Poor “Carol of the Bells”

By Ted Potrikus

It’s a lovely melody, to be sure, one that indeed invokes the pleasures of the winter season. It’s easy pickings for advertisers, though, because it’s in the public domain. No one has to pay royalties for its use, so it’s fair game. And every year, there’s some honcho at an ad agency thinking he or she is the first one ever to shout out during a brainstorming session, “Hey! Let’s use ‘Carol of the Bells! That’ll grab ‘em!”
Selling a car? “Carol of the Bells.” Selling jewelry? “Carol of the Bells.” Selling, oh, I don’t know, appetizers at your chain restaurant? “Carol of the Bells.”

That’s the problem with Christmas music, or, in many cases, just sort of generic wintery music like “Sleigh Ride” or “Winter Wonderland” or, please stop playing it, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” By the time we get to early December, we’ve heard a lot of holiday music.

Not that that’s a bad thing. I love Christmas music and spent a lifetime collecting all manner of it. The beauty of Christmas music — ANY music, for that matter — is that if it sounds good to you, then it’s good.

For better or worse, our daughters grew up listening to a somewhat skewered set of Christmas tunes: a record of a guy imitating Porky Pig singing his way through Elvis’s “Blue Christmas.” And an impossibly bad record — in the “so bad it’s great” category — called “Helicopter Santa Claus.” Proof of its oddball obscurity: I can’t even find it on any streaming platform or YouTube.

I got it on a 45 rpm record after engaging in a not-well-thought-out bidding war on eBay roughly a decade ago. It’s by an obviously well-meaning guy from the Youngstown, Ohio region whom, I surmise, thought he was about to hit it out of the park with the next “White Christmas.” He did not. Instead, he sings about Santa having a little buyer’s remorse after trading in his reindeer for a helicopter. Now, he’s “freezing in his copter fly” and “dreaming about the good old days/when reindeer flew across the flaky sky.” He also over-enunciates the word “hurriedly” — not one you’d generally hear in a song in the first place. But here, we get it as “hurry-id-lee.”

For around 10 years, “Helicopter Santa Claus” and a few dozen others featured on a radio show I had the pleasure of doing with my good pal Paul Rapp. Paul and I would scour the Internet and record stores for the most unintentionally awful stuff we could find, but then found ourselves so drawn to it that these songs became tradition for our families. There’s one that sounds like one of those things where you go into a recording booth and sing to a backing track, but this time it’s a guy with a trumpet trying with all his might to make it through “Sleigh Ride.” He does not.

One year, National Public Radio star and jazz maven John Pizzarelli stopped by our studio to promote his own performance in town later that night. We tried to warn him what we were doing. Instead of slamming his guitar case shut and running out the door, he asked us to open up his microphone while he sang along (in perfect imitation) with a Walter Brennan Christmas record about saving Henry the Christmas turkey. That Walter Brennan record is on YouTube. I either do or don’t recommend it, depending on your tolerance level.

In our house now, it’s not the Christmas season until we break out Johnny “Bowtie” Barstow teetering on the edge of disaster as he claws his way through “The First Noel.” Or the guy who calls himself “Elvis Presley, Jr.” delivering a wholly creepy preamble to his young son (“Elvis the Third”?) before performing one of the most hideous Elvis impersonations of all time in an utter mangling of “Silent Night.”

Somehow, these unique interpretations make our season bright. And I hope that each of you has your own playlist of seasonal ditties, regardless of the season, to help lighten the burden.