“All Things Must Pass” (1970) – Billy Preston

“All Things Must Pass” (1970) – Billy Preston * Written by George Harrison * Produced by Billy Preston and George Harrison * LP: Encouraging Words * Label: Apple

Billy Preston’s Beatle connections went all the way back to 1962 Liverpool, when the starstruck foursome warmed up for their idol Little Richard, who included Preston in his touring group. So when Preston sat in on organ for their Get Back sessions in 1969, the comfortable music he made with them testified of their old-friend status. He recorded two albums for their Apple label, That’s the Way God Planned It (1969) and Encouraging Words (1970), with co-production and guitar work by the symbiotically God-conscious George Harrison. For Encouraging Words, Harrison allowed Preston to roll out two of his own songs, “My Sweet Lord” and “All Things Must Pass,” in September 1970, two months before he’d release his own versions. For his iteration of “All Things Must Pass” (which puts parentheses around “must” on the label), Preston adapts the song to an arrangement reminiscent of Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song,” working its way up to the IV in the verse beginnings, then scooting back down (III-II-I). By then the Christmas season market had become (and would continue to be) a major part of the Beatles’ commercial legacy, with Harrison’s All Things Must Pass release date of November 27, 1970, being a case in point. It’s hard not to hear Preston’s approach as some sort of St. Nicholas eye-wink, complete with falling snowflake strings at the end.

“Song of the Death Machine” (1970) – Bruce Haack

“Song of the Death Machine” (1970) – Bruce Haack * Written by Bruce Haack * Produced by Leroy Parkins * LP: The Electric Lucifer * Label: Columbia

Bruce Haack, the late Canadian electro music inventor and experimentalist, has such a reputation as an outsider that it’s easy to forget that his best known album came out with major label backing on Columbia Records. The Electric Lucifer, though, maintains the sort of homegrown, folk art charm that Moog masters, as a rule, are not expected to project. Haack’s liner notes declare his wish to end war with his music and also find him dwelling on the Milton/Blake subject matter of war in heaven. Standing on a larger stage than usual, Haack meant to unleash a “powerlove” so effective it could bring about the transformation and forgiveness of even Lucifer, the fallen “love angel.” The Christian angle gets more musically explicit near the end with yuletide signifiers. “Requiem” resolves into “The First Noel,” while “Song of the Death Machine” takes melodic cues from “Stars Were Gleaming, Shepherd Dreaming,” a children’s carol published in 1946 for the Presbyterian Hymns for Primary Worship (with lyrics by Nancy Byrd Taylor). But the music came from Poland, that most Christmasy of all Eastern Bloc nations, where it’s always been known as “W Żlobie leży” (in the manger).

“Będzie kolęda” (1968) – Skaldowie

 
“Będzie kolęda” (1968) – Skaldowie * Written by Wojciech Młynarski (lyrics) and Andrzej Zieliński (music) * LP: Wszystko Mi Mówi, Że Mnie Ktoś Pokochał * Label: Pronit
 
Communism could never squelch the Christmas spirit of Poland, whose Catholic roots and traditions ran too deep, so the appearance of a brazenly festive track called “There Will Be Another Christmas Carol” on a 1968 album by the popular rock group Skaldowie was hardly unusual for its time. (A girl group called Ali Babka joins them, flavoring it with some Phil Spector Americana.) The church bell-simulating vocal refrains at the beginning and end are possibly borrowed from the chorus of Gene Pitney’s “Just One Smile” (1966). The melody reverberated further in the TV theme for The Smurfs (1981), the Wycliffe Gordon-penned theme for NPR’s All Things Considered (1995), and South Park’s cheesy poofs theme (1998).
 

“Dawn” (1975) – Slapp Happy

“Dawn” (1974) – Slapp Happy * Written by Anthony Moore and Peter Blegvad * LP: Slapp Happy * Label: Virgin

Although Slapp Happy were one-third American (Peter Blegvad, later to create the surreal Leviathan comic strip), another third German (Dagmar Krause), and the final third British (Anthony Moore), they took shape in Hamburg and had an independent krautrock sensibility. This means that it’s not clear, when listening to the trio’s first two albums, if they’re being facetious, earnest, or experimental, because they’re being all three. “Dawn” sounds like they’re riffing on the Grass Roots or Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady” but with retreat bugle calls and elliptical words about someone, in fact, in retreat. It also includes two separate insertions of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.”

