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The WORST Christmas Album I've Ever Heard
🕑 Added 2024-12-18 19:49:15 +0000 UTCOkay, that’s a clickbait title if I ever heard one, and it’s one that would probably be impossible to actually decide definitively. I mean, what criteria would I even use to judge badness here? When some delusional rando who thinks “Hey, I sound great while singing in the shower, I should make an album!” then downloads a bunch of royalty-free midi files and warbles over them on a CD-R released directly to the Goodwill bins, that guy has tapped into a level of technical failure that even the worst release by a professional on a major label can’t hope to match. Conversely, those madmen who release whole albums of dog and cat noises synced up to recognizable holiday tunes have unleashed an unfathomable evil upon this world, but it can’t really be considered a “failure” since they sound exactly how they were intended to sound. Or consider how many Christmas albums sound pretty much identical, the same dozen songs performed in the same schmaltzy arrangement over and over again. If some critic snaps and blows up over one particular Christmas album because it’s basically the fiftieth time they’ve heard that sort of album this year, is it REALLY fair for that specific album to bear all the punishment despite not actually doing anything worse than the other forty-nine? Or maybe you just think all Christmas albums are collectively the worst. Well, that just makes you prejudiced. Do better.
But seriously, though, this is NOT the blog I originally set out to write. My plan was to do a round-up of Christmas records by people you just wouldn’t normally associate with doing Christmas records. Actually, I still might end up doing that one day, if I can come up with a better structure to focus the thing, because I sure don’t have that right now. As it was, the blog was just too sprawling and rambling, even for ME. It was a mix of whole albums alongside one-off singles, by both established artists and random celebrities, and they covered the quality spectrum everywhere from pretty great to absolutely awful to just plain forgettable. And worse of all, I couldn’t really think of much to say about most of them, other than just reporting the fact that they exist. “Hey, remember John Schneider, Bo from Dukes of Hazard and the Dad in Smallville? Did you know he released a Christmas album? …well now you do …’cos he did.” Yeah, it wasn't shaping up to be especially interesting.
But there was one item that I found I had a lot to say about, more than all the other songs on the list combined. It got to the point where that one “section” of the blog post would have dwarfed all the other items put together. And so, I decided to do what all your favorite YouTube video essayists don’t know how to to do and actually edit myself. Sort of. Not really. See, while I technically am zeroing in on one particular album here, I also feel compelled to provide an awful lot of backstory to properly explain just what an utter misfire the album in question truly is, and how multiple parties with mutually destructive goals could all have made the terrible decisions required to bring this disaster to fruition. Ya know, the exact same thought process that turns an eight minute video essay into a two hour feature presentation. So gather round and spike the eggnog, because it’s time for us to talk about the absolute dumpster fire that is A Christmas Present… And Past by Paul Revere & The Raiders.
Now, depending on your knowledge of older music, your reaction to even hearing that Paul Revere & The Raiders made a Christmas album at all will vary wildly. If the only thing you know about The Raiders is that they’re one of those bands the Oldies station likes to play, then this probably doesn’t sound any weirder than that one time when The Beach Boys wrote a hot rot song about Santa’s sleigh. If you have a more functional awareness of The Raiders’ status as one of America’s premier Garage Rock practitioners in the mid-‘60s, however, the idea becomes a lot stranger. What the heck would the band that recorded “Just Like Me,” “Kicks,” or “Hungry” be doing playing “Jingle Bells?” But to a full-on ‘60s Rock nerd with a full awareness of The Raiders’ history, or even just a knowledge of the band’s peak years beyond the handful of biggest hits, the notion of a Raiders Christmas album actually loops back around to something that probably SHOULD have worked. After all, this is the band that dressed up in silly Revolutionary War costumes and were constantly appearing on Dick Clark shows aimed at teenyboppers.
Clearly, a band willing to make a goofy spectacle of themselves like that wouldn’t be above cranking out a cheesy little holiday novelty album, right? But oh, my friends, therein lies quite a tale.
The group that would eventually become knows as Paul Revere & The Raiders started knocking around the Pacific Northwest in 1958, with a rotating cast of sidemen around keyboardist Paul Revere. And before you ask: yes, that really was his name… sort of. “Revere” was legally his MIDDLE name, until he got sick of people saying “Wait, you could be calling yourself ‘Paul Revere’ right now and you’re not? WHY NOT?” However, despite his patriotic name being the one featured in the band’s name, Revere wasn’t the star of the show. The actual focal point of The Raiders quickly became saxophonist and eventual lead singer Mark Lindsay. Eventually, the band would go so far as to be billed as “Paul Revere & The Raiders, featuring Mark Lindsay” on everything. I can’t prove this was all a diabolical plan to shut down competition by hogging all the space on every club marquee… but I’ll still suggest it, because that sounds really funny. Anyway, Revere and Lindsay would be the two stalwarts of The Raiders, though the rhythm section would eventually stabilize around drummer Mike Smith, guitarist Drake Levin, and bassist Phil Volk. By that point, The Raiders had already become a mainstay of the Portland scene, and had even scored a Frat Rock instrumental hit in 1961 with “Like, Long Hair.” What’s more, they had a potentially history-altering incident where they recorded a cover of the Richard Berry song “Louie Louie,” which did well enough regionally to get them signed to Columbia records. Alas, Columbia dragged their feet on pushing the record in other markets, enough so for a competing cover of “Louie Louie” by fellow Portland group The Kingsmen to break out nationally and become the definitive version.
