He performed no Box Tops (or Big Star) songs that night, and if he had, I doubt he would have done my favorite, “I Met Her in Church.” (Though did once say from the stage that it was the best song the Box Tops ever did.) While a haze of irony hovers about Chilton and his reputation (e.g., covers of “Volare” and “Hey Little Cobra”), it certainly not what earned his place in music history or our hearts. Songs like “Thirteen” and “September Gurls” capture an unguarded vulnerability—or at least project it. The question, then, about songs like “Jesus Christ” or “The Ballad of El Goodo” (“And at my side is God”) or “I Met Her in Church” (even though it was written by the estimable Dan Penn and not Chilton) is: it is a joke? Or is it something truer, deeper? Or simply a matter of reflex, instinct, habit—the old-time religion bubbling up from the Southern soil Chilton and Penn both sprouted from?
I have a friend who argues that Tony Bennett is a superior artist to Frank Sinatra. I think she’s wrong—Tony Bennett would say she is wrong—but there are times when I see what she means. Like when I listen to this cut, which may be the finest in his long career. Amazingly, it had been out of print for 40 years until Sony released Tony Bennett: The Complete Collection last year.
It was on Tony’s last album for Columbia before his contract lapsed and he launched his own label and wandered in the pop wilderness for a decade or more, which may explain why it got lost. Sublimely supported by Robert Farnon’s arrangement, Bennett embraces softness after a career spent to a large degree sending his voice up to the third balcony. (Bennett was a much more operatic a singer than Sinatra ever was.) This may have been a necessary strategy: Tony’s pitch wavers a bit throughout the album, suggesting vocal problems or perhaps rocky confidence at a point of career crisis. But it works here, and it was an understated mode he would turn to with increasing success and frequency when his career bounced back in the 1990s.
Then there’s the Van Heusen-Burke song—really, the perfect Valentine’s Day song if you’re a glass-half-empty type of person. I’ve never heard a version of this classic that wasn’t moving, but this one, for all its brevity, plumbs its depths like no other I know.
For Boxing Day, something from the UK: “It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats.”
Various artists A Christmas Record (1982) ZE PB-6020
Few Christmas records cover a broader range of feelings or tell better stories than ZE Records on this 1982 anthology. Powered by the energy of punk and new wave and post-disco, the artists of ZE turned their considerable if quirky talents to reclaim the holiday record on their own terms. The wildly various results included “Hey Lord” by Suicide, James White’s “Christmas with Satan,” “Christmas on Riverside Drive” by August Darnell (AKA Kid Creole), and Was (Not Was) telling us about “Christmas Time in the Motor City.”
Almost all the songs were originals, but one of the stand-outs, Christina’s “Things Fall Apart” was an updated version of an earlier song featuring “new improved lyrics.” It’s has a flat, hard, bleak midwinter outlook that matched the holiday nihilism of my younger self. (That nihilism was complete unearned, by the way: no true nihilist would claim to have a favorite xmas song, even a depthlessly depressing one.)
With its largely spoken and well-wrought lyrics, “Things Fall Apart” is a perfect flipside for one of my all-time favorite holiday songs, “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses. With its cinematic details and happy ending, it’s a post-punk It’s a Wonderful Life.
Best of all, however, is Davitt Sigerson’s “It’s a Big Country,” which captures the connections and dislocations of family, travel, and modern holidays better than any song I know.
