B-sides For X-mas

Jimmy Osmond, 1976 — For my money, it just doesn’t get any better than thirteen-year-old Jimmy Osmond pleading with Santa not to bring him a sleigh for Christmas. See, there’s not enough snow and ice in Los Angeles — where Jimmy Osmond lived at the time — for a sleigh to be practical, or even useful. That’s all Jimmy’s saying. It just wouldn’t make sense, would it? A sleigh, in Los Angeles? Sacramento, maybe. Sure, it’s hardly the North Pole, but you’d be close enough to the mountains that you could just drive a few miles out of town — or get one of your eight siblings to drive you, in Jimmy’s case — to the country for the occasional sleigh ride. But not in Los Angeles. That’s just silly.

Grandaddy, 2000 — The best part about this dead-pan farce of a Christmas tune is that you get the sense that Grandaddy really does admire Parsons’ work. Why else would they devote nearly three minutes of bone-dry sarcasm to him?

Burl Ives, 1968 — A brown-nosing mouse wraps up a piece of cheese as a gift for Santa Claus, who names him “Santa Mouse,” and lets him hang out on Santa’s shoulder. Also, Burl Ives is completely insane.

Paul Revere and the Raiders, 1967 — Arguably the biggest band to come out the northwest (if you ignore that whole grunge thing), Paul Revere and the Raiders made one corker of a Christmas album, with bizarre psychedelic rock punctuated by interludes from an authentic Salvation Army band. Rain, Sleet, Snow — a musing on the efficacy of the postal service — is somehow the centerpiece of the record, and it’s probably the only track that could hold its own on a best-of compilation. If you have the means, I recommend listening to this one while drunk and/or heavily sedated.

Tony! Toni! Toné!, 1990 — This is just embarrassing. It sounds like it could easily have been an outtake from some forgotten holiday special episode of A Different World, yanked at the last minute because the song was making people irritable. It’s surprisingly religious for an early-90s R&B Christmas song. But listen to how seamlessly one of the Tonys intermixes the sacred with the profane: “So this Christmas Eve/I’m gonna lay out by the tree/Me and my girlie sharin’ the Word/Ooh, you know what I mean…/[squealing girl]/Opening up the presents.” So the song sucks, but you gotta give the Tonys some credit for their skillful use of holiday innuendo.

Bryan Adams, 1985 — I told you there’d be Bryan Adams. In a shining example of the over-wrought power balladry that made your sister cry in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, who else (besides perhaps Adam Sandler) would have absolutely no problem belting out lines like “To see the joy in the children’s eyes/The way that the old folks smile/Says that Christmas will never go away”? It’s that rare combination of glittering generalities and queasy sentimentality that earns Bryan Adams his rightful place as chaplain aboard the SS Holiday Cheese.

Bob Loftis, 1974 — The premise is simple: contrary to popular belief, Santa Claus is in fact a Texan, and something of a cowboy, though instead of roping/herding cattle, he laughs a lot and sings for his herd of reindeer. As they say, everything’s bigger in Texas, and you can’t get much bigger than Santa. This is a novel idea, of course, but Loftis presents practically zero evidence to back up his claim — even the anecdotal evidence you’d expect to be in a song devoted to the subject — so I’m unconvinced.

Prince and the Revolution, 1984 — Revolution-era Prince sings to his dead girlfriend, reminiscing about swimming and gambling (well, pokeno). We’re not sure if it was pneumonia or strep throat that did her in, but Prince admits to spending the last seven years drinking himself blind on banana daiquiris and admiring her younger sister. Fa la la la la, la la, la la.

Lou Monte, 1967 — One of the most important functions of art is to help us convey complicated ideas in a meaningful way, forging relationships and bridging gaps of time, space, and culture. Lou Monte wrestled with such an idea: how would Santa’s reindeer cope with the rocky terrain of the Italian peninsula? While the answer might seem obvious (Santa’s reindeer can fly), Lou Monte goes deeper than that, and tells us a story about a donkey. A christmas donkey.

Kurtis Blow, 1979 — Ignore the obvious pun in the title and the lack of any discernable hook, this novelty track was perhaps the first charting hip-hop single, ever. (Rapper’s Delight, the first hip-hop single to hit gold record status, was released a month or so later.) Its success launched the career of hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow, and introduced middle America to the awkward, angular cadence and barely-reinvented disco of early hip-hop. And like every other early hip-hop track, listen closely for the parts the Beastie Boys have sampled. (Hold it now…)

Bob Rich, 1970 — We’ve seen this one before — it came to my attention last year about three weeks too late. So to start off this year’s round of holiday goodness, here it is again. Information on this track is scarce, but it sports some unapologetically deep lyrics: “I’ve got Christmas in my pants/and my hands on my hips/I’ve got Easter for a zipper/and Shakespeare’s upper lip.” Whoa.