Happy Festivus!
Since there again isn’t a whole lot of Christmas music I actually like, the stuff I’m searching out this year is kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel. The bad stuff is just way too common, and so I found myself discovering stuff that isn’t actually good, but is in one way or another… memorable.
Billy Idol, “Yellin’ At the Xmas Tree”
An aging-gracefully Billy Idol gives us a pretty rockin’ tune paired with a deeply weird Poser-style computer animated video about the family patriarch coming come from the pub drunk as fuck. Extra points for the line “Santa’s balls are jinglin’.”
Bob Dylan, “Must Be Santa”
What’s even more incomprehensible than a Bob Dylan song? Bob Dylan taking a traditional Christmas song and doing it completely straight. Any resemblance between this one and “Schnitzelbank” is probably not coincidental.
Wild Man Fischer, “I’m A Christmas Tree”
If you’ve never heard of Wild Man Fischer… you’re probably better off.
Bob Peters, “You Ain’t Gettin’ Sh*t For Christmas”
Which is what I usually tell people.
Christopher Lee, “Jingle Hell”
As I present this example of Christopher Lee’s power-metal Christmas “singing”, it gives me the opportunity to recount my favorite Christopher Lee anecdote:
Among the many bits that got cut for time in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation was the anticlimactic Return to the Shire, in which the heroes return to Frodo’s home town to find it’s been taken over by corrupt Hobbits led by Grima Wormtongue and Saruman. At this point in the story, Saruman has lost most of his powers, so he is easily overthrown but the heroes let him live. And as he walks out of town he verbally berates Wormtongue and expects him to follow along like a whipped dog. Instead Wormtongue finally snaps and stabs Saruman in the back.
Apparently Jackson wanted Lee as Saruman to loudly cry out during this scene, and Lee told him that a man stabbed in the back wouldn’t cry out so. And Jackson asked why, and Lee said, when he assassinated Germans for British Intelligence during World War II, “it’s not ‘AAAAA’, it’s ‘hhhh…’- because the breath’s being driven out of your body…”
The Stooges, “I Wanna Be Your Dog”
Look, it’s got sleigh bells in it, right?