“The Mistletoe and Me” (1969) – Isaac Hayes

“The Mistletoe and Me” (1970) – Isaac Hayes * Written and produced by Isaac Hayes * Arranged by Isaac Hayes and Dale Warren * 45: “The Mistletoe and Me” / “Winter Snow” * Label: Enterprise

Three Christmas singles from 1969-1970 heralded a new era of increasingly sophisticated, adult-friendly radio fare. These were the Carpenters’ “Merry Christmas Darling,” Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas,” and Isaac Hayes’ “The Mistletoe and Me.” Each of these sound as though they could have been released at any point up to the present day since their appearance, but not prior. They also continue serving as templates for the art of the minimally-annoying Christmas record. Hayes’ seductive offering is a miracle of sound mixing, mood, and instrumentation. “Fate is Santa Claus, and Cupid’s his helper,” sings Hayes with his lady by his side and a quiet fire all ablaze. The song also stands as one of the towering indicators of promise for arranger Dale Warren, who had previously worked on Hayes’s “Walk on By,” but whose momentum and spirits gave way to alcohol and financial woes after apparently tying too many of his hopes to the doomed Stax label (which closed in 1975). Although all Christmas record arrangers like to cross-reference the standards, Warren is remarkably subtle. Listen for the interweaving melody snippets as the track plays: “Jingle Bells,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “We Three Kings,” “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” “No Place Like Home for the Holidays,” and a piano toying with “Up on the Housetop” and “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).” 

“Silent Night” (1978) – The Dickies

“Silent Night” (1978) * Written by Joseph Mohr and Franz Xaver Gruber (listed as Trad.) * Produced by John Hewlett * 45: “Silent Night” / “The Sound of Silence” * Label: A&M

The Dickies were punks from Southern California who drew slapstick (and stage prop) inspiration from England’s the Damned, whose cover art for Damned Damned Damned would have suited the Dickies just fine. Singer Leonard Graves Philips also sounded eerily interchangeable with Wire’s Colin Newman. One of their distinguishing factors, though, was a way with turning cover songs, which always started out seeming like mockery, into expressions of earnest tribute. On 1978’s “Silent Night,” with a misogyny-tinged picture sleeve that reinforces “punk-version” expectations, Philips sings his heart out and the guitar solo reaches for the stars. It becomes an un-silent yearning for silence that brings more layers of meaning out of the familiar song than countless other versions have ever managed. The silence shtick carries over to side B, a cover of “The Sound of Silence,” with an intro that makes you think of Loverboy’s forthcoming “When It’s Over,” and when the whole song really is over, silence never sounds louder.   

“Vanity Fair” (1997) – World Party

“Vanity Fair” (1997) – World Party * Written and produced by Karl Wallinger * LP: Egyptology * Label: Chrysalis
 

Welshman Karl Wallinger emerged from the Waterboys as a solo artist called World Party in the late ’80s. He sounded like a studio rock classicist with a voice only a few inflections shy of Mick Jagger and presented himself, in visuals and production, as a big fan of Prince’s Around the World in a Day. Most of the songs on his first two albums, Private Revolution and Goodbye Jumbo, had a save-the-planet theme, but by 1993’s Bang, the preoccupation had dematerialized. His fourth album, Egyptology (1997) contained his big meal ticket in a song called “She’s the One,” which had “sync me” written all over it in the placement-happy late ’90s, and indeed the WB Televison Network found an open snuggle-space for it in a 1998 first season episode of Dawson’s Creek. Singer Robbie Williams, a mega-star in the UK, then recorded a version that went #1 over there in 1999. As a whole, Egyptology survives that notoriety along with the TV stink and comes off now as an underappreciated pop artifact. Hear Wallinger’s feel for even non-classic pop-history detail on “Vanity Fair,” which starts out feeling like “Play with Fire” but sprinkles the chorus with flutes teasing on that recorder line in “Hitchin’ a Ride,” the 1970 record by British one-hit wonders Vanity Fare.

