Twelve Christmas Wishes

A dozen artists who really should have made Christmas albums

Argh, I’m sorry. I really didn’t plan to take two weeks off from this here thang, but the combined hassles of doing a solo move, buying a car, trying to sort out my health coverage and generally starting my life over again completely dominated my waking hours this last fortnight. But thank you for your patience — and I am now officially out of boxes and out of the weeds, so let’s boogie…

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When my brilliant pal Rachel Lichtman posted the fake Christmas album cover above on her Instagram account a couple of weeks back, I laughed heartily at the idea of Scott Walker — the man MOJO magazine once aptly described as “Ingmar Sinatra” — crooning those holiday favorites in his existentially devastated baritone. But Rachel’s handiwork also struck a nerve with me, because this is the time of year when I inevitably spend way too much time thinking about how I wish this or that artist had made a Christmas album. And yeah, Scott is definitely included on that list.

As you may have gleaned from my last couple of posts here, I’ve always been a fan of Christmas music — even the really stiff and schmaltzy stuff. In fact, the stiff and schmaltzy stuff is pretty much what I grew up on; with the exception of John Fahey’s incredible The New Possibility and maybe one or two choral albums, nobody in my family owned much in the way of Christmas records, so the background music for wrapping and unwrapping usually came via whatever local radio station was ladling out the musical eggnog. Which is probably one of the reasons I have such a soft spot for this kind of stuff.

So it really blew my young mind when I first learned about A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records, a.k.a. Phil Spector’s Christmas Album. The notion that a popular recording artist (or producer) could take traditional carols that I’d sung in elementary school music class and put their own decidedly non-traditional stamp on them seemed wonderfully exciting to me. Obviously, Spector’s “Wall of Sound” arrangements were a perfect fit the holidays, what with their French horns and glockenspiels and such…

…but a further revelation came in the form of The Ventures’ Christmas Album, on which everyone’s favorite guitar-instro foursome twanged and jangled all the way through ten Christmas classics and a couple of holiday-themed originals. It’s still one of my all-time favorite Christmas albums, both because of the perfect brilliance of its concept and execution, and because it really motivated me to find out what other Christmas albums by my musical heroes might be lurking out there.

Of course, heroes (much like Santa Claus) can have a way of disappointing you. Neil Diamond’s Christmas albums are absolutely dire, and about every 10 years or so since the late 80s I’ve picked up another copy of Paul Revere & The Raiders’ A Christmas Present… and Past, hoping that it has somehow improved since I last heard it. (Spoiler alert: I bought a mint original 1967 pressing this year, and have to report upon further listens that it still pretty much sucks.)

And while it’s true that there’s a whole stack of great Christmas albums in the bins, including ones by favorite artists of mine ranging from Herb Alpert and Lou Rawls to Booker T. & The M.G.s and Los Straitjackets, I can’t help but be a little greedy and wish that there were still more out there that I have yet to discover. So, setting aside folks who released one great Christmas single and left it at that (Slade, Elton John, Otis Redding, etc.), here’s my dream dozen of Christmas albums that don’t exist:

Ahmad Jamal

A friend of mine recently (and quite correctly) opined that there’s no such thing as a bad Ahmad Jamal album, which is pretty amazing considering that the jazz pianist has been recording since 1951. However, none of his sixty-plus albums as a bandleader has been a Christmas album, which is a real shame — especially when his gorgeous 1961 rendition of Claude Thornhill’s “Snowfall” points to what might have been.

Herbie Mann

Jazz flautist Herbie Mann has a considerably more checkered discography, but some of that was willingness to really take chances and stretch out into unfamiliar musical territory. But a Christmas album was apparently too much of a stretch for a nice Jewish boy like Herbie; thus we were not only denied the the pleasure of hearing his languid, cognac-dipped flute renditions of various Yuletide classics, but also the inevitable album cover portraying him as a stripped-to-the-waist Santa.

Grant Green

If I could play guitar like anyone, it would be the late, great Grant Green. His fat tone, his funky swing, his conversational way with a melody, his nimble yet tasteful excursions around the fretboard… hearing him is always truly inspiring and soul-warming. Kenny Burrell, whose playing is in a similar bag, made a fantastic holiday LP (1966’s Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas) — which makes me think of how fantastic Grant’s could have been. I mean, just listen to his sublime take on “My Favorite Things”!

