MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!!!
Christmas Greetings from our bud, Spud, Al Jardine’s right-hand man …
Merry
Christmas and Happy New Year!
Here are a few fun festive links and one in honor of
Jeffrey Foskett:
Al Jardine “Hurry Up Hurry Up Santa Claus”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp8rlb0hC_E
The Beach Boys “Little Saint Nick” (from Shindig!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_3HLtW8mCw
Al Jardine “Big Sur Christmas”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqlOQzLupjY
The Beach Boys “Christmas Day”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfbk32iqytc
Al Jardine “Sunshine to Snowflakes”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0koOGcw9xRA
Jeffrey Foskett “Merry Christmas Mary”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDRUsvquf7Y
Happy Holidays!
Wishing everyone a happy and healthy holiday season and
all the best waves in 2024 🌊
Surf’s up!
Spud
https://www.aljardine.com/news
From Noise 11:
Watch Darlene Love’s First Appearance And Most Recent With David Letterman, 37 Years Apart
I heard three cuts from Phil Spector’s Christmas album at three different stores this week, so decided to tout the title.
Harvey Kubernik
Timing is everything … Spector’s classic … perhaps the greatest Christmas release ever … never earned an initial audience … as it was issued in the stores the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated.
Over time, it was discovered and adored by new audiences … The Beatles even liked it enough to put it out on their own Apple Record Label in 1972! But initially it was lost in the shuffle of all the chaos that was November 22nd, 1963. (kk)
.jpeg)
Nobody has improved on it.
Andrew Loog Oldham
As we’ve been flashing back 60 years in our latest on-going feature, we are reminded that Phil Spector’s Christmas Album … an absolutely LEGENDARY piece of work … went virtually unnoticed when it was first released …
That’s because it came out on Friday, November 22nd, 1963 … the very same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated … and the country was, shall we say, focused on other events of the day.
Harvey Kubernik put this together commemorating the event:
The Phil Spector Christmas album
By Harvey Kubernik
© Copyright 2023
Sony Music Entertainment has been actively releasing physical and digital Phil Spector-birthed collaborations of his influential catalog.
As we look at Christmas, perhaps it’s logical to examine the origins of “Phil Spector: A Christmas Gift For You.”
The Christmas album, recorded at Gold Star recording studios in Hollywood, was initially issued as A Christmas Gift For You on Philles, and later re-titled as Phil Spector’s Christmas Album for the Beatles’ Apple Records, It reached #6 on the Billboard Top 200 chart in 1972. It continued to sell moderately each Christmas.
It was out of print for many years until Sony Music Entertainment re-released this Yuletide classic which includes Darlene Love’s performance of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” written by Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Spector.
During a 2000 interview, I learned about the birth of Gold Star.
“The studio was built for the songwriters,” explained engineer Stan Ross, co-founder with Dave Gold of Gold Star recording studios. The landmark facility was in operation from 1951-1984 in Hollywood. Ca.
“In the fifties, it was a place where songwriters did demos and masters. They were fun, wonderful people to be around: Jimmy Van Heusen, Jimmy McHugh, the Sherman Brothers and Sonny Burke.”
The studio location and early fifties clients bookings were not lost on teenager Phil Spector.
“He was as concerned as they were about the song -- one of the reasons Phil’s songs have durability and are copied. I thought things we did with The Paris Sisters were terrific,” he continued.
“I saw a lot of growth with Phil very early. The day he first walked in, I explained to him the studio policy of buying time by the hour and a roll of tape … I had to be firm ‘cause I didn’t want 20 more Phil Spectors coming in.”
Ross also detailed the room and their famous echo chamber. “It gave it the Wall of Sound feel. Dave (Gold) built the equipment and echo chamber. We had so much fun with that echo chamber; it never sounded the same way twice. Gold Star brought a feeling, an emotional feeling. Gold Star was not a dead studio, but a live studio. The room was 30 x 40 feet.
“It was all tube microphones,” he explained. “We kept tubes on longer than anyone else. Because we understood that when a kick drum kicks into a tube, it’s not going to distort. A tube can expand. The microphones with tubes were better than the ones without the tubes because if you don’t have a tube and you hit it heavy, suddenly it breaks up. But when you have a tube it’s warm and emotional. It gets bigger and it expands. It allows for impulse.
“Phil appreciated mono … but we did back up with multi-track. So, if he wanted to go back to the four-track, he would. He never did, ‘cause if he didn’t hear it, it wasn’t right. When it came to multi-track you could put everything on mono. The bass drum, the guitars and keep it. Once you have it on mono, it never changes. It will be the same on Wednesday, then the previous Tuesday, the same sound.