While Colombia might have been slacking on the promotional front, nobody could ever accuse The Raiders of lacking in grind. Looking to exploit the whole “revolutionary war” aspect of their name to the absolute limit, the band took to performing in full-on historical reenactment garb, with tights and fancy jackets and tricorne hats a-plenty. Lindsay would even grow his hair out to an outrageous-for-the-early-‘60s ponytail, just to look that much more revolutionary war-era. Obviously, this kind of visual gimmick got them a lot of attention, in multiple ways. For one thing, they were pretty much made for TV, with American Bandstand maestro Dick Clark featuring them prominently on Where The Action Is and even making them the hosts of It’s Happening. Even better, though, it allowed them to benefit from something that had spelled doom for a whole wave of their contemporaries: The British Invasion. While The Raiders were good enough that they probably would have survived in the post-Beatles musical landscape regardless, the built-in patriotic aspect of their gimmick meant that headlines about The Raiders “beating back the British” and “leading America’s counterattack” just wrote themselves.
And most importantly, they had the hits to back up the hype. They scored their first top ten in 1965 with “Just Like Me,” originally by fellow Washington band The Wilde Knights. Maybe out of fear of another “Louie Louie” situation, The Raiders took the unusual step of actually buying the publishing rights to “Just Like Me” from the original composers, meaning that even if a competing version sniped theirs in the charts again, they’d still be the ones pocketing the royalties. It’s doubtful that would have happened, though, because “Just Like Me” is a real beast of a single that built nicely on their already established Garage Rock foundation. They expanded upon that foundation further with the follow-up hit “Kicks,” provided by composers Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil, which injected the Garage framework with some gangly Folk Rock guitars. And then Mann & Weil repeated their success with “Hungry,” which is one of those songs I heard on Oldies radio so often that I’ve kind of grown numb to just how great it is. Seriously, “Hungry” is one of the most finely constructed singles of the ‘60s and nobody even notices. It builds upon the template of songs like “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” by The Animals (another Mann/Weil composition) with a tight performance and snarling production and a startling number of hooks. Seriously, there’s more memorable riffs and breakdowns in this one song than a lot of bands could manage across whole albums. I’m a fan, is what I’m saying.
And most importantly of all, in this post-Beatles landscape, The Raiders were capable of generating self-composed hits as well. They closed out 1966 with “Good Thing” (basically “Hungry” but with some Beach Boys harmonies thrown in for good measure) and “The Great Airplane Strike” (if Bob Dylan were backed by The Rolling Stones), both band compositions. Unfortunately, however, that push towards original compositions would end up spelling doom for the Raiders’ classic line-up.
Two distinct creative factions had formed within Paul Revere & The Raiders, neither of which really seemed to include Mr. Revere himself, oddly enough. From everything I’ve seen, he seemed increasingly happy to just focus on leading the live shows and being a clown on TV, leaving the work of actually writing songs to his bandmates. And that’s where the problems formed. On the one side, there was the rhythm section of Levin, Smith, & Volk, who had begun writing in various overlapping collaborations. They demonstrated a keen knack for writing solid Garage Band rockers, and Volk’s “In My Community” even got used as the B-side to “The Great Airplane Strike.” Unfortunately, they were beginning to have second thoughts about the whole Raiders image. Make no mistake, they were VERY commercially successful by 1966, but success is not the same thing as respect. The Raiders, with their goofy costumes and regular appearances on kiddy TV shows, were not afforded anywhere near the critical respect their work really deserved. And with the Rock & Roll landscape rapidly getting more serious and experimental by the close of ’66, the boys in the band were really getting concerned about the perception of The Raiders and a band for teenybopper. I mean, seriously, if you haven't actually been clicking any of the links so far, go back and check out the "live" performances of stuff like "Hungry" or "Just Like Me." They were absolutely being a clown act while the cameras were rolling. Quite frankly, they were only a few steps behind The Monkees in therms of bands that The Cool Kids didn’t admit to listening to, and the Levin/Smith/Volk contingent worried that this lack of respect would catch up with them if something didn’t change soon.