ABBA

Sweden’s greatest musical export finally got around to releasing a Christmas song last year (“Little Things”) as part of Voyage, the foursome’s first new album in 40 years. The song is nice, if a little on the sleepy side; but if they’d applied their Phil Spector obsessions, lush harmonies and falling-icicle piano bits to a Christmas album back in their peppier mid/late-70s heyday, it could have resulted in something truly wondrous.

KISS

Considering that these guys will do just about anything for money — and that they posed for the above pic as part of a holiday-themed photo session for CREEM magazine’s January 1977 cover (which hit the newsstands in December ‘76) — it’s kind of amazing that they never went the Merry Kissmas route. Personally, I would love to hear Paul Stanley belting out “FROTH-tee the THNOW-man” in full-on arena drag queen mode, and I’m sure Gene and Paul could have easily cooked up a few good double-entendre originals regarding candy canes, Yule logs and stuffed stockings for good measure.

Billy Stewart

An incredible singer who still doesn’t get his full due, the late, great Billy Stewart was truly one of those “could sing the phone book” types. And if you’ve heard his transcendent George Gershwin cover, you can just imagine what he would have done with Irving Berlin.

Dusty Springfield

Speaking of people who could make even the phone book sing… Dusty did record this lovely Christmas single for charity in 1964, which has since been repackaged into an album with several earlier Christmas songs cut by her folk-pop trio The Springfields. Still, I really wish she would have cut an entire Christmas album in her late-60s Dusty In Memphis prime.

Schoolly D

My favorite old-school rapper — best known nowadays for his theme from Aqua Teen Hunger Force — could easily have made the dopest Christmas hip-hop album ever, complete with gritty tales of Santa stick-ups and elf-delivered beatdowns. I mean, “Same White Bitch (Got You Strung Out On Candy Canes)” would have been an easy enough jumping-off point, but alas…

Link Wray

Another guitarist I never tire of listening to — though for completely different reasons than Grant Green — ol’ one-lung Link and his growling guitar could have severely roughed up any Christmas classic in their path. But he also had an endearingly tender side, as heard on “Golden Strings (Based on a Chopin Etude)”. Though I couldn’t tell you which Chopin piece it’s actually based upon, I can easily imagine Link delivering a sweet “Silent Night” or “Silver Bells” along with bruising renditions of “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.

Doug Sahm

Christmas is an emotionally loaded time of year. It’s supposed to be all about “Joy to the World,” but it brings up all kinds of sadness and trauma for a lot of folks, and it has a way of intensifying and amplifying any feelings of sorrow, loneliness or unworthiness that you may already be experiencing. Which is why it’s too bad that Sir Doug’s Far-Out Christmas does not actually exist. The late, great Sir Douglas Quintet leader had a knack for injecting a warm sense of low-key cosmic joy into just about everything he every recorded, and I can easily envision him making a gently uplifting album of psilocybin-laced originals recasting Santa’s North Pole workshop as a groover’s paradise.

The Troggs

The Troggs are one of my all-time favorite bands, but it’s probably for the best that they never made a Christmas album. Though they could/should have made a stomping, eyebrow-singeing collection of rocked-up carols and leering originals inviting you to come over and sit on Santa’s lap, it’s more than likely that their soppy side would have come front and center on such a project — think “Christmas is All Around Me” from that cinematic excrescence Love Actually. Therefore, my alternate-reality suggestion would be for Reg Presley and the boys from Andover to narrate/star in an audio version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in their inimitably foul-mouthed West Country way, with Reg starring as Ebeneezer Scrooge. “You there, boy,” he’d cry out, “What feckin’ day is today?” “Why, it’s Christmas you big pranny,” Ronnie Bond would respond.

Tom Jones

ToJo’s 1969-1971 TV variety series This Is Tom Jones was massively entertaining on the whole, but the show’s Christmas specials were unfortunately pretty rough-going. A straitlaced reading of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” backed by the Treorchy Male Choir? Er, no thanks. I would much rather hear the Pontypridd Powerpack putting his priapic pipes into raunchy, hip-thrusting Christmas fare like “Back Door Santa” or “Santa Claus is Back in Town,” ideally as part of an album entitled, say, My Sack is Bigger Than Santa’s or Wendell in a Winter Wonderland (if you know, you know). There’s still time, Sir Tom — put down those Leonard Cohen songs and get festive for us!

Happy Holidays to you all, by the way. Thanks again for reading and supporting this Substack — and feel free to add any Christmas albums YOU wish existed in the comments thread below!

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