“So, when you do transfer from one track to four tracks, it’s OK. And to that, you can add voices, never losing the quality of the bass drum track, because it’s been transferred, it hasn’t been disturbed. You took the mono and transferred it to track one of a four track, tracks two, three and four are for voices and guitar fills. You follow? Everything is a fresh generation. It saves you from having to overdub four generations. You have less highs and less sibilance. And, we didn’t use pop filters and wind screens, we got mouth noises. Isn’t that life?"
In 2000, I interviewed Larry Levine who, with Ross, engineered hundreds of sessions at Gold Star, including the Spector-produced Christmas album.
“Mono was the mode we listened in. Microphones used on sessions. We mostly used Neumann and Shure we used a lot. We had some Electrovoice. I recall us working mainly in Studio B, and we didn’t have a vocal isolation booth in that room.
“Mixing a Phil Spector record … I talked to some people before about this but the unique thing about working with Phil in mixing was that Phil would leave the room when I mixed and I would mix what I wanted to hear, or felt was a good mix, and then I would call Phil in. He would listen to it and then critique it for me and tell me what it was that I was missing what he wanted. And then he would leave the room again.
“It served a two-fold purpose: One was that I was mixing without someone looking over my shoulder, so I wasn’t mixing for them, I was mixing for me. And the second great benefit was that Phil was always listening with a fairly clean ear, rather than being involved with all the machinations while I was mixing, and then try and remain objective about it.
“I mixed on big speakers. The great thing about the playbacks at Gold Star was that they were thrilling. We were listening to excitement and then trying and bring that excitement when we were cutting discs. And we had to bring that excitement and EQ when we were making discs to bring that sound that we heard from the control room. The first record I ever did with Phil was ‘He’s A Rebel.’
“Everything I did mixing, it all started with Phil, and I was there to try keep out of his way and get him what he wanted. When we talk about mixing specifically, it was emotional. I never intellectualized.
“I mixed from an emotional standpoint. I tried to get a picture in my mind of what this music or sound looked like. Basically, I used to have a theory, and I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but part of the reason we took so long in actually recording the songs was that Phil needed to tire out the musicians, or they got to the point where they were tired enough so they weren’t playing as individuals. But they would meld into the sound more that Phil had in his head. Good musicians start out and play as individuals and striving to play what Phil wants.”
From 1974 to 1984, I was in Gold Star dozens of times, watching sessions and playing percussion on a handful of sessions with Leonard Cohen, the Ramones and the Paley Brothers.
“Secondly,” stressed Levine, “as far as the room sound, and the drum sound went, because the rooms were small, with low ceilings, the drum sound, unlike other studios with isolation and get your drums the way you want them to sound, they would change accordingly to whatever leakage was involved.
“How the other instruments were playing affected the drum sound also. Every time Phil would change the way someone would be playing another instrument, not so much the Ramones since we didn’t have a lot of acoustic instruments on those sessions, doing the old stuff with four or five acoustic guitars and horns, would all change the sound of the drums.
“As a matter fact, Phil once said to me the bane of his recording existence was the drum sound. Phil pointed out to me that at Motown they had the drums nailed at a certain part of the room and always got that drum sound. And of course, he could never get that at Gold Star. That was something that had to be worked on. But listening to all the stuff it worked out.
"We would lay carpeting down to absorb sound. The one thing about Gold Star that a lot of people didn’t realize was, when you fill a small room with a lot of people, you get a better sound, that when you have a few people in a large area. Body absorption. It sounds better with a room full of people.
"I did “Summertime Blues” here with Eddie Cochran. The nicest kid. He wasn’t a punk in any manner, shape or form. He followed Elvis, but doing what came naturally for him. The biggest thing I remember about Eddie was that he was always a polite and engaging person. At that point and time when I did ‘Summertime Blues,’ we didn’t have an echo chamber per se. As a matter of fact, that was done in Studio B and we had a toilet in there that’s what I used for the echo chamber … the toilet. At times, people sang in the bathroom. Dave Gold finally came up with the great sounding echo chamber.
"Early on, with Phil, in Studio A there were basic equalization curves we used were basic and only had a few frequencies that we could push up or down, but all we were doing was tweaking.
"A lot of people attribute to echo to what Phil was doing. The echo enhanced the melding of ‘the Wall of Sound’ … echo enhanced it, but it didn’t create it. Within the room itself, all of this was happening and the echo was glue that kept it together.
"The Gold Star mixing board ... one thing is we only had 12 inputs on there and we had a lot more people in the room than 12.”
In 1988, I asked arranger / producer / songwriter Jack Nitzsche about helping build the “Wall of Sound.” Architect Nitzsche remarked, “The Wall of Sound happened over a period of time. I don’t know who coined the term. The sound just got bigger and bigger.