“Oh the Warm Feeling” (1986) – Van Morrison

 
“Oh the Warm Feeling” (1986) – Van Morrison * Written and produced by Van Morrison * LP: No Guru, No Method, No Teacher * Label: Mercury
 
Van Morrison took the title for his No Guru, No Method, No Teacher album from a passage in the 1964 book Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the songs reflect that anti-guru guru’s focus on self-knowledge as true religion. Inner peace and societal change, he teaches, both come through self-directed meditation, and you can hear Morrison express this, especially, on the album’s “Got to Go Back,” “Oh the Warm Feeling,” and “In the Garden.”
 
Recorded in Sausalito, it was New Agey in sentiment and sound, sharing the Marin County textures of late-eighties Windham Hill releases. But even if you’ve been programmed to reject such characteristics, you’d have to be truly hard-hearted not to feel the genuine spirituality in those three songs, at least.
 

“Oh the Warm Feeling” gets the spotlight here for espousing peaceful seaside pondering, filling Morrison with “devotion” and “religion” and, presumably, peace, while Richie Buckley’s soprano sax handles aforementioned aural textures. But the first four notes of the song seem to mimic the first four notes in the main riff of the Damned’s “Noise Noise Noise” (1979) which, if intentional, is quite the emphasis-through-counterpoint exercise.

“Utawena” (1961) – The Kingston Trio

 
“Utawena” (1961) – The Kingston Trio * Written by Nick Reynolds and Adam Yagodka * Produced by Voyle Gilmore * LP: Make Way * Label: Capitol
 

Sketchy songwriting credits abounded during the folk revival, with interpreters taking ownership of traditional-sounding tunes as “version-composers.” This could complicate the act of tracking down a song’s proper origins. In the case of “Utawena,” a song on the Kingston Trio’s 1961 Make Way album, the credits go to Trio member Nick Reynolds and his friend Adam Yagodka. But it’s really an arrangement of a South African Kinswahili song called “Ut’he Wena,” which the two credited writers likely learned from the 1960 Schirmer publication Choral Folk Songs from South Africa, with arrangements credited to Pete Seeger and Robert DeCormier. Seeger had previously recorded a number of songs in that book on a 1955 album called Bantu Choral Folk Songs from the Song Swappers. “Ut’he Wena” isn’t included on the record, but its book arrangement shows that Reynolds and Yagodka had consulted it faithfully. (The book includes a translation.)

A thread at Mudcat Cafe about this song illustrates how frustrating origin-hunting can be for curious researchers, with the initiator reporting finding no answers from the Bear Family label’s box set notes, from Yagodka’s widow, and from Reynolds himself via phone, who claimed his memory had failed him. The initiator finally declares it a lost cause. (The recent group history Greenback Dollar: The Incredible Rise of The Kingston Trio by William J. Bush only calls the track “awful,” which it isn’t.) Another song on the Make Way album, “En El Agua,” is credited to Trio leader Bob Shane, but on the 1966 Best of the Kingston Trio, Vol. III, the label rightfully credits the then-living “Antonio Fernandez,” the real name of Cuban singer-songwriter Ñico Saquito. He had debuted the song in 1957 as “Maria Cristina.”

“Too Shy” (1983) – Kajagoogoo

“Too Shy” (1983) – Kajagoogoo * Written by Kajagoogoo * Produced by Colin Thurston and Nick Rhodes * 45: “Too Shy” / “Take Another View” (US), “Too Shy (instrumental) (UK) * LP: White Feathers * Label: EMI
 

That rising synth at the beginning of “Too Shy” is the sound of a digital entertainment wave sweeping across the US during the summer of 1983. Anyone between the ages of roughly 8 and 17 will remember the lifestyle shift of when video game systems and cable TV became more deeply entrenched into suburban American households, changing young perceptions of summertime itself. The song’s video, by ’80s British Invasion group Kajagoogoo, with their bleached/dyed hair and gibberish name, aired in heavy rotation on MTV during that summer, pushing the song to #5 in the US. But these outer aspects, in retrospect, overshadow the track’s virtues as sophisticated songwriting and studiocraft, co-produced by Nick Rhodes, whose cachet with Duran Duran, the kings of all ’80s bleached/dyed and gibberish-name groups, gave it added commercial blessing. The instrumental mix of “Too Shy,” on the b-side of the UK single, shines a worthwhile spotlight on Nick Beggs’s bass lines, reminding us of how much value British New Pop placed on the low end and how so many of its players had internalized American funk, fusion and R&B. Lead singer Limahl’s enunciated delivery reinforced an inclination among American pop bands to try and sound British, just like in the ’60s.