Unfortunately for them, Mark Lindsay was also flexing his muscle as a songwriter. While he was no such at penning a tough snarling rocker himself, Lindsay was also far more willing to indulge his growing Teen Idol status and play directly to the teenyboppers, be it in the form of sappy ballads or melodramatic angst. This is the guy who took time out of an album to squeeze in an Easy Listening saxophone instrumental for himself, and that’s the sort of thing you only did if you wanted to be taken seriously by the Lawrence Welk crowd, not the hardcore Rock audience. Unfortunately for Levin, Smith, & Volk, Lindsay had an ally even more power than the guy who the band was named after: the band’s producer. By late 1966, Lindsay was collaborating directly with their producer producer Terry Melcher, and when the guy running the recording sessions is explicitly backing one side of a creative dispute, that dispute is basically already over. By 1967, Levin, Smith & Volk had all be forced out of The Raiders, replaced with an increasingly anonymous crew of more obedient sidemen (who would themselves be replaced in the studio by session players more and more as time went on).
Now, I realize this is a LONG preamble to a blog that’s supposed to be about Christmas stuff, but I want you all to understand the thought process that must have been at play when the higher-ups at Columbia Records looked at the band that had recorded powerful, raucous rockers like “Just Like Me” and “Hungry” and thought “You know what? I want to hear you sing ‘Jingle Bells.’ Give me a Christmas album!” Because, see, that’s really NOT what the label was thinking. They were looking at a band in the colorful costumes who appeared on all the Dick Clark shows, obvious entertainment professionals who knew how to do business. Heck, the lead singer just fired two thirds of the band so hard that they wound up being tied up in lawsuits for years, all because those guys had wanted to be LESS commercial! And their studio output was getting increasingly more elaborate and less Garage Band oriented. Surely this was a band who would have no trouble recording some crowd-pleasing holiday standards, right? Right?
Well, as it turns out, no. Not at all. Very strongly the opposite, in fact. The Raiders VEHEMENTLY opposed the Christmas album plans. And while this probably seemed a bit out of the blue to the suits at Columbia, we can see with the power of hindsight that the album which would eventually plop malformed and sickly onto store shelves was just the first signs of a self-destructive pattern of behavior that would dominate the band’s career for the remainder of the decade, much to their own detriment.
You see, while The Raiders were still a reasonably successful band in 1967, they weren’t AS successful as they had been the year before. Revolution!, their first album recorded with the new lineup, broke their string of consecutive top tens they' enjoyed with the likes of Midnight Ride and The Spirit of '67, and their performance on the singles charts was starting to slip as well. While they managed to score one more top ten with “Him Of Me – What’s It Gonna Be?” they missed the top ten with “I Had A Dream,” they missed the top twenty with “Ups and Downs,” and “Peace of Mind” would miss the Top 40 entirely. Yes, that was still better than most bands every managed to achieve… but those bands were getting a lot more respect from the press and listeners alike than The Raiders were. It seems that, by late ’67, Lindsay had belatedly come to have second thoughts about taking such a strong stand on the side of commercialism, and the band would wind up spending the rest of the ‘60s flailing around with increasing desperation to try and grasp onto something, ANYTHING, that would improve their standing with the older, hipper crowds. For one thing they ditched the trademark silly costumes in favor of… well, let’s face it, even sillier costumes.
Yeah, the nearly three hundred year old military uniforms weren’t anywhere NEAR as dated as those gaudy Austin Powers via Spirit Halloween monstrosities look now. And they didn’t fare much better on the musical front, either. Raiders albums would swerve wildly from one genre to the next in hopes of finding something that clicked. Goin’ to Memphis was a stab at Southern Soul that didn’t help The Raiders out anywhere near as well as such moves would help Dusty Springfield or Elvis Presley. Something Happening was an attempt at kaleidoscopic Psychedelic experimentation, which didn’t impress anyone either. Hard ’N’ Heavy (with marshmallow) took a hard right into Bubblegum so sugary that it’d make Tommy James & The Shondells blush, which Alias Pink Puzz then tried to beef up with a dose of Roots Rock a’la The Band or Creedence. None of them are egregiously awful albums, but it’s easy to see why anyone would dislike at least one of them (me, I just can’t sit through Goin’ to Memphis) so this much flailing around resulted in a LOT of burned bridges for a band that a growing number of people just didn’t like in the first place.
Silliest of all, there’s the story behind the odd title of Alias Pink Puzz. In an attempt to social experiment themselves onto the cool, trendy FM radio playlists, The Raiders send out promo copies of the single “Let Me” credited to the non-existent group “Pink Puzz.” The hope, apparently, was to pull some kind of “IT WAS ME, AUSTIN!” reveal moment that would shock and shame all the hip kids who would be horrified to learn that they’d enjoyed a Raiders song… except I don’t think there was a single listener in the country who couldn’t immediately recognize Mark Lindsay’s voice, so “Pink Puzz” never gained any fans in the first place. What’s more, “Let Me” wound up being a decent hit anyway, which just made the attempted ploy look thin-skinned and pointless, while ALSO ensuring that plenty of people heard about it. An embarrassment all around.
