Fact #148392

A CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR YOU
by Johnny Black

Before Phil Spector became a producer, the key factors for hit records were melody, words, arrangement and performance. After Spector, the unique sonic landscape of a record was often equally as important. One of many contenders for the title of First Rock Concept Album, A Christmas Gift For You is also considered the first bona fide rock’n’roll Christmas album.

Spector learned his craft as an apprentice to Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, arguably the greatest songwriting and production team of the 50s. His first solo production, To Know Him Is To Love Him, for his own band The Teddy Bears, went to No1 in America in 1958, after which there was no stopping him.

By the age of 20 he was head of A&R for Atlantic Records in Los Angeles, and two years later he started his own label, Philles, almost immediately scoring another No1 with The Crystals’ He’s A Rebel.

A ruthless manipulator, Spector didn’t let The Crystals sing on the tracks issued under their name. That job went to Darlene Love, lead vocalist of another band of Spector protégés, The Blossoms. “When Phil told me he was planning a rock’n’roll Christmas album,” she recalls, “I thought he was crazy. Nobody had done anything like that before.”

Rock’n’rollers had, of course, made Christmas albums but their raw style was invariably toned-down to fit what was perceived as the Spirit of Christmas. Spector’s innovation was that this would be unmistakeably rock’n’roll music.

By the time recording started in mid-1963, Spector had become known for his production technique, The Wall Of Sound, which he had developed at LA’s Gold Star Studios. Indeed, the specific qualities of that studio were essential to the Wall Of Sound.

First of all, Gold Star boasted superb echo chambers which, when fully open, produced a vast cavernous wash of reverb and sympathetic harmonic vibrations. Secondly, the walls of the recording room were painted with a lead-based paint, which caused any noise to ring around in the air. Finally, the facilities were relatively primitive, with no means of equalisation or compression.

All of this suited Spector ideally. His technique was the opposite of everything sophisticated studios strove to achieve. While they recorded every instrument clearly and separately, Spector would cram Gold Star’s little 22 by 32 feet room with upwards of thirty musicians, none of whom were isolated from each other by sound baffles. He would then let the resulting sounds intermingle freely into a huge sonic soup. Individual instruments might be swamped to the point of inaudibility, but the overall sound seemed massive.

That Wall Of Sound, plus appropriately seasonal sound effects, applied to songs like Frosty The Snowman and White Christmas sung by Spector’s stable of hitmakers, resulted in a timelessly exciting Christmas album.

Disastrously, shortly after release, US President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and America was plunged into mourning. Out of respect, Spector re-called the album from the shops, so it didn’t even chart, despite which its reputation has grown over the years.

(Source : by Johnny Black, first appeared in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2007)
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Darlene Love (vocalist) : When Phil told me he was planning a rock'n'roll Christmas album, I thought he was crazy. Nobody had done anything like that before. I was impressed though when he gave me the opportunity to choose which songs I wanted to sing, which was something he'd never done before.

Jay Traynor (formerly of Jay And The Americans] : Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry had been telling me that Phil Spector wanted to work with me. It was a new opportunity and I decided to go with it. I did rehearsals with him, and I was supposed to be the only white artist on his Christmas album. We rehearsed Little Drummer Boy. It got to the stage of sitting in his apartment,practising the tune to come up with an arrangement. I don't know what happened, maybe I didn't cut it with him, but it just didn't progress. Source : Steve Kolanjian's sleeve notes to the 1990 CD compilation Come A Little Bit Closer – The Best Of Jay And The Americans]

Hal Blaine (session drummer) : We recorded it in Gold Star Studios on the corner of Santa Monica and Vine, which had been one of Phil's favourite studios ever since 1958 when he'd recorded his first hit, To Know Him Is To Love Him by The Teddy Bears, in there.

Darlene Love : We started recording at the end of July, and it was a very hot summer. That was very late to start a Christmas album. Usually you want to finish a Christmas album by the end of May.

Jay Migliori (session saxophonist) : The feeling we had while we were doing the Christmas album was that it was really something special for Phil, something he particularly cared about.

Hal Blaine : The studio was very small, just 22 by 32 feet, and Spector packed in a minimum of five percussionists, up to six rhythm guitars, three basses, then the strings and horns. At times during those sessions there would be thirty of us in there, sweating profusely.

Phil Spector : All the tracks were made like singles. I did everything that Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby wouldn't want, because I was getting a bit bored with all that 'I'm Dreaming Of A White Christmas' stuff.

Jay Migliori : Phil used a bunch of us session guys very regularly, and we got to be known as the Wrecking Crew. It was myself, with Hal Blaine on drums, Steve Douglas on sax, Don Randi on piano and, on the Christmas album, it also included Glen Campbell, , who went on to be a big country star, playing guitar.

Don Randi : Nino Tempo, who had a huge No1 hit single with April Stevens singing Deep Purple, was listed on the album credits as a guitarist, but he actually played sax for those sessions.

Jay Migliori : I seem to recall Herb Alpert, who again wasn't yet famous, playing trumpet. I know that Sonny Bono was in the percussion section and his girlfriend Cher was hanging around all the time.

Don Randi (session pianist) : Because the album is now regarded as a classic, people don't realise how audacious Spector was to take these standards and turn them into rock tunes. On White Christmas, for example, he added in a whole new lyric about being in Los Angeles on 24th December with the sun shining in a blue sky. Well, you just didn't do that to an Irving Berlin song. Berlin was sacrosanct. His publishers would freak if you changed anything, but Phil just said "Aw, screw it. We'll do it this way."

