Another (Slightly Quirky) Christmas Season Blog

As I wrote in my blog last year at this time, I have my own way of ringing in the yuletide by rereading old books that friends have introduced me to. But for this year, I’d like to comment on my choice of music for the season. And what I have to say really borders on a true confession.

Like my reading, my choice of music for the season usually runs nostalgic. Sounds are chosen for the associations they can conjure. I know that for my parents’ generation, that would mean bringing out Bing Crosby and Harry Belafonte albums. Some of my favorite memories as a child involve Belafonte’s deep, lively voice; in fact, most of the time, when I hear carols sung on TV or in the malls, I think, “Oh, that was a Harry Belafonte song. But they aren’t getting it quite right.” Most of the Christmas songs, in my mind, belong to him.

But the real focus of this blog has to do with the fact that, for me this year, the season didn’t really get started in a meaningful way until I broke out my The Best of the Monkees CD.

As I said, this involves true confessions.

Trouble Getting Into It

The truth is that this year, this time around, none of the season’s big hits did it for me. This may just be my own psychology, but with Black Friday becoming Black Thanksgiving this year, and with Christmas stuff coming out as soon as my youngest son came in from trick-or-treating, I put up resistance. I didn’t fall for it (It doesn’t help that I live in California, where right now it looks and feels like early fall). And so this year I felt like someone was trying to trick me into making all of the Christmas associations far too early, and I wasn’t going for it.

I submitted final grades and settled in for some Christmas reading (This year it’s Dostoyevski—I’m rereading “White Nights” and a perennial favorite, Notes From Underground) and I waited. And I waited. Still no Christmas spirit. Still no cozy, warm memories or desire to make new ones.

In fact, it wasn’t until, as I said, I got out the old Monkees CD and got into that first guitar solo some studio musician made up for the Monkees TV show that Christmas really started to cook for me this year. 

I started to remember being twelve again. Davy Jones on “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” sent me right back, as though by the TARDIS, to Northern Little League and that summer when that song was on the loud speakers over the concession stand most of the season. And then “She,” that great Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart song, two giants of the Bubblegum era, blasted forth, and I was again hearing my sister listening to the album she got for her birthday that year. I was back in the living room with it coming over our old hi fi.

The Three Levels of Listening to the Monkees

The truth is, of course, that the Monkees require listening on several different levels to be fully appreciated, and with that I will conclude this yuletide blog.

The first level is the one the TV show invites. This is the level of the pre-teen, who believes these boys all play and sing like that, though of course by the fifth grade you’ve started to see that Mickey, the drummer, isn’t really drumming, and while Mike is playing legitimate guitar chords and must know something about the instrument, the sound track has at least two other guitars playing in addition to that organ sound. And where is that coming from, since Peter is playing the bass guitar?

TV, as we know, requires that we don’t ask too many questions. And this Christmas, I realized that I was still capable of this, that the pre-teen is still alive and well and living in these musical tracks.

The second level comes from going beyond being aware to frankly admitting that while that picture is quite cool and hip on the screen, there also really are some very talented musicians who laid down the instrumental tracks back in the studio. This isn’t hard to go with. People do it all the time with today’s country music and American Idol. There’s some singer with good vocals, but behind her is a class A band of unknowns.

The third level is to recognize that the Monkees are not lip syncing, and that in fact, they can sing and even play, but they just are not playing on these first recordings. But they sure do put a lot of teen passion into those words someone else has penned. You just have to appreciate the whole package, going back and forth between these three levels, appreciating the real musicians, appreciating the talent of the boys themselves, and appreciating the illusion that someone put some thought into so that we could have these memories.

Some Day, Somewhere

Somewhere, Davy Jones is breaking out again into that terrible song, the one I always skip over, “Day Dream Believer.”

Like most of the others, it reminds me of summer and being young. But this Christmas, what with Christmas coming early to the stores, I figure it’s just a matter of time before “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone” or “Valleri” become standards for the season--at least for me and my family.

I said at the outset that this might be confessional. And it is quirky. But for all of this, I wish you a Merry Christmas.