s CHRISTMAS DAY… ”
And it’s at this point — exactly 1:58 in — that the song loses its mind.
Ms. Love had until then been relatively restrained, in her own overpowering way. At the thought of it being Christmas Day, she collapses. “Please,” she sobs. The chorus, having made its point that it is indeed Christmas, now turns to taunting her. “Please.” “Please.” “Please.” “Please.” “Please please please please please please…”
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With everyone’s attention thus distracted, the piano player (Leon Russell, if you’re scoring) shows up. It’s not clear where he’s been until now, but he takes over the song — a series of escalating crash chords that lift it, with the power and dignity of a Saturn Five rocket, into the stratosphere. The drums, all four hundred of them, take this as a signal to fire at will, the chorus keeps pleading, while Ms. Love’s voice effortlessly soars above them all: “Baby please come HOOOOME!” The effect is altogether devastating: tingling scalp, moistened eyes, the works. There’s not another moment like it in popular music.
From there order breaks down more or less completely. The song fades while the piano overcomes any remaining resistance and the drums shoot the wounded. I imagine the studio being filled with acrid smoke and overturned chairs. Spector is said to have been so carried away by one of Russell’s piano lines that he ran out of the control booth and handed him a hundred dollar bill on the spot. Which was about as much as the record made: It was released on Nov. 22, 1963, its glistening innocence made instantly obsolete.
And yet the song is still with us, as is the redoubtable Ms. Love, at 76 still belting it out, as in her annual appearance on the David Letterman Show (this week’s was the last). Baby, thankfully, never did come home.
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