Christmas Shuffle #28

On By jbIn Christmas, Random Universe3 Comments
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I promised you another shuffle before Christmas came this year, and I’m sliding in just under the wire.

“Little Drummer Boy”/Ottmar Liebert. Back when I was programming Christmas music on the radio, I think my station’s library had more versions of “The Little Drummer Boy” than any other Christmas song. Liebert’s guitar version is fine, although this blog is on record as saying there are only three truly good versions: the 1958 original by the Harry Simeone Chorale, the one by Kenny Burrell on his 1966 album Have Yourself a Soulful Little Christmas, and Daryl Stuermer’s version on the first GRP Christmas Collection, released in 1988.

“Socks”/J. D. McPherson. When my first nephew was little, my wife and I used to tell him that if he didn’t give us a Christmas list, he was going to get socks and underwear—and we followed through on the threat at least once. He was probably 12 or 13 the year he gave me socks and underwear, and he was very pleased with himself. Joke’s on you, kid. I was happy to get them then, and I’d be happy to get them any year. I linked to the entire Socks album in last week’s shuffle post.

“Arbolito de Navidad”/Los Lobos
“Feliz Navidad”/Los Lonely Boys
In the process of recording their 2019 album Llegó Navidad, Los Lobos assembled dozens of Latin Christmas songs spanning many cultures and whittled the list down to 12. I expect that most will be new to you, although the band covers “Dónde Está Santa Claus” and the Christmas warhorse “Feliz Navidad.” Los Lonely Boys, three Texas brothers, do a rockin’ good version of the latter on their album Christmas Spirit from 2008.

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”/Joe Sample. From the 2003 compilation Christmas for Lovers, which is exactly it says on the label: an album of mellow, romantic jazz interpretations of Christmas songs both familiar and not. Sample’s track is a solo piano improvisation that renders the song almost unrecognizable. Which, in the case of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” is not a bad thing.

“O Holy Night”/Supremes
“O Holy Night”/Perry Como
The Supremes album Merry Christmas is 60 years old in 2025. “O Holy Night” wasn’t on it, however, until the 2015 digital reissue. Florence Ballard takes a rare lead vocal and is magnificent. Neither Ballard nor Como sing the lesser-known third verse, however, which some so-called Christians might want to cancel for  wokeness:

Truly he taught us to love one another
His law is love and his gospel is peace
Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother
And in his name all oppression shall cease

“Go Tell It on the Mountain”/Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. A Season for Miracles, released in 1970, might be the best of all the Motown Christmas albums, and it’s one of the biggest sellers. Motown’s Christmas music tended toward the very traditional or the very schlocky. But the Miracles’ soulful-yet-reverent “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is right up there with the Jackson Five’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and Stevie Wonder’s “What Christmas Means to Me” as the most joyous of all Motown Christmas songs.

“My Boyfriend’s Coming Home for Christmas”/Toni Wine. This song about a soldier coming home on leave was a modest seasonal hit in 1963, when Wine was just 16 years old. Apart from several important songwriting credits, Toni Wine was also one of the voices of the Archies. She’s the one who sang “I’m gonna make your life so sweet,” and she should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her performance of that line alone.

“Jingle Bells”/Willie Nelson. Willie’s 1979 collaboration with Booker T. Jones, Pretty Paper, is in the hot rotation at our house every Christmas. Veteran music critic Nate Chinen recently wrote a good appreciation of the album. (Also, the New Yorker‘s new profile of Willie is fantastic.) “Jingle Bells” itself is so familiar that it seems like it must always have existed, but it was written by John L. Pierpont in 1857 for a blackface minstrel show. According to journalist Khalil Greene, it’s racist as hell, although the racist references in the lyric were long ago lost to history.

WordPress tells me that what you are reading is the 3,000th published post in the history of this website, a milestone that has been a long time coming considering the long silences here in 2025. I feel like I’m getting some of my writer’s mojo back as the year ends, however, and if you have stayed with me, I am grateful. Also, I wish you and yours a happy holiday. 

Christmas Shuffle #27

On By jbIn Christmas, Random Universe3 Comments
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The Christmas shuffle tradition, with 10 tracks from my laptop music stash yakked up at random, started here in 2007, and I feel a yearly obligation to keep it up, so here’s one for 2025. This is the 27th in the series; you can find others here. My plan at the moment is to try and get one more of these up before the day arrives, so stay tuned and see if that actually happens.