Darlene Love : I kept laughing during White Christmas because we were recording it in sweltering summer heat. When we'd get to the spoken part, I'd just crack up. I really had to make myself imagine it was winter time just to do that part.

Hal Blaine : People will tell you Phil was a madman, but he wasn't. He was a real jokester. Like, I was also doing some work as a film extra around then, and I got one of the props guys to make me a fake telephone with a button I could press to make it ring. Right in the middle of one of the sessions, I made it ring, picked it up and pretended it was my wife calling. I had this long, imaginary conversation about buying some cheese, and she shouldn't call me during sessions and so on, and when Phil realised what I was doing, he just cracked up. He loved a joke.

Don Randi : The whole album took several months, but we went in and did the rhythm tracks very fast, just two or three-weeks, which was real quick by Phil's standards. The rest of the time was Phil doing overdubs, and getting good vocal performances. That was when he'd get difficult, demanding things be done over and over until he was happy with it.

Ronnie Spector (Ronettes) : We had to stay in the studio and, if necessary, sleep on the stools outside. If one of the other groups were in the studio we would have to lay back for a while.

Nedra Ross (Ronettes) : It was an album that felt like family. We approached it where there wasn't competition. It wasn't about who was going to get which parts. We all went in together. Everybody was singing on everybody else's song.

Don Randi : The tracks you see listed as The Crystals were actually sung for the most part by Darlene Love and the other girls from The Blossoms. It really didn't matter to Phil who was singing, so long as they got it right.

Hal Blaine : While we were doing rhythm tracks in the studio, the girls would be stuck in a tiny sound booth, and they'd just do like a demo-guide vocal to get the feel of the track. Then they'd come back later and do finished vocals.

Ronnie Spector : We worked on Frosty The Snowman forever. Phil started recording it in the summer and he didn't leave the studio for about two months. We'd start recording early in the evening, and we'd work until late in the night, sometimes even into the next morning. And everybody sang on everyone else's songs, so all of Phil's acts really were like one big happy family for that one album.

Nedra Ross (Ronettes) : The Christmas album was the one where I thought I'd lost it mentally. I heard the parts. I swore I'd put them down, but they said it wasn't on the tape.

Jay Migliori : That often happened. You'd play your horn part, then not be able to hear it on the playback, but Phil wasn't interested in specific parts so much as in the overall effect, the big picture.

Phil Spector : On Bells Of St Mary's I told Hal Blaine, "Solo, solo, solo!" I wanted the drums on the same level as the strings. He didn't understand at first, but he got it.

Don Randi : Phil drove us very hard, but that was his way of getting a good performance out of people. It might have been nicer if he'd found some other way of achieving that.

Hal Blaine : He particularly liked to do sessions on Friday night. See, most producers didn't work over the weekend, so he knew he could keep us in there for as long as he wanted, because we weren't going on to another session afterwards.

Phil Spector : Santa Claus Is Coming To Town was when Steve Douglas could really play …. the percussion is supposed to be the toymakers working away.

Sonny Bono : Darlene was the only one who stood up to Phil. Phil would just back everybody down, but Darlene didn't give a damn. She was tough.

Darlene Love : Most people were scared of Phil because they depended on him for their living. I already had a good career as a backing singer in Los Angeles, so I would stand up to him if I thought he was in the wrong. The singers were nothing to Phil. He used to say it was all about 'his music' So I'd say, 'If it's all about your music, why aren't you making instrumentals?

Sonny Bono : During the session for Baby Please Come Home, Phil was so touched by a little concert line that Leon Russell played, that he took out his cheque-book and wrote the pianist a check for $100.

Darlene Love : We called that Leon's little concerto. He just went wild on the piano and, when he was finished, he fell right off the stool. Phil worked incredibly hard to make that track exactly right. I remember we worked right into the night, with me standing beside Phil in the control booth, singing the vocal right in his ear to be certain the backing track was exactly in tempo.

About 4.00am, I fell asleep against the studio wall and woke up because everybody was laughing so hard. My wig had fallen off and it just put everybody into hysterics. Phil tried to keep us working but we were laughing so much we had to end the session.

Don Randi : Here Comes Santa Claus, with Bob B. Soxx, was a lot of fun because we kept adding more and more percussion. People would keep coming up with another idea and we'd add it in.

Larry Levine (engineer) : It went on for months, and I never wanted to see him again after that. Day and night for months.

Jeff Barry (songwriter) : I stood there for days and days and days, just playing shakers.

Ronnie Spector : He walked into the studio on the last day of recording and announced that he was going to add a vocal himself… a spoken message from Phil, where he thanks all the kids for buying his records and then wishes everyone a Merry Christmas, while we all sang a chorus of Silent Night in the background. A lot of people thought it was corny but, if you knew Phil like I did, it was very touching.

Phil Spector : I had to play all the strings on that. The string players wouldn't do it. I said if I was Toscanini or Eugene Ormandy you wouldn't say that. Play it!

David Geffen : I was at those Christmas album sessions because Phil was a distant in-law of mine. It was an incredible experience for me. I idolised Phil Spector, who was the richest, most successful guy I'd ever heard of. I also met Sonny And Cher for the first time while I was there. Being at those sessions made me realise there was such a thing as a career in the music business, and that it could be a lucrative, exciting career at that, although at that point, I really couldn't imagine where I would fit in.

Phil Spector : Only I could spend nine months on an album and release it the day President Kennedy was assassinated … Naturally, that depressed the whole country. Certainly no-one was buying Christmas records - everybody was in mourning which was only right. And not only was it the worst Christmas of all time, it was also the hottest Christmas in American history.

A president died and the public changed. How would you like to put out a $55,000 album the same week as something like the president being assassinated took place?
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