“One time we cut the Crystals’ ‘Little Girl.’ Sonny Bono was the percussionist on the date. He came into the booth and said it had more echo than usual and it wouldn’t get played on the radio. The echo was turned way up high. Phil said, ‘What’s too much echo? What does that mean?’ Phil was smart enough to say, ‘Wait a minute, listen to this.’ If you notice, there’s more echo on each song we cut. It hadn’t been done like this before. People on the business side, the promotional side of the record industry, felt it was different. He didn’t listen to them.
“There were four echo chambers, and I remember engineer, Stan Ross, who was co-owner with Dave Gold, telling us many times that the echo chambers were acoustically and geometrically designed to get the right amount of balance and reverb. That added to the impact of Phil's recordings.
“I loved the echo. It's like garlic. You can't get too much. 'What's too much echo?' Phil once said during a session.”
Nitzsche in the same 1988 conversation commented about the Local 47 Hollywood Union Federation musicians, who were not known then, or referred to as “The Wrecking Crew,” that populated Spector’s recording sessions. To Wikipedia children and chroniclers: Before 1990, they were always called “The A-Team” or Local 47 Hollywood Union Federation members.
“The musicians played at once. Before that, I was working with compact rhythm sections and three or four players. This was groundbreaking for me.
“Hal Blaine (drummer) ... I liked his work, but sometimes I felt he overplayed. That’s just the way he plays. A lot of fills. As it turned out, Phil and the people loved the breaks Hal took, especially at the end of the tunes, the fades. Hal had a big kit. I liked the fills.
“Earl Palmer was the other drummer on the records. He’s the best. Like a rock. A real good New Orleans drummer. Harold Battiste, Mac Rebennack. New Orleans guys were on the dates, so you had a good mixture of jazz guys, West Coast studio cats and New Orleans players.
“I had met Don Randi a long time ago. He was a pianist at a jazz club on La Cienega. He was cool. He looked like a beatnik. His hair was right. He had the attitude. He didn’t smile when he played. Al DeLory was on keyboards, too.
“Leon Russell ... I met him with Jackie DeShannon; she introduced me. Leon at the time, was playing piano in a bar in Covina. He was an innovative piano player. He was good. I heard him on a Jackie DeShannon record. In those days it was really hard to find rock ‘n’ roll piano players who didn’t play too much. Leon talked the same language. You could really hear Leon play in the Shindig TV band. I put him in The T.A.M.I. Show band, and he’s all over the soundtrack.
“During the Spector sessions, a lot of the time we had two or three piano players going at once. I played piano as well. Phil knew the way he wanted the keyboards played. It wasn’t much of a problem who played. Leon was there for the solos and the fancy stuff, rolling pianos. The pianos would interlock and things would sound cohesive. I knew Leon would emerge as a band leader.
“The horn players ... Steve Douglas on tenor, Jay Migliori on baritone, other horn players as well. I had met Steven through Lester Sill. We were friends for a long time. Phil had an idea about horns.
“It started on ‘He’s A Rebel.’ Remember the horns on ‘Duke of Earl?’ Phil wanted something like that. The horns always had to figure out this thing. The thing that came out of it was the voicing. The trumpet was voiced really low, and the voicing of those horns made a big thing happen. The horn section would play quiet behind the rhythm section. Phil sure knew what he wanted. He had all the basses covered.
“Percussion ... Well, Sonny Bono. I love Sonny. He helped me get into the business. The first guy I worked on records with was Sonny Bono when he was in A & R at Specialty on Sunset Blvd. He’d let me hang out. I’d play him my first songs and he’d say things like, ‘You’re almost there. Not quite.’ I did lead sheets for him at $3.00 each. On onion paper. Don & Dewey.
“Sonny was receptive to talent. Sonny put me in the record business. He listened to my songs all the way through while I was there. ‘You got something. You gotta continue writing.’ ‘You’re right on the borderline to write hit records.’ There were characters at Specialty. Great ones. Larry Williams. I did voices for Johnny Morissette. The office was right next to the Sea Witch. I saw Little Richard there. It blew my mind.
“It was at Lee Hazelwood’s office. He was starting a record company after he left Lester Sill. Back to Sonny for a bit. On ‘Needles and Pins’ we used a twelve-string guitar when we put it together as a demo. I’ve got the tape. And Sonny said, ‘Thanks, you showed me a whole new way of writing.’ It was in 1963. He was on Phil’s sessions.
“Julius Wechter later of the Baja Marimba Band, was on a lot of the dates. Frank Kapp was on a lot of sessions. He was a jazz drummer who used to play with Stan Kenton. Phil would dream these percussion parts up at the session. They were his ideas. There were no formulas. I played percussion, chimes, orchestra bells. They weren’t mixed way in the back.