“Baby It’s Cold Outside”/Robert Palmer and Carnie Wilson. No matter who’s singing it, “Baby It’s Cold Outside” usually runs on two tracks—the woman wants to go home, the man wants her to stay with him, and each one tries to persuade the other while they talk past each other. Here, Carnie sings fetchingly while Robert is only slightly less subtle than Pepe Le Pew. Their singing styles are so different that you don’t for a moment believe they’ve ever met, let alone spent an evening together.

“Merry Christmas Darling”/Vanessa Williams
“Merry Christmas Darling”/Deana Carter
Vanessa has released two Christmas albums; her version of the Carpenters standard was on Silver and Gold in 2004, and it’s really good. Deana Carter is a country singer best known for her breakthrough album Did I Shave My Legs for This? and the #1 single “Strawberry Wine.” Her 2006 Christmas collection was produced by her father, Nashville session veteran Fred Carter, so it’s naturally called Father Christmas. It’s miles better than the cookie-cutter Christmas product every country singer is required to extrude at one time or another.

“Lonely Christmas”/Sonny Til and the Orioles. In 1962, Til and the Orioles recut the 1948 Orioles original for an album released on the Charlie Parker label. Yup, that Charlie Parker. The label was co-founded by his widow in 1961 to control the release of bootleg albums that had proliferated since Parker’s death. “Lonely Christmas” came to me years ago on Any Major R&B Christmas, which our longtime friend Gunther has reupped at Any Major Dude With Half a Heart, along with his entire collection of Christmas mixes, including a new one for 2025. His site is a fabulous gift to all of us, and I hope you will join me in raising a Christmas toast in his direction.

“Santa’s Got a Mean Machine”/J. D. McPherson. Few albums in my collection are more purely enjoyable than Socks, McPherson’s 2018 album of holiday originals inspired by early rock and rockabilly.

“Blue Christmas”/Richard Hawley
“Blue Christmas”/Bright Eyes
I have accumulated several Richard Hawley tracks from various sources over the years and I don’t know what to think of them. His version of “Blue Christmas” has a throwback feel without imitating the Elvis version. The Bright Eyes version is OK.

“White Christmas”/George Conedy
“White Christmas”/Booker T and the MGs
Conedy and his soul-jazz organ album Merry Soul Christmas represent one of my favorite musical mysteries. I’ve gone as far as e-mailing the address of what might have been a family member I found on a geneaology site trying to learn anything about the guy, but have found nothing, and there’s precious little hard info about his album out there either. I guess there are some things we’re not meant to know, and that’s OK.

Also: I didn’t try to write anything here memorializing Steve Cropper, although I probably should have. I didn’t see nearly as many stories as I expected after his recent death. But considering that Rolling Stone ranked him as the #2 guitarist of all time after Jimi Hendrix, maybe nothing more needs to be said. He doesn’t have much to do on “White Christmas” other than a bit of rhythm, but as many other MGs performances show, Cropper’s genius was like that of Miles Davis—in the notes he didn’t play.

“Sleigh Ride”/Mojo Nixon and the Toadliquors. In which Mojo can only remember a few lines of the song, so he makes up the rest. I played this for my wife and she was a bit mystified by it, but in her defense, Mojo tends to confuse the uninitiated.

Recommended: If you have yet to watch the PBS American Masters documentary about Dick Van Dyke, produced for his 100th birthday, go and do immediately. (It’s also on the PBS app if you swing that way.) It’s so good that my wife and I were sorry to see it end.

The Elephant in the Room

On By jbIn Record Charts2 Comments
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In the wake of my involuntary retirement from radio, I have started working as a substitute teacher. And because of the way my thought process works, I find myself recalling the most famous substitute teacher of them all.

Cheech and Chong’s album Big Bambu became a sensation when I was in middle school—junior high, as we called it in my town then. Kids who had heard it thanks to older siblings would play it for their peers, who then wanted to borrow it, and who eventually went out and got copies of their own. It’s hard to fathom that we listened to titles such as “Let’s Make a Dope Deal” and “Ashley Roachclip” on an album packaged to look like a box of rolling papers (which actually came with giant rolling papers inside) without any sort of freakout from school officials or parents.

