In-Flight Entertainment, Part 2
Another audio flashback to the golden age of air travel
I always loved the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day when I was a kid.
Much as I truly enjoyed the bell-jingling run-up to the holiday, some of my sweetest “Christmas” memories of my childhood actually hail from its immediate aftermath, those times when I could almost physically feel the collective pressure to make merry gently deflating, like the air being let out of an over-pumped tire. Once all the presents had been unwrapped and the family feasts consumed, I was free to just slink off by myself and play with my new toys, read my new books (or my Uncle John’s collection of EC comics), draw pictures, watch football games on TV, listen to music on the radio, or some relaxing combination thereof.
Christmas music was typically part of this equation. As with Christmas lights, I’ve never believed that Christmas music is something that should be turned off as soon as the calendar hits December 26. Even as an adult, I enjoy basking in both of those things during the last week of the year; if anything, I tend to gravitate in this time towards the mellower, dreamier end of the Christmas music spectrum — a la the (allegedly) Jackie Gleason-conducted orchestral records, or the quieter and more introspective moments of Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack — mostly because it’s such great stuff to space out to while vegging out, silently enjoying the glow of the colored lights and digesting whatever random combination of holiday leftovers I’ve been snacking on. The harshness of the New Year will arrive abruptly enough, so why not revel in the sweetness of the holiday season for just a little while longer?
The U of M Wolverines’ annual Bo Schembechler-led Bowl loss aside, the flight back to Michigan after spending Christmas in L.A. or Alabama was always the first unhappy event of my new year circa 1973-78. Sure, it was always sad to say goodbye to our mom and her side of the family, but mostly I just really resented having to return to the icy grey mid-winter of the Midwest. The first time I spent the holidays in Los Angeles, my enchantment with the 70-degree December days and the palm trees wrapped in Christmas lights quickly gave way to anger at my parents for making us live in a place with such brutally cold winters. To my seething seven year-old brain, this was clearly all part of the same broad parental conspiracy that involved them buying wheat bread instead of Wonder, driving a Saab station wagon instead of an American-built one with fake wooden paneling on the side, and making me go to bed at 9 p.m. Now that I’d witnessed the Southern California sun firsthand, I was absolutely livid at having to exchange it for another three months of frigid misery. It just was not FAIR…
The one thing that eased my intense upset on that flight to Detroit Metro in early January 1974 was the music magically contained in the arm rest of my seat, which I listened to through a rubber-tipped plastic headset that the flight attendants handed out at the beginning of our trip. I guess it was too early in the month for the airline to have updated its programming, because I distinctly remember listening to the same 12-15 song Christmas playlist on that flight that I’d heard on the way to LAX. But this was fine with me; those snow-packed songs like “White Christmas” and “Sleigh Rude” actually brought back sun-lit memories of the wonderful holiday I’d just experienced, and genuinely warmed my heart a bit at a time when it was feeling particularly icy.
I was thinking of that flight again the other day when A Magnificent Panorama of Stereo Sound showed up at my door. One of many reel-to-reel tape compilations manufactured during the 1960s and early 70s in an arrangement between major airlines and major record labels, A Magnificent Panorama of Stereo Sound is now (thanks to the Ebay seller who sold it to me at a very reasonable price) the second such American Airlines comp in my R2R collection, and — not coincidentally — also the second one featuring artists from A&M records. The first, American Airlines Astrovision Popular Program No. 38, was something you may remember me writing about just a little over a year ago…
As I mentioned in that previous JTL piece, A&M Records had (for the most part) a pretty distinctive sound in the late 1960s, one whose smooth, sophisticated and slightly exotic elements totally meshed with the idealized vision of luxurious airline travel that was still being promoted while I was a kid. And as wonderful as American Airlines Astrovision Popular Program No. 38 is, I daresay that A Magnificent Panorama of Stereo Sound delivers an even more delicious in-flight listening experience, even if you’re only flying in your head. Plus, this compilation features a handful of Christmas tunes scattered throughout its 60-track playlist, making it perfect for this particular moment in time where you’re moving away from the holiday but not entirely ready to let it go… just as I was on that LAX-DTW flight back in January 1974.
Released in 1969, A Magnificent Panorama of Stereo Sound is similar to Astrovision Popular Program No. 38 in that it’s heavy on such A&M mainstays as Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Sérgio Mendes and Brasil 66, Burt Bacharach and the Baja Marimba Band while also slipping some up-and-coming and/or not-as-popular A&M artists into the mix. While the selection isn’t entirely bulletproof — I was never much of a We Five fan, and I would really love to travel back in time and tell Jerry Moss, “Stop trying to make Jimmie Rodgers happen!” — its “cocktails at 35,000 feet” quotient is still impressively high, thanks in part to then-recent additions of Paul Desmond, Walter Wanderley and George Benson to the A&M roster.
The three-hour program is a total joy to get lost in, which is why — as with Astrovision Popular Program No. 38 — I decided to go ahead and put all its songs on a Spotify playlist, so that other folks could enjoy this compilation as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson selections (including their mind-blowing version of Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman”) anywhere on Spotify, so instead I inserted renditions of the same tracks by such period-appropriate folks as Brasil 66, The Soulful Strings and Gabor Szabo. I think it works…
Whether you’re flying home this week, or you’re already there and kicking back comfortably, I highly recommend this collection as something that’ll both enhance and take the edge off of what remains of this holiday season. Cheers!
Gabor Szabo was an absolute genius.
Side note: my Pop introduced me to the elegant guitar work of Wes Montgomery in 1973. Great memories here. Thanks, young feller.
Along with rock, soul, and chicken kickin’ country, this kind of music was more popular than you might suppose at the tape center in one of my Army libraries in Vietnam in 1970. I still have some of the playlists that the soldiers used to order music recorded from albums onto their blank reel to reel tapes. We didn’t call the playlists then though. They were just lists typed from the album covers.