Far Out There Christmas Soundtrack: May

Technically the newest character to get a Christmas Soundtrack this year, though anyone who’d been paying attention knows that May was appearing in Far Out There for YEARS before she was technically “introduced.” And since most of those early-bird cameos were in Christmas comics, it’s only fitting that she gets her half hour of holiday fun as well! Anyone paying attention to the regular soundtracks knows that a hyperactive girl like May was best represented by 60s British Invasion tunes, heavy on The Beatles. Now, you would think that this would mean her Christmas playlist would basically be a trans-Atlantic version of Trigger’s playlist, full of English bands doing novelty seasonal tunes. But surprisingly, no. The Mersey Beat crowd were apparently much more resistant to doing Christmas tunes than their American counterparts, at least they were at the time. See, I do indeed have A Very Beatlemania Christmas, but rather than having ACTUAL Beatles tunes, May’s Christmas playlist is largely dominated by tribute acts re-constructing familiar Christmas tunes by grafting riffs or arrangements from recognizable Beatles songs. It’s a cute idea that’s probably a lot MORE cute to a music nerd like myself who can derive just as much joy out of picking the arrangements apart to see what bit comes from what song as from just listening to a Christmas song in the first place. And, of course, it also depends on whether the cover band is actually any good at what they do. Regardless, I hope you’ll agree that these fast, punchy, guitar-driven “Yeah Yeah Yeah” interpretations of Christmas songs are pretty much the exact musical representation of Far Out There’s red-headed scrappy in holiday mode. And besides, it’s technically not ALL cover bands, there’s some extra surprises lurking within. Let’s dig in!

We start off with a very VERY last-minute addition to the list, as in I'm editing the queued-up blog post to squeeze this in, because I didn't even know this tune existed when I wrote the rest of the blog.  But in a great Mersybeat Christmas miracle, I just now stumbled onto the perfect opener for a list like this: "I Want A Beatle for Christmas" by Jackie & Jill.  This one's the only real 60s recording on this whole list, though it's American rather than British.  Actually, there was a whole cottage industry of cheap Beatles cash-in songs for a few years, a number of which were Holiday-themed.  Most of them were also pretty terrible (the pun "Ringo Bells" was used MORE than once) but I kinda like "I Want A Beatle For Christmas."  The vocals are very obviously coming from a pair of wildly untrained teenagers, the lyrics are even more juvenile fangirl drivel, and the melody is a pretty uncomplicated rewrite of "I Want To Hold Your Hand," but there's an authentic Garage Band energy to the whole thing that's kind of charming to a guy like me.  At the very least, it's a passable entry point to the more polished songs to follow.  With that said, don't be weirded out if the rest of this blog acts like this song doesn't exist, because the other entries were written before I knew this would even be on here.

Anyway, the very first of the Not Beatles songs was also my personal introduction to this whole Christmas/Tribute idea in the first palce: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by The Fab Four, performed in the style of “I Saw Her Standing There.” Right from the opening “One Two There FAWH!,” this is an absolutely spot-on Beatles impersonation, both in the sense of being sonicly accurate and just being really good. Even setting aside the eerily accurate Paul McCartney impression, they're just a really tight, well-honed rock band. Back in Ye Olde Dayse, I used to see this song posted online as if it was an actual Beatles rarity, and I can see why some people would fall for it.

Next, we have Rubber Band, a tribute act from Denmark who… aren’t bad, but also aren’t quite as good as The Fab Four. For one thing, their English is a lot more shaky, resulting in some unintentionally funny flubbed lyrics. But on the other hand, I think their Christmas album Beatmas came out before any of The Fab Four’s stuff, so they’d at least get some bragging rights for coming up with this idea first. And it seems to have really been a hit over in Scandanavia, to the point that I occasionally see them billed as “The Beatmas” instead of Rubber Band. Anyway, they do a version of “Last Christmas” in the form The Beatles’ cover of “Please Mr. Postman” …and I must admit that this is the recording that made me not hate the Wham original anymore. I mean, I still think it’s under-written and lacking a real hook and generally not really about Christmas outside of the title, but that backbeat (the same one that Adam Schlesinger swiped for “The Thing You Do!”) really brings the whole thing into focus for me and makes it feel a lot less insubstantial. I still prefer my Christmas songs to be more about actual Christmas stuff (and if it MUST be a love song, at least be a happy one) but just getting me to be okay with “Last Christmas” at all was a bit of a Christmas miracle.

Next up is “Silent Night” in a sort of a generic Early-Beatlemania-era send up (sort of a hybrid of “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Another Girl,” “I Wanna Be Your Man” and their cover of “Some Other Guy”) by… UK Holiday Rock Heroes. Yeah, I have no idea who these guys are. At first I thought the name might be a generic catch-all for one of those package tours of 60s has-beens, but the vocalists here don’t sound all that old. Rather, they sound like a bunch of average session musicians doing middling-to-poor Liverpool accents and recording cheapo covers in somebody’s garage. And there’s a certain charm to that chintzy-ness, at least to me. If nothing else, this bar band take on “Silent Night” is still the kind of thing May would dance along to.

Okay, if you need some authenticity to get over that especially iffy inclusion, then we next have Wizzard doing the original version of “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday.” Yes, this is a 70s song rather than a 60s one, but it’s still closer to the 60s than most of these covers, and it’s not as if Roy Wood didn’t build his whole career on a foundation of borrowed Beatles hooks. Even if the 70s-Glam-version-of-the-50s presence of saxophones make things a bit weird, that killer melody still fits right in with the Beatlemania pastiches elsewhere.

