It's Christmas Time in the City

Bing Crosby — "Silver Bells" (1950)

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers! Thanks so much to all of you who have recently come aboard as subscribers, both free and paid. Having you join the JTL party lights me up like the proverbial Christmas tree.

If you’re new here, check out our mission statement. Unlike some music blogs, I rarely linger for long on one musical style or era — my brain just doesn’t work that way. Last week we had Part One of my multi-part 2002 interview with Lemmy of Motörhead, and a round-up of holiday Muzak mixes for department stores of the 1960s and ‘70s; on Tuesday, we’ll debut the first episode of my new podcast partnership with

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith

, where we’ll talk about The Jam’s brilliant 1979 album Setting Sons. And today, we go all the way back to 1950 to celebrate a certain Christmas classic.

You rarely know where the Jagged Time Lapse time machine will land — and neither do I, which is part of what makes this Substack so much fun to write. Hopefully you’ll find it fun and edifying to read, as well…

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This past week, my mom and I were having lunch together, and listening to one of the aforementioned Xmas Muzak mixes while we ate. We talked nostalgically of Christmases past — I can still vividly remember every one of them from 1968 to 1981, though they do tend to get a little fuzzy after that — and about our favorite Christmas songs. We came to the realization that, for the both of us, no holiday favorite possesses quite the same nostalgic kick as “Silver Bells”.

Written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans — who would later pen Doris Day’s “Que Sera Sera” and the TV themes for both Bonanza and Mr. Ed — “Silver Bells” was originally featured in the Bob Hope vehicle The Lemon Drop Kid, which was filmed in the summer of 1950 but not released until 1951. Bob Hope apparently sings the song in the film, which sounds like a grim prospect, indeed. However, someone was smart enough to have Hope’s Road to… travel partner Bing Crosby record “Silver Bells” with actress Carol Richards and release it before the film came out, in time for Christmas 1950. And thus, a holiday classic was born.

Simple yet extremely evocative, “Silver Bells” gets the job done with just a couple of verses and choruses. It’s a shiny snow globe of a song, one which captures a sparkling, idealized urban scene of cheerful Christmas shoppers, excited kids and bell-jingling street-corner Santas. This is a world free of most societal ills, not to mention frenzied “doorbuster” sales, flash-mob shoplifters or bottom line-driven December layoffs (and fat Christmas bonuses for the executives who sign off on them); a world where the spare change dropped into the Santas’ red buckets actually goes to the poor instead of some bigoted and discriminatory religious bureaucracy. There’s no stress, just smiles, and everyone is digging the pre-Christmas vibes. It’s a world that probably never really existed — but then again, I don’t go to Christmas music for a dose of reality.

No, I spin Christmas music because of the nostalgic feelings and memories it churns up for me. I was lucky enough to have always had happy Christmases as a child, to have always spent them with people I loved and who made me feel safe and warm and loved in return. And that’s where “Silver Bells” transports me — to Christmas-shopping forays with my parents, aunts and grandparents during the 1970s, to the elaborate window displays of department stores in Detroit (Hudson’s), Milwaukee (Gimbels), Los Angeles (Bullocks Wilshire) and New York City (Lord & Taylor). It takes me back to that dream-like “Black Friday” of 1980, where I explored Chicago’s Loop by myself for the very first time, and came home with the Bing Crosby Christmas album that just so happened to have “Silver Bells” on it.

It also transports me to Christmas 1994 at Bob Stupak’s Vegas World. Now part of the Stratosphere Resort, Vegas World was a seedy space-themed casino and hotel located in an equally seedy part of town located due north of “The Strip” and southwest of Downtown Las Vegas. Owned by entrepreneur, motorcycle enthusiast and failed political candidate Bob Stupak, Vegas World featured a thousand-foot Space Needle-esque “observation tower” — or at least, it would have, if the casino had ever gotten around to completing it. (Stupak’s local reputation was dubious enough by then that when the half-finished tower caught fire in August 1993, rumors immediately spread that he’d done it to score an insurance payout.)

My friends and I had already been in Vegas for a few days at this point, enjoying some of the Strip’s glitzier attractions, like Christmas Eve dinner at Treasure Island’s Buccaneer Bay Club, a lavish repast which gave us a fantastic view of the nightly pirate show out front, and also accidentally afforded us the opportunity to share a fabulously awkward elevator ride with the ancient comedian Red Buttons and his not-so-ancient date for the evening. But by now, we’d become a little bored with the Strip’s never-ending megawatt bombardment of the senses, so our goal for this rainy Christmas night was to experience something a little more trashy than flashy.

“Are you sure you really want to go there?” our cabby asked us, when we asked him to take us to Bob Stupak’s Vegas World. “It might be hard to get a cab back.” We thanked him for his concern, but assured him that we did indeed want to go there. “Okay,” he shrugged, then proceeded during the ride to regale us about the place’s history, and what a disaster it had become — its decline having begun several years earlier when a windstorm had actually blown down the hotel’s giant sign. “Folks around here call him ‘Bob Stupid,’” he added.

“Disaster” turned out to be a pretty apt way to describe it. Whereas the front entrances of every other big Vegas casino we’d visited were brightly lit and bustling with activity, there wasn’t a soul — or even a working lightbulb — to be seen at the Vegas World entrance where the taxi dropped us off. The first things we saw once we actually walked into the place were orange traffic cones and dozens of yards of yellow “Do Not Cross” tape, all of which were blocking off the entrance to the casino’s Galaxy Showroom. The day’s torrential rains had apparently flooded the theater; Marty “Hello Dere!” Allen would not be performing that night as scheduled.

As for the Vegas World casino itself… I can’t think of too many other places I’ve visited that were simultaneously this weird and this bleak. Mannequins dressed as astronauts hung suspended from the darkened ceiling, along with models of rockets, space capsules and lunar modules, giving the room the feel of a broke-ass aerospace museum with gaming tables and slot machines. At the center of the room sat a lucite display case, famously filled with an alleged million dollars in cash — cash which had clearly been sitting there for awhile, judging by the considerable amount of cobwebs that had accumulated on it. There were a handful of lights and wreaths half-heartedly hung around the casino, which was largely (if sparsely) populated by locals — I’m pretty sure we were the only tourists there — but I think even Santa himself would have found it difficult to bring some Christmas cheer to this dump.

We’d heard that it was a better bet to play the slots at casinos that catered to locals (the theory being that Strip machines were “tighter,” since the big hotels didn’t really need big payouts to lure in the tourists), but nobody here tonight was hitting the jackpot. At every other casino we’d been to, the white noise of ringing machines and clinking quarters washed over the entire place like a metallic waterfall; here at Vegas World, it was the stillness that practically deafened you, with only the plink or plunk of a paltry payout serving as an occasional reminder that the room wasn’t actually encased in silent, smoke-filled amber, and that you (probably) hadn’t had a stroke.

And then, right on cue — just as I’d passed two elderly women languidly playing the slots while simultaneously smoking cigarettes through their tracheotomy holes — I heard it. Someone at the casino had remembered to hit “play” on the piped-in music, and suddenly there was Bing, smoothly crooning “Silver Bells” with off-time accompaniment provided by the sluggish slot machines.

Silver Bells

Sil-

[plunk]

-ver Bells

It’s

[ker-plink plink]

Christmas Time

In the Ci-

[plunk]

ty

It was all so wrong, like egg nog spiked with grain alcohol or mulled wine made from Night Train. And yet, on this dismal Christmas night in that dying casino, Der Bingle made it all seem so right.

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