Now, obviously, all this this stuff happened AFTER the Christmas album debacle, but I really wanted to make clear the desperate, flop sweat-drenched lengths The Raiders would end up resorting to in their desperate quest regain some semblance of hipness. That hindsight explains a LOT about the utterly baffling decisions that went into the creation of 1967’s A Christmas Present… And Past.
So, as we’ve established, The Raiders didn’t want to make a Christmas album. They realized, not without reason, that running around in matching Santa suits and singing “Rudolph, The Red Nosed Reindeer” was the exact opposite of what a band trying to distance themselves from matching costumes and songs for kids ought to be doing. Unfortunately, the recent decline in record sales that seemed to finally put the scare into Mark Lindsay had also left the group in no position to pick a fight with Columbia Records. It’s easy to stand your ground against clueless label execs when each of your records charts HIGHER than the last one. That makes you look like you know what you’re doing, and increases your odds of being acquiesced to. It’s a lot harder to act like you know better then your bosses when your sales are on the decline. That’s when it looks like you need someone to step in and “help” you. So there was no getting around it, they had to present a Christmas album to the label whether they wanted to or not. And thus, in the most petulant act of “I’ll show YOU!” self-sabotage possible, Paul Revere & The Raiders set about making A Christmas Present… And Past into an ANTI-Christmas album. It would be a swipe against the hypocrisy and shallow consumerism of the whole holiday season, and a deliberately irritating dig at the sappy conventions of holiday music to boot. And that, right there, is where everything went wrong.
I have no idea how many more revisions this blog will have gone through by the time the version you're reading is finished, but as I’m writing this part, it’s mid-October and the whole pop culture landscape has been pointing and laughing at Joker: Folie à Deux for a few weeks now. The general game theory is that Todd Philips deliberately made a movie to aggravate everyone who idolized the Joker character for the wrong reasons, but only wound up making everyone say “Wow, Todd Philips sure made a bad movie.” A Christmas Present… and Past is the Joker 2 of Christmas albums. It wants everyone to think it’s Two Steps Ahead™ while only succeeding at being an irritatingly bad piece of music. It’s already an established fact that any creative project undertaken by somebody with an axe to grind, with something to prove, with (pardon my using a bad word) an agenda, is far more likely to end up being bad. It’s already hard enough to make something good when deliberately trying to make something good, hoping it’ll happen by as a byproduct of focusing on something else is… unrealistic. And going so far as to make something DELIBERATELY bad and expecting an audience to go along with you is, at best, optimistic and at worst egotistical and entitled. And given how the band’s commercial fortress had slipped over the past year, it’s all the more brazen for them to just take for granted that you WILL sit through whatever they give you AND YOU’LL LIKE IT!
I usually hate it when people ask “Who is this for?” Because I usually want to think it’s enough for the artist to make something for himself. But that just doesn’t work when the artists is stepping into a realm where the audience has VERY OBVIOUS expectations, with the clear intention of riding those expectations for attention, yet still wants the audience to go along with them when they blatantly refuse to actually meet those expectations. Whether it’s a sequel to an established property, the latest installment in a familiar franchise, or participation in a broad cultural celebration, the artist has forfeited any right to be uppity about making something “just for me” at this point. Example: I can make whatever dinner I want when I’m at home cooking food for myself, but if I get a job working at Taco Bell, I have to make whatever you order regardless of what I think of it. If I think Taco Bell food is bad for you and you shouldn’t be eating it, then I shouldn’t have taken a job where I have to make it. If I refuse to make your order, or deliberately sabotage it to “teach you a lesson,” that just makes me bad at my job. And when Paul Revere & The Raiders decided to serve up a deliberately badly cooked Christmas album, all it did was tell everyone that Paul Revere & The Raiders weren’t good at making albums any more.
And just in case you think I’m being harsh by suggesting that The Raiders might have made parts of this album bad on purpose, I present track one: “Introduction.” More of a skit than a song, “Introduction” is a noticeably out of tune brass band playing a warbly version of “Joy To The World” while a smarmy radio DJ talks over them. Also, he yells at them a lot when they miss their cues, because loud equals funny. The brass band not being very good is clearly on purpose. The DJ trying way too hard to get a laugh and failing, on the other hand, is not. Frankly, The Raiders would try skits like this on several of their later albums, and it just never works for me. I see a surprising number of contrarians out there digging up Christmas Present… and Past and trying to praise it as a work of satire, but… no. Just no. if you can look me in the eye and tell me that The Raiders woke up one morning, decided they were The Firesign Theater now, and you think tracks like this are evidence that they succeeded at producing a solid musical comedy album, I will look at you call you a liar to your face. This is neither funny nor good, and would only resonate with somebody who’d just looking for an album that’s as sour about the holiday season as they are. And look, I don’t actually have a problem with that, just so long as the person doing so admits that this is basically the same thought process that allows people to like “I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas” because they find it nostalgic. It’s allowing sentiment to gloss over an EXTREME lack of objective quality, and I’m always going to make fun of you for that. And that’s just the first track, there’s still ten more to go.