Guitarists ... A lot of the guitarists were jazz players and weren’t rock and roll players, like Howard Roberts, Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, Tommy Tedesco, Barney Kessel, Dennis Budimar. A lot of the guitarists were good and well-known session players: Glen Campbell, Bill Pitman, Don Peake.
Most the guitarists had to play eighth notes on Phil’s records. There was a lot of acoustic guitars on the songs. Phil used to walk around to the players just before he rolled tape and would whisper in their ears. ‘Dumb. Don’t do anything. Just play eighth notes.’ It was hard for any of the guitarists to breathe or stretch out on the records.
“I was amazed how big Glen Campbell made it as a total entertainer. I knew he was a great guitarist. I never knew he would show up as a singer later. Billy Strange was good, too. I became aware of the 12-string guitar during the last Phil years. It was a new sound, a new toy to play with.
“Bass players. Jimmy Bond and Red Callendar were on most of the dates. Ray Pohlman, Ray Brown and Carol Kaye. The bass parts were written out and the players had to stick right with them. They were mixed way low in the back, almost a suggestive element to the song. No one really had a lot of room with those sessions. Really, only the drummer had any sort of freedom. They weren’t R&B records.”
When I wanted to know about the voices that informed his Spector collaborations, Jack Nitzsche remarked, “The vocals would last all night. Background groups, doubling and tripling so it would sound like two or three dozen voices. Phil would spend a lot of time with the singers. I would split and he’d still be working on lines with the singers. The rhythm section and the horns were done together. Vocals and string parts were overdubbed later. We did most of the sessions at Gold Star studios in Hollywood. I loved the rooms, but it was always too small for all the people. Phil was on his game. What an education!”
Read the Forgotten Hits Tribute to the musical mastery of Phil Spector:
https://fhphilspector.blogspot.com/
(Spector would have turned 84 tomorrow. I have NO doubt that he was absolutey and completely insane ... but early on, he created some musical masterpieces that will live on forever ... and his Christmas album raised the bar.) kk
From Chuck Buell …
Make Tonight a Holiday Movie Night!
This lost scene is now included in the Special "Director's Extended Cut of "It's A Wonderful Life!"
CB
And Now, This Special Afternoon Update!
The reason there’s no Nativity Scene in Washington D.C. again this year is that no one has yet been able to find Three Wise Men in our Nation’s Capital.
And the search for a Virgin there has also proved fruitless.
That's why only a Stable is the entire display because finding enough assess in Washington to fill it was not an issue.
Meanwhile as a Governmental Holiday Gesture, even tho the designated federal budget appropriation is extremely limited for this, a proposal is being floated to provide every home in the DC area that wants one, a free, no-charge, “On a Budget,” Nativity Scene Parts Package so that those who wish can create their own small Nativity scene on their own.
Residents can expect to receive this Holiday Package by June 1, 2024.
CB
A Gift for a Young Boy! Or Two!
Fast Forward to
the mid-1960s ~~~
What young boy wouldn't want a “Mattel Super Agent's Zero M Sonic
Blaster 5530!”
This Toy Bazooka Gun was what every secret agent-wannabe needed! Its 34-inch-long barrel shot hand-pumped compressed air creating an exciting deafening blast. And “deafening” is the accurate word here since its blast would push out over 157db of sound loud enough that it could be heard and felt at least 15 feet away!
That Sound Level at such high decibels can easily do permanent damage to an adult’s hearing much less to that of a small child and cause lifelong hearing damage.
And because of this and that kids were firing them at the heads of other kids resulting in ruptured eardrums, Consumer reports rated "The Mattel Agent Zero M Sonic Blaster 5530 as a ”Not Acceptable Toy!”
Still, it was actually available for a few years before it was finally discontinued and pulled from Toy Store shelves.
If you’d like a personal visit by your real-life local SWAT Team at your house, these Blasters have recently sold from $80 to $180 to $3,000 for one in its original box on eBay!
Attached is a Vintage TV Commercial for the Sonic Blaster starring the young child actor, Kurt Russel, and narrated by former Radio “Gunsmoke’s” Matt Dillon and TV’s “Cannon,” William Conrad.
What a Blast!
CBBB ( which stands for “Charlie Blaster-Boy-Buell!” )
And we’ll leave you with this beautiful Christmas medley, sent in by Timmy …
And our own post from a year ago at this blessed time … from our buddy Jon Weiss …
kk
60 YEARS AGO TODAY:
12/25/63 – Walt Disney’s 18th
full-length animated motion picture, “The Sword In The Stone,” is released in theaters on Christmas Day