And speaking of which, The Fab Four return with “Joy To The World,” as arranged to sound like “Please Please Me,” though with an instrumental break borrowed from “Little Child” to cover up the fact that “Joy To The World” doesn’t have a middle eight the way “Please Please Me” does. See what I mean about picking apart the various ingredients of these musical concoctions? I could do this crap all day! Again, The Fab Four are easily the best at this gimmick, and this is another tune that could easily be passed off as a real Beatles rarity to people who didn’t know any better.

Next, believe it or not, we have the single, solitary recording in May’s entire “Beatles Christmas” playlist that actually dates from the 1960s: “Christmas Is My Time Of Year” by “The Christmas Spirit,” actually Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman of The Turtles backed by an amalgamation of West Coast weirdoes including Gram Parsons. To the extent that this song is known at all, it’s the later cover version by The Monkees (thanks to co-writer Chip Douglas being one of The Monkees’ more notable producers), and I myself have already talked up that version over in Layla’s playlist. The original’s not bad, but Parson’s involvement gives it a bit more of a Lonhair Country flair, and Kaylan & Volman’s vocals lean much harder into their bug-eyed, wacky Flo & Eddie personas for my tastes. But hey, “bug-eyed and wacky” sums up May pretty well, so why NOT throw the original in here?

And then The Fab Four return AGAIN with “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” as arranged to sound like “Help!” This is probably the most clever of their re-arrangements, working in ways that really shouldn’t work at all. They cram a LOT of lyrics into not a lot of verses, but the original “Help!” already saw John Lennon experimenting with wordier lyrics, so it all fits together unexpectedly well. Even better, though, is the way the repeated “new born KIIIIIING” lyric is used to mimic the “PLEEEEEASE please help me” line, falsetto and all. This is always the song I play to introduce people to The Fab Four, and it rarely fails to get a laugh.

Rubber Band returns with “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” patterned after “All My Loving,” though one again, the impression isn’t anywhere near as tight. Also, the melody of the original is pretty drastically different from “All My Loving,” to the point that only the hyperactive staccato triplets of the rhythm guitar ties the two together. It still works just as a song, though, and when the chorus and guitar solo kick in around the end of each line, those parts do click very well. Now if only the singers could do some better impersonations…

To drive that point home, we return to The Fab Four with “The Christmas Song” as arranged to sound like “Here, There, and Everywhere.” It’s probably the least obvious pastiche of there’s to be included here, since once again, the melody of the original doesn’t really match the Beatles song much at all. Where it not for the occasional pedal guitar flourish that’s clearly based on “Here, There and Everywhere,” I could probably get away with claiming this was based on ANY mid-tempo Beatles ballad. But in a weird way, I actually think it works in the songs favor, in that this sounds less like a Beatles fanboy joke and more like just a really solid cover of “The Christmas Song.” This is the one Fab Four song I could honestly see getting played on some random radio station’s Christmas playlist just as a regular song. Granted, it’s also a bit subdued for May, but even she needs to cool things down for a LITTLE bit.

Rubber Band comes back more time with “White Christmas,” mostly based around the distinctive “Ticket To Ride” riff… but awkwardly injecting some lines from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” in a REALLY weird and jarring fashion. I don’t care much for those bits, especially since WITHOUT them this would definitely be Rubber Band’s best tune. The “I Feel Fine” riff and “White Christmas” melody work startlingly well together, and they also throw in some new lyrics set to the original “I Feel Fine” melody during the fade out. If only they just left out that clunky extra bit, it’d be perfect.

NOT perfect is another UK Holiday Rock Heroes tune: “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” arranged to sound like… um… I’m not even sure WHAT this is supposed to sound like. I mean, it’s clearly going for some kind of generic Merseybeat sound with the corny Liverpool impersonations and the sixth chord at the end and all that, but it’s either not directly borrowing any elements from a pre-existing Beatles song, or doing it so poorly that I can’t recognize it. And the thing is, if an ACTUAL Merseybeat band has recorded this exact arrangement, it’d be a perfectly fine little holiday rocker. But the other tracks on the awkwardly-titled 60s British Invasion Christmas are obvious pulling the same Fab Four/Rubber Band gimmick of basing the arrangements on other songs, so I kind of have to look for that here too. May wouldn’t mind either way, of course, so the tune still makes the cut no matter what it’s supposed to be.

And we wrap things up with yet ANOTHER Fab Four song, the fifth out of a set of only twelve songs. It’s almost as if I think they’re pretty good or something. Admittedly, this is the one song here where I do think The Fab Four ALMOST bite off more than they can chew. It’s “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” arranged to sound like “Got To Get You Into My Life,” which is another combination that works a lot better than it really seems like it should. Unfortunately, the band gets a Bit too creative for their own good and tries to incorporate the melody of “O Christmas Tree” in for the horn sections and later guitar break. On paper it’s not a terrible idea, and the guitar bit really does work, but the horns are just a little… off. The bit stretches out a little too long, there’s a bit too much dead air, and the flow of the whole song threatens to fall off. It’s not as bad as “White Christmas,” though, and I obviously still think highly enough of the song to wrap up the playlist with it. Also, they replace the “pumpkin pie” lyric with some REALLY nerdy Beatles references, which is always going to appeal to a dork like me. And also a Nitpicker, now that I think about it. Gah, I mean I WAS TOTALLY THINKING OF IT THIS WHOLE TIME! That’s why I chose to end May’s Christmas playlist with it! Aren’t I so clever and totally good at planning things out in advance?

May's YouTube Christmas Playlist