Skip to main