A year-and-a-half after its release, Big Bambu was boosted by an actual hit single: “Sister Mary Elephant,” in which a substitute teacher deals with a difficult class in her own unique way (“shudd-up!”) “Sister Mary Elephant” hit the radio in the fall of 1973, first at KHJ in Los Angeles, although stations in New Orleans, Louisville, Vancouver, and Buffalo were early adopters as well. In Louisville, she was in the Top 10 by Thanksgiving. In mid-December she hit #1 in Milwaukee, at both WOKY (for three weeks, through the holidays and into the new year) and WZUU. In January, she would get as high [snortlaugh] as #2 at WCFL and #3 at WLS, both in Chicago. “Elephant” was more popular in Chicago than anywhere else in the country, and given the popularity of WLS among teenagers in my Wisconsin hometown, that may have juiced Big Bambu‘s popularity a bit. “Sister Mary Elephant” reached #24 on the Billboard Hot 100 on January 19, 1974, and she peaked at #36 in Cash Box one week later. But before the winter snow had melted, she was gone from the charts, and from the radio. WLS ranked her at #54 for all of 1974. WKTU in Pittsburgh ranked her at #11 for all of 1973.

(“Sister Mary Elephant” nearly overlapped another Cheech and Chong single, “Basketball Jones,” which reached peak popularity around the country in October and November 1973. Chicago had been ground zero for “Basketball Jones” too; it hit #1 on WBBM-FM and #2 at WLS. In Cash Box, it peaked at #13 and in Billboard, #15. Its success likely spurred the record label to issue “Elephant” as a followup.)

I bought the “Elephant” single before I got my own copy of Big Bambu (which I still have, rolling papers included). The flip side of the single was a track from Cheech and Chong’s 1971 debut album titled “Wink Dinkerson,” in which a naïve Top 40 DJ introduces an act at a rock concert. I liked that almost as much as the A-side, considering that by then I wanted to be a Top 40 DJ myself.

Big Bambu had gone to #2 on the Billboard 200 album chart; so did Los Cochinos, which contained “Basketball Jones.” A year later, Cheech and Chong’s Wedding Album would make #5, propelled by the national Top-10 single “Earache My Eye.” But that’s a post for another time.

Recommended Reading: In December 1975, Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue played a benefit at Madison Square Garden to raise funds for the legal defense of boxer Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, convicted of murder in New Jersey. The night before, Dylan and the entire company, which included Joni Mitchell, Roger McGuinn, Alan Ginsberg, and others, performed for Carter and other inmates at a prison in Clinton, New Jersey. Here’s the story.

Also: I have linked to this before but it’s worth another look: the promos, intro, and commercials from the original broadcast of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, on Sunday, December 6, 1964. The show aired as an episode of the General Electric Fantasy Hour at 5:30 in the afternoon Eastern time, in an era when late Sunday afternoon was valuable network real estate. GE had paid a half-million dollars to the show’s producers, Rankin/Bass, a deal that permitted two broadcasts, and which presumably helped to pay for commercials in the show that featured Rudolph characters plugging the newest modern wonders Mom would want for Christmas that year. They’re a charming look back into a bygone world.

Also Also: I was pleased to be cited as a “radio historian” in this interesting piece about Marcia Strassman, who was a “flower-power pop singer” before becoming one of the great TV babes of the 1970s. This is a quiet corner of the Internet, but every now and then someone happens by.

Two-and-a-Half Hours

On By jbIn Radio Tales2 Comments
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Every radio jock who worked in the old days has stories. A record stuck on the air, a tape cartridge got eaten in mid-commercial, a telephone feed dropped off and the dial tone got on the air, or the transmitter quit unexpectedly. It was an “oh shit” moment but you fixed it, maybe you made a joke about it, and you moved on with your show.

Earlier this week a radio station in Minneapolis played the last four bars of the same song over and over for two-and-a-half hours. Some sort of glitch, apparently, either in software or hardware.

Two-and-a-half hours.

Nowadays, if a music station isn’t running a syndicated show at night, like Delilah or Hardrive With Lou Brutus or Taste of Country Nights, it’s probably either running jockless or voice-tracked. If a listener calls about a problem, they’re going to get voicemail at best, but it’s just as likely that they’ll get an eternal busy signal because the studio lines are turned off for the night. Social media is literally the only way people can reach out now, and those feeds are rarely monitored 24/7.

During the day, there are most likely (but not necessarily) people in the building monitoring what’s actually playing on the air, but on nights and weekends, quite possibly not. If the station drops off the air or goes silent for some other reason, an engineer will get an alarm via a phone app, and can take steps to fix it remotely or by going to the office or transmitter site.

But if programming goes goofy without affecting the signal itself—if, for example, the computer starts repeating the last four bars of a song—the only way it gets fixed is if somebody capable of doing so happens to be listening. That must have been what happened in Minneapolis the other night; the stuck digital file was eventually replaced with a generic iHeart radio feed.

But not until after two-and-a-half hours had passed. 