“Wear a Smile at Christmas” is, at least, an actual SONG instead of a skit. That said, it’s still an obviously sarcastic joke, poking fun at Officially Mandated Christmas Cheer over an overly bouncy melody that sounds as much like a radio commercial jingle as a holiday tune. There’s a few problems here, though. First off, it ALSO sounds like about a hundred contemporary Sunshine Pop tunes about being positive and happy that are every bit as vapid and substance-free as Christmas songs, despite The Raiders apparently finding THOSE acceptably hip and with it for them to have unironically recorded a few over the years. Oh, and the “sounds like a commercial” aspect makes for fairly toothless satire when it comes from a band that recorded multiple commercials themselves as well. Finally, the songs is only a minute and a half long. It’s over after one verse and a chorus, way too short to actually get across WHY it’s bad to force a smile when you’re not feeling it. The song just assumes you get what its saying and moves on before it’s actually said anything. So it’s unsatisfying as both a satirical gag OR as a piece of music, which more or less means it has no reason to exist.
And then comes “Jingle Bells.” Oh boy. Take everything I said about “Introduction” and crank it up to eleven. This deliberately sloppy and intentionally over the top bit of musical mugging is clearly designed to dare the listener to skip ahead to the next track. It’s too long, too repetitive, actively fakes the listener out with false build ups, and finally collapses into a mess of obnoxious laughter because noise is funny. But rather than just say “this isn’t good” again, I’ll instead cut the band something slightly resembling some slack and suggest that this might have played a BIT better as a skit on TV than it does on record. I haven’t watched a TON of The Raiders’ TV appearances, but everything I have seen is basically just as lowbrow and goonish as “Jingle Bells” sounds, but at least there’s a visual element to it. I could at least imagine the kids in the audience laughing if you could actually SEE the band falling over each other and mugging to the camera. Maybe the years of clowning around on camera had started to pollute their instincts on record here? Honestly, the whole idea of Christmas Present… and Past seems like it would be a lot more palatable as a series of skits on an episode of It’s Happening! -which people could just switch on and watch for free- rather than an album people would have to go out and pay money for. Heck, the back of the album even lists this track as being "From Hollywood" and lists some guest vocalists, so it legitimately might be the audio from a TV skit. But if it is, I couldn't find a clip of it online, so the previous paragraph is stayin' in.
And hey, as bad as this version of "Jingle Bells" might be, it's still a lot better than the entirely different version The Raiders recorded in the '80s... which tries to be Reggae. That's a level of badness wholly unlike anything going on here.
Anyway, after a brief interlude by the brass band again (a recurring motif throughout the album), we next get “Brotherly Love:” a rewrite of “Greensleeves” with a stab at socially conscious protest lyrics. I’ll give the song this: it’s at least more earnest than the previous several tracks, and the sparse Folk Rock sound of the guitar picking is tastefully done. Unfortunately, even just four tracks in, it’s already a bit too late to start acting like this album’s got something meaningful to say. Remember, we just sat through a dozen or so drunken verses of “Jingle Bells,” so a sudden plea for unity and equality is a bit hard to take seriously. It’s like watching a clown get hit in the face with a pie, then turn try to lecture the audience about the importance of protecting the environment while the cream and crust are still dripping down his face. And even then, earnest or not, the “be nice to people” message isn’t even THAT deep, and pairing it up with the melody of a song that had already demonstrated far more staying power than anything on this album ever will just highlights that problem.
Next up is “Rain, Sleet, Snow,” which is probably as close as Christmas Present… and Past every comes to getting legitimately good. An ode to all the postal workers busing delivering all your presents and cards over the holiday season, “Rain, Sleet, Now” is a surprisingly heavy song, built around a crunchy fuzz guitar riff and some unexpectedly distorted vocals, spiked with some tasty harmonies on the chorus, and topped off with a string section right out of “I Am The Walrus.” I’ve been known to lament that there isn’t much Psychedelic Christmas music, but this is pretty close to what a Magical Mystery Tour Holiday Special would probably sound like. Alas, while “Rain, Sleet, Snow” is where the album STARTS to get good, it never quite arrives there. The song’s arrangement, even with slashing strings on top, is deliberately sparse and empty sounding. That’s fine for a first verse, something to build up tension until the whole band kicks in and the song cranks into high gear for the second half, but that never happens. Instead, the song just repeats the one hook it has too many times, not building it up enough or introducing any variation to liven things up. Frankly, the song only sounds half-finished, like it was supposed to receive some extra rounds of overdubs that never happened. Apparently, “Rain, Sleet, Snow” was meant to be the single off of this album, and while I agree that it’s the only obvious choice for that role, I also can’t imagine any radio station playing it more than once. There’s just not enough to it for listeners to latch on to hard enough for the song to even stand a chance at chart action. Ironically for a song about the US Mail, “Rain, Sleet, Snow” fails to deliver.
Side one wraps up with another “Did we mention we listened to Sgt. Pepper?” track in “Peace,” an instrumental bit of string section playing while some stock sound effects play. Similar to “Rain, Sleet, Snow,” there’s the START of a nice musical idea here, but it’s not fleshed out enough, and what is here is repeated for way too long. Once again, I feel like I’m listening to a backing track that was supposed to have extra layers of production dubbed over it; it just feels half-baked. I must stress, for as much as I’m dunking on them here, I actually do like Paul Revere & The Raiders, and even in the dross of this album, there’s still flickers of the talented band they actually were. This isn’t a BAD little string section hook, it easily could have been the start of something solid. Unfortunately, they just seemed unable or unwilling to properly develop what good musical ideas are struggling to be heard here. It’s like listening to the sweepings left over after the recording of Revolution! wrapped up, dumped straight onto an album with minimal attempts to flesh them out. That, or they were just unwilling to do the hard work of writing real songs because they were too eager to get on to their next painfully unfunny “comedy” bit.
Case in point: “Valley Forge,” an attempt to spin their Revolutionary War gimmick into a Vietnam song, and failing utterly. First off, there’s a “funny” introductory disclaimer that’s just groan-worthy, and the main body of the song isn’t much better. This sounds like the placeholder lyrics someone would jot down while they worked out the melody, but then they just recorded it as is. That’s not good under any circumstances, but downright fatal on a “this is our serious protest statement” song. Even if anybody out there were willing to give the clowns who dressed up like George Washington on American Bandstand the benefit of the doubt to have some serious commentary on Vietnam in the first place (and that’s already a BIG “if”), there’d be nothing here of any substance beyond a generic “War isn’t Good” platitude. To add insult to injury, they try to pull the same trick as “Wear A Smile At Christmas” by pairing the lyrics with an “ironically” cheerful and jolly melody. But the problem is, that musical backing -which is clearly meant to be sarcastic- is the only part of “Valley Forge” that unambiguously WORKS. It’s a genuinely catchy little Sunshine Pop ditty that works quite well with jingle bells added to the mix, and it just makes the band’s attempts to act like they’re above such material seem idiotic. So, basically, this is the 1967 version of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” which is one of the biggest jabs I could ever make at a song.
“Dear Mr. Claus” actually starts off promising (minus the brass band bit), with an echoy, acoustic Folk intro that sounds straight out of a Simon & Garfunkel album. Alas, it doesn’t last long, and the main body of the song is one of those corny vaudeville send ups that so many bands in the late ‘60s inexplicably thought were so freakin’ hilarious. Unfortunately, the song doesn’t commit to the bit anywhere near hard enough for what little humor might be found to come through. The song is played way too slow, and the arrangement is far too sparse to make the smarmy corniness of the melody actually come through. Go listen to “That Acapulco Gold” by The Rainy Daze to see how this gag SHOULD be played for irony’s sake. That, or “Magnolia Simms” by The Monkees for an example of truly nailing the gag from a production standpoint. They even do the “skipping record” gag better than The Raiders do. Compared to those, “Dear Mr. Claus” feels limp and listless. To give “Dear Mr. Claus” some VERY faint praise, it does seem to be TRYING to point out how creepy the recurring “I’m asking Santa for a GIRL!” trope in holiday Pop songs is when you think about… but they don’t think about it very hard. It only comes through in one or two lines, and the rest of the song plays the bit so straight that a listener could easily miss it. See, even when I try to be nice to this album, it refuses to meet me halfway.
Speaking of which, “Macy’s Window” is another track that has the START of a nice melody, with some stately Baroque Pop harpsichord flourishes. But even more than “Valley Forge,” the lyrics sound like they were made up on the spot, with painfully obvious rhymes and a LOT of dead air in between the lines. It clearly wants to be a satirical depiction of the crass madness that radiates out of every department store during the holiday shopping rush, but it can’t muster the energy to do anything more than list things off in the barest detail. It’s like listening to the rough draft where the band just jotted down the basic outline of the song, but never came back to will the outline in with real content. There's a LOT of dead air between the lines here. What’s more, the track is barely a minute and a half long, and most of that half is just another snippet of the brass band. Even if this song had more to say than a surface level “commercialism is bad” commentary, it’s over too soon to actually get any of it across. This feels like a song that was written with the expectation that the audience would just project their own agreement onto the song, so the band didn’t need to do the hard work of actually writing anything out themselves. Well, that might work for politicians, but it makes for a pretty crappy Christmas song.
Next up, we have “Christmas Spirit,” in which that brass band finally gets to play along with The Raiders rather than just awkwardly bookending the tracks. And yes, they’re still deliberately out of tune, which does set the tone for the song as a whole. This is the “big showstopper number,” with giant audible air quotes around everything. The singing is about as hammy as it was over on “Jingle Bells”, though this time around they add in a bit of Alvin & The Chipmunks high pitched vocals as well. Because annoying voices are funny. I mean, sure, I guess you could say it’s supposed to parody Alvin & Co’s own holiday hits… except that “Christmas Spirit” otherwise sounds nothing like Ross Bagdasarian’s songs, so if it IS meant as a parody, it’s a very bad one. And if it’s not, then it’s still bad, but entirely on purpose. Whichever one you think is worse is really a moot point. It’s still two minutes of the holiday season you’ll never get back.
And we end the album on “A Heavy Christmas Message,” which… even just as a TITLE, that’s a ballsy thing to say after the preceding ten tracks of utter detritus. Oh, but it gets better. Strap in because I’m going to need some space to properly dissect just how much stupid is going on here. First off, only the opening quarter of the track has vocals, and it’s played up as a parody of those send-off numbers in the “old people shows” where the host delivers his goodbyes while the band plays on. But the thing is, the lyrics actually SEEM to be played straight here. Or, if they’re going for a straight-faced parody angle, it’s played SO straight that the part that makes it a parody has vanished. But at the same time, it’s also a song that will literally end on the line “Who took the Christ out of Christmas?” … after opening with the line “You wouldn’t take the bunny out of Easter,” as if there isn’t something CATACLYSMICLY stupid about that comparison. And again, if that’s on purpose, they do such a bad job of communicating it that I can’t laugh. I’m just forced to assume that Mark Lindsay doesn’t realize that Easter is also supposed to be a Jesus holiday. And if it WASN’T on purpose and he really DOESN’T know that, well, that just makes it all the harder for me to take anything else he has to say seriously.
But the real kicker is the closer, which is actually the bulk of the song. The lyrical section is over in less than a minute, while the rest of the track VERY slowly fades into a Ragtime Jugband jam, complete with kazoo. And then it takes even longer to wrap up, without ever really leading to anything. Again, it’s obviously calculated to be as annoying as possible to the listener, just one more troll move to mock us for actually sitting through this garbage all the way to the end. Setting aside how much that undermines any substance which might have been found in any of the preceding tracks, it’s just a teeth-grindingly irritating note to end a record on. Once again, my complaint isn’t just that Christmas Present… and Past is a bad Christmas album, this is just a bad album period. It’s easily the worst thing The Raiders had ever recorded up to this point, and I’m even including the generic Frat Rock instrumentals they started out doing.
But hey, if you don’t want to take MY word for it, why not ask the man who produced the thing? Remember Terry Melcher? The producer who had been collaborating with Mark Lindsay on his composing endeavors? Well, he thought this album was an absolute pile as well, and when the band insisted on pressing ahead with the material anyway, it more or less killed their relationship. With the exception of a stray track that would end up released on the following Goin’ to Memphis album, Melcher cut all ties with The Raiders after Christmas Present… and Past, with Lindsay eventually taking on producer duties himself. Because, you know, his decision making had been so on point already. And Melcher wasn’t the only one who wanted nothing to do with this album. Columbia quickly realized they had a disaster on their hands, cutting all promotion and axing the release of “Rain, Sleet, Snow” as a single. And yeah, that was the smart move. Any money spent trying to hype people into buying this turd would be money wasted, because the record buying public AGGRESSIVELY didn’t care about Christmas Present… and Past. I mean, if you think about it for more than five seconds, the whole idea of this album as a commercial product is totally flawed. The kind of people who normally buy Christmas albums aren’t going to like an album making fun of Christmas albums, the kind of people who like making fun of Christmas aren’t going to spend money on a Christmas album at all, and the people who would normally buy a Paul Revere & The Raiders album wouldn’t enjoy something this malformed and ill-tempered. And that’s ignoring the fact that the category “people who buy Paul Revere & The Raiders albums” was already getting smaller and smaller as it was. Like I suggested before, this project seems like it would have been much better suited as an elaborate special episode of one of their TV shows, which people could watch WITHOUT paying for it. This really is an album for nobody but the five guys who recorded it, and I can’t imagine even they went back and revisited it very often.
And yes, to reiterate what I already laid out earlier, The Raiders’ career just went into more and more of a tailspin after December ‘67, and the harder they tried to regain some semblance of respectability, the more it slipped out of their grasp. Their TV work dried up, making it even harder to push new songs on the buying public. Sure, they still managed to chart a few hits, “Mr. Sun, Mr. Moon” even made it into the top twenty. But “Cinderella Sunshine” and “We Gotta All Get Together” missed the Top 40 completely. And speaking of “Mr. Sun, Mr. Moon,” that song is so Bubblegum that they literally turned it into a jingle for battery operated dancing doll. In fact, speaking of commercials, let’s take a second to talk about the commercial they did for Pontiac to hype up a GTO called “The Judge.” I know absolutely nothing about cars, so I have no idea if I even structured that sentence properly.
