(Philles [original] / Apple [reissue] / Abkco [compact disc])
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
It's October now, but as you well know if you work retail, Christmas is just around the yeah yeah. You can already hear it lurking around, some unseen thread of invisible colored lights propping itself up from underground like the tripods in War of the Worlds -- that now-whispered furor of forthcoming stresses and dreads and everything frantic and terrifying about spending the holidays with your family, or with a parade of perpetually dissatisfied members of the public each with their own mortally freaky back story. But underneath all this, there is Something About the holiday season that even a nonreligious person can find some way to get a sense of once in a while. It's not limited to just goodwill and angelic pleasures -- who doesn't like getting presents? -- and it's not even limited to things you celebrate privately in your own way. There is (or can be) something kind of lovely about the sensation of urgency you get out in the thick of it surrounded by the busy and overworked populace.
That world looks better with the Ronettes' "Sleigh Ride" floating through it. It's an arrangement that makes the most of its melody's giddy exuberance far beyond the trappings of its lite-classical origins, smartly excising the momentum-killing "giddy-up" bridge in favor of that unforgettable ringalingalinga dingdongding after each line. Ronnie Spector's sumptuous treatment of the song makes it something much more than a decorative supplement to chaos. It alters the architecture of the season, infuses it with an enchantingly furious romance. To put it more simply, it makes rock & roll out of the most arid and secular of humdrum traditions. Exploding with overfilled brass and bells and drums, it's so much alive as to become an escape, something that implies both a universal celebration and the ability to carve our own space in it. The Ronettes' communication, singing songs that we've heard so many hundreds of times, seems strangely personal. And so it goes for Phil Spector's entire Christmas album, a piece of lovably cluttered beauty and unabashed (almost weird) sincerity that does so much more and works so much harder than it has to.
That wasn't typically the case with the few full-length albums Spector released on his Philles label in the '60s; this is by far the most significant LP he produced until he worked on the Beatles' Let It Be in 1970, and it would remain his best for longer than that. Spector's team of session musicians, singers, writers and arrangers seem to have been waiting their entire lives for this. They probably hadn't, they might not even have cared that much deep down, but they certainly make it seem like the most important thing that's ever been recorded for the duration, in an era when even non-seasonal rock & roll and pop albums were still generally cash-ins. Though he trips up the magic a few times with probably too many songs about Santa Claus that can't really be anything but kiddie distractions and one too many intrusions from dark-horse stablemates Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, Spector does something here with Christmas music that seems to exist nowhere else and seems to capture something intrinsic to the nature of the American celebration: he makes it vital.
From the first melancholy, driving notes of Darlene Love's belted-out "White Christmas" -- one of the best recordings ever of that brilliant, haunting song -- the sense of power, yearning and loneliness seems to infuse nearly every moment of A Christmas Gift for You. Love was and remains one of the most commanding singers in American popular music, and when she stops the presses to announce that "there's never been such a day in old L.A.," the intoxication is complete, which is something considering that she is merely setting up the payoff to come on Side Two. The Crystals, great as ever, must inevitably sit in the shadow of Love and Ronnie Spector. More than their peers, the Crystals seem saddled with the toy-drum part of our production, the part that seems -- adoringly enough -- to bask in frivolity. But these too are powerful performances, even of so slight a creation as "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer," or one so tired as "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." It's just that the Ronettes do more than faithfully enhance their songs, they conquer them; that includes "Frosty the Snowman," deconstructed into something like perverse eroticism (this is Phil Spector, after all) with nothing more than Ronnie's read of the words "button nose." Her delivery of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" is mindbending for similar reasons.
Nevertheless, the highlights of this record are quite consistently Love's domain, enough that it's hard to imagine it would have suffered much as a complete album of her performances. "Winter Wonderland" is the truest Spector wall of sound to be heard here, though the Crystals' gloriously busy "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" is an ambitious near-miss. But Christmas Gift houses two of Love's greatest moments on record, and everything here sort of lives in their wake, not just on the LP but in all attempts since to record worthwhile popular Christmas music.
There are few moments more luminous in '60s pop than the introduction of Love's "Marshmallow World," likely the most obscure non-original song selected for inclusion here, which ends up mattering not even a little bit. Its wonderfully surreal, evocative lyric is instinctively captured and rendered by Love into a towering celebration of the snow, the ice, the paradise of cold, and again, the warmth of romantic awakenings. It's as if in treating a holiday occasion as an event of the same momentous largeness as the boy-girl relationships she and Spector usually tackle, she is implying something larger, something about the moment when the annual obligations of surrounding oneself with iconography and celebrating the icily familiar gives way to the ability to choose how we do what we do, to form our own families -- to burst out dancing and to notice that it's our own turn to decide what being grownup actually means, all of the frustrations and unrequited desires amounting in the end just to freedom. That's rock & roll, and that's "Marshmallow World" in its breakneck, unstoppable speed.
As ever, though, we cannot be permitted these freedoms without ache. All of A Christmas Gift for You builds to the moment of truth seven minutes before it amusingly ends with a suitably creepy message from Spector himself (later imitated with adorably stilted awkwardness by Dennis Wilson on the Beach Boys' "Auld Lang Syne") over the top of "Silent Night," the album's only directly religious song. There's something coyly perfect about the ghostly beauty of "Silent Night," with its stark Nativity image, ultimately seeming in this context less important than Darlene Love singing about a boy she misses. Or rather, Darlene Love giving every bit of herself, as if her every last shred of life absolutely depends on it, to the masterpiece of this album: the glorious "Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)," a song of frankly indescribable grandness, in July or October or December.
Not for nothing is the song beautifully written -- by Spector with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich -- including its lyrics that capture the anguish of loneliness, especially in a time of celebrated union and family, as well as any non-holiday composition. Love carries it home, though, and seems to define with herculean glory the bittersweetness of memory and grief in the face of perpetual cheeriness. Jack Nitzsche's arrangement builds and builds, conscious of the mounting intensity in Love's performance, until the song reaches a "please! please! please! please!" climax so overwhelming it seems to almost lose its grip on itself. But Love's control is absolute; nearly unnoticed in 1963, issued on the day that John F. Kennedy was shot, here sits on tape one of the finest vocal performances ever captured -- one that resonates fifty years later to anyone who's ever longed for someone, anyone who's ever looked at tinsel and tidings and wanted desperately to be happier.
This all-time moment is just the shiniest of the jewels given to us by this noble and gorgeous album. There is no use for irony here, no way or cause to be dismissive or skeptical of it. A Christmas Gift for You is ubiquitous, played year after year until its mono grooves wear thin to the eardrum, but it can still captivate, charm and bomb you out with its sheer, irreducible emotional vastness. Trim your tree to nothing less.
[SEE ALSO:]
Back to Mono (1958-69)
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