After I left the badly run station in the nowhere town, management picked up a satellite-delivered overnight show. In those early 80s days, you still needed a live body in the studio, to mind the transmitter and insert local commercials. The station hired a student from the local university for the gig. The story I heard was that one night the satellite dropped off and the kid did the only thing he had been taught to do: he played commercials. The same three commercials, for an hour. Somebody who knew the program director eventually called him at home and said, “I think there’s something wrong with your radio station.”

It would have been an embarrassment for any station, but at least it didn’t last two-and-a-half hours.

You can blame iHeart Radio for proliferating a lot of the worst things about radio today, but this isn’t unique to them. Companies big and small have embraced an economic model that requires jockless dayparts or formats, and voice-tracked stations. As a listener, you’re lucky if the voice-tracker is somebody local, but it’s just as likely that they’re from elsewhere, or somebody doing generic tracks that run in several markets. Or maybe you’re hearing an AI “personality” who doesn’t exist at all.

Here’s the part where I mention that when I lost my radio job recently, I was replaced by a voice-tracker. My former bosses would probably say, “Well what difference does that make? We’ve got a personality in that daypart like always. Nothing has changed.” More than a few listeners might say the same thing. And it’s true, as far as it goes. If the average listener doesn’t care, maybe it doesn’t matter. So when I say that it’s unfortunate, maybe I’m just another old geezer raging in vain against the dying of the light.

But radio was my craft, and even when I was required to voice-track, I approached it the same as a live show, trying to say something worthwhile whenever it was my turn to talk. My greatest worry was that I’d track Saturday at the 70s and go out of town, only to have Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger drop dead on Saturday afternoon and there I’d be that night, not talking about it.

I joked on Bluesky the other day that what bothers me most about losing my job is that on the day Donald Trump finally croaks, I won’t be able to read the bulletin and follow it with “Celebration.” Now I wonder, if that blessed day ever comes, how long it will take before the average voice-tracked station manages to acknowledge it.

Two-and-a-half hours, people. 

‘Tis the Season (No, Not That One)

On By jbIn Repeat Posts2 Comments

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What you are about to read is some of the oldest writing I have ever posted on this website. It first appeared in 2009, but I wrote something very much like it in the fall of 1995, for the editorial page of the Daily Iowan newspaper at the University of Iowa during my one-year tenure as an opinion page columnist. The gig was a lot of fun while it lasted, and I should probably go digging for clips and see if there’s anything else in there worth repeating. For this post, I have excerpted the good bits from the old one and edited them a bit. 

Despite the joke about Wisconsin having two seasons—winter and road construction—there are actually five: winter, spring, summer, fall, and the gun deer-hunting season, which runs nine days around Thanksgiving each year. Even for those who don’t hunt, and I don’t, deer season is one of those rituals by which we order our lives. Everybody knows somebody who’s going, and we all hope they’ll drop a couple of venison steaks on our doorstep when they get back.

(Back in the early 90s, a bunch of us tailgated before a Packer game in Milwaukee with venison bratwurst that had been walking around in the woods three weeks before. It might have been the most quintessentially Wisconsin experience of my entire life.)

If you drive out into the rural areas, you may see guys in blaze orange getting in and out of pickup trucks in various places, especially at the state’s many rural taverns, which will be festooned with beer-company signs saying “Welcome Deerhunters.” You might not think it’s a good idea for a hunter to throw down a couple of Leinenkugels at lunchtime before returning to the woods with a high-powered rifle, but we manage to live with the contradiction just fine up here.

(If it’s really cold, some of the guys won’t be drinking Leinenkugel’s. Wisconsin is the nation’s largest per-capita consumer of brandy. I used to think everybody drank brandy until I tried ordering one in Chicago and the waitress looked at me like I had two heads.)

It occurs to me that “tavern” is an old-fashioned word you don’t hear much anymore, particularly in the leafy suburbs of Madison where I live, but it’s an evocative word that connotes a particular sort of place. Taverns don’t have video walls, live DJs, stuffed potato skins, or crop-topped servers named Kelli. Taverns have one or two TVs, always over the bar…. There might be a pool table or a pinball machine, but if those games don’t suit you, there may be some old guys playing euchre around a table in the back. (In my hometown, the old guys sometimes play jass, a Swiss variation on whist.) The bartender is often the guy who owns the place; the waitress is either his wife or his daughter.  The menu consists of burgers, cheese sandwiches, frozen pizza, and chili in season. If you want dessert at a tavern, smokes are available behind the bar.… The taverns that dot the rural crossroads of Wisconsin are social centers, and many have existed in one form or another for a hundred years or better. Often, they’re the last vestige of what was once a village or town.