What I do know is the commercial is incredibly corny, with the band totally mugging to the camera in a way that seems like it would only appeal to an audience too young to actually drive. Speaking of which, I’m not sure why Pontiac thought the dudes who bought muscle cars would be impressed by having one pitched to them by that teen idol guy their little sisters liked. More importantly, though, are the costumes. The band is in full Revolutionary War regalia again, tricorn hats and all, despite being two years into their desperate push to distance themselves from that very gimmick. From everything I’ve read, this was very much done under duress. The band didn’t want to put on the old uniforms again, but the company and the director demanded it. Again, I don’t understand why they’d want that from a pure marketing perspective, but the very fact that they did still speaks volumes. They didn’t care what being seen on TV in those costumes again would do to The Raiders’ credibility, because as far as THEY were concerned, The Raiders didn’t have any. They’d basically hired they eye-catching costumes to be in their ad, and who the band wearing them even was (and whatever kind of aspirations towards critical legitimacy they might have had) was irrelevant.
And quite frankly, that’s what The Raiders wound up being: irrelevant. The deeper the Rock and Roll scene got into serious counterculture stuff, the more clear it became that The Raiders would never be more than that silly band who sang for little kids while wearing the stupid George Washington costumes. Mark Lindsay tried to branch out into a solo career, and did manage a top ten single with “Arizona,” but nothing else he did every came close to matching that success. And frankly, most of his solo stuff is generic AM radio fluff that’s indistinguishable from Gary Puckett, so the failure is deserved. Meanwhile, The Raiders sipped even further, failing to land a single entry into the top 40 for the entirety of 1970. In a frantic attempt to shed their old image entirely, the seven went so far as to drop both Revere and Lindsay’s names from the billing and simply go by “The Raiders” or even simply “Raiders.” I guess being associated with an Oakland football team was better than The Revolutionary War (Hey look, I made a sports joke!). It didn’t help. Their first album without Revere’s name on the cover, Collage, couldn’t make the top 100 at all, stalling at an embarrassing 154 on the charts.
And on that pathetic note… they had the single biggest hit of their entire career with “Indian Reservation” in 1971. Yeah, I know, it kind of messes up my “downward spiral” plot arc, but this is one of those cases where the fluke exception just proves the broader trend to be true. Yes, “Indian Reservation” was The Raiders’ one and only chart topper, but it really sounds nothing like anything else the band was doing at the time. That makes sense, seeing that it was a cover of a tune that had been floating around since the late ‘50s. If anything, the melodramatic string-laden production sounds more like a Mark Lindsay solo record than anything by the band. But what matters here is that record buyers in 1971 were fans of “Indian Reservation,” not The Raiders. Case in point, the Indian Reservation album managed to crack the top 20 again riding the coat tails of the title track, while 1972’s follow up Country Wine clocked in at an abysmal 209. I didn’t even realize that Billboard counted albums below the 200 mark. That would also be the band’s last album, as Columbia finally cut the group loose in ’73 after a string of failed follow-up singles. Mark Lindsay would bolt from the group himself in 1975, eventually working behind the scenes of the industry through most of the ‘80s. Meanwhile, Paul Revere would finally, fully embrace his obvious fate as an Oldies Artist, bringing back the tricorn hats in all their cheesy glory, performing on stage behind a keyboard designed to look like a hot rod, and steering a version of the band with no other original members down a never-ending string of state fairs and novelty cruises and the like. And you know what? God bless him for it. I’m coming down hard on the group for the purposes of the blog, but I do find something weirdly wholesome about a showbiz clown who drops all pretense of being a “serious artiste” and just has fun being a crowd pleaser. On the other hand, though, the occasional one off singles The Raiders would cough up at this point are absolutely dreadful. It’s painfully obvious that, by this point, the name Paul Revere & The Raiders would never be associated with anything even remotely approaching relevancy ever again. For all that desperate fighting in the late ‘60s they were more than a bunch of costumes, the costumes won, shambling on long after the band that wore them had died a death.
And you know why? BECAUSE THEY BEEFED WITH CHRISTMAS, THAT’S WHY! That’s right, for as much as the year 1967 had seen the band modestly fall off, it wasn’t until the anti-Christmas album that their output became legitimately BAD. That was where the spiral truly began, and they never truly managed to pull out of it. Because that’s what happens when you mess with Christmas! The Baby Jesus calls in his angel goons, and they go MESS YOU UP! Clearly, as soon as Santa saw work on the album appear on his list, he sentenced them to years of nothing but lumps of coal in their Billboard chart placements. The elves were probably sneaking into Mark Lindsay’s hotel room every night and injecting visions of sugar plums into his dreams, disrupting his sleep pastes and preventing him from coming up with enough lyrics to actually finish the songs. The reindeer probably went around sabotaging deliveries of the album to stores, while Frosty personally threatened every single programing director at every major radio station to ensure that they never promoted it. The Christmas Mafia has tendrils that run far and deep, there is no where you can go to evade it’ punishing grasp! Those who go to war against holiday cheer WILL be crushed beneath its unforgiving boot! When you meddle with the primal forces of Christmas, YOU! WILL! ATONE!
…that just might be the single most unhinged paragraph I’ve ever written in all my life.