I have nothing but anecdotal information and my own half-assed perceptions to base it on, but it seems to me that deer season is not quite as big a deal as it was when I first wrote this. I could be completely wrong, however. Maybe I am too far out of touch with the small-town folk I used to know. Maybe I have lived too long in the suburbs of one of America’s most liberal cities, a place where people like to speak for the animals and where those people consider hunting to be an unseemly blood sport. And maybe I have become at least a little sympathetic to people who think that way. 

But I am also a Wisconsin boy, born here, raised here, and with the state’s culture engraved on my DNA. And that’s why I ended that 2009 post with these words: 

When I lived out of state, which I did for 18 years, the call of this place was never stronger than in the fall. Now that I’m here, there’s no place else for me to be.

Makeovers and Detours

On By jbIn Radio Tales, Record Charts2 Comments
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(Pictured: Boz onstage in 2021.)

Like practically everybody else, I became a Boz Scaggs fan in a time that Boz calls “the Hollywood years,” between 1976 and 1980. After that, Boz took a hiatus, as a man pushing past 40 might do, dealing with a divorce and a custody battle, and trying to figure out the next phase of his artistic career. It took him nearly two years to make the album that became Other Roads, released in 1988, after Columbia Records rejected it at first. And then six more years went by. Some Change, in 1994, was vastly different from the adult-contemporary gunk of Other Roads (sorry Boz, love ya man, but I cannot listen to that record), a throwback to his pre-fame roots in blues and R&B. In 1997, Come on Home went deeper into the blues. That same year came the compilation My Time: A Boz Scaggs Anthology, which remains an excellent introduction to the first three decades of his career, with most of the hits and key album tracks, including the monumental “Loan Me a Dime” featuring Duane Allman on guitar. (My Time is what turned me into a Boz completist.)

After one more conventional album (Dig, released on September 11, 2001), Boz gave himself a makeover, as a man pushing into his 60s might do. But Beautiful (2003) and Speak Low (2008) are albums of standards from the Great American Songbook, each recorded with a small jazz combo. Between 2013 and 2018, Boz went back to his roots again, and released three rich albums of R&B and blues songs, Memphis, A Fool to Care (probably the best album of his career, Silk Degrees included), and Out of the Blues.

Boz turned 81 in June of this year, and he was not planning to release a new album at all. But he’d been fooling around in the studio, singing more songs from the Great American Songbook, mostly for his own amusement, when something clicked. He’s out now with the album Detour, which adds to the legacy of But Beautiful and Speak Now. How you feel about Detour and its predecessors will depend entirely on how you feel about smoky late-night combo jazz and Boz’s unadorned voice. I, of course, dig ’em extremely.

I Read the News Today Oh Boy #1: You may have seen the headlines this week saying that the #1 country song in America is AI-generated. Well, yes and no. Yes, “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust is currently #1 on Billboard‘s Country Digital Song Sales chart. That means it racked up the most paid downloads of any song in the country genre. From what my usual half-assed research process has been able to gather, the numbers we’re talking about are quite small. It’s possible to top the all-genres Digital Song Sales chart with between 5,000 and 10,000 downloads, although certain megastars do better on occasion. The country slab of the pie would be correspondingly smaller. So it’s not like the song is #1 on Hot Country Songs, Billboard‘s main country chart. “Walk My Walk” is doing big streaming numbers, however (as are other AI-slop songs in other genres), and it’s only a matter of time before AI slop starts making its way onto mainstream radio, country and otherwise. “Walk My Walk” is no better or worse than the stuff being produced by the batallion of singing haircuts Nashville has churned out over the last 15 years. If it turns out to be the song that puts AI slop onto the radio in a big way, I will not be surprised one bit.

I Read the News Today Oh Boy #2: I unsubscribed from Radio Insight’s daily e-mail digest just in time to miss seeing myself in it. I am not sure who’s responsible for reporting the story; it quotes the website you are reading right now and snags pictures from my former station’s website. I joked on Bluesky the other day that I now expect to be snowed under by job offers, although I don’t think I want one. (But if you’d like to make one, hit me up. So far, retirement from radio suits me just fine, but I’d never rule anything completely out.)

Some people, both here and on the socials, have complimented me for taking the high road in the wake of all this. It’s not that I’m especially noble; I simply don’t see any point in publicly going ham on anybody. I was treated extremely well by the company for 19 years, at least until the last 10 minutes. Make no mistake: there are things I could say, but for right now, if you want to hear them, you’ll have to buy me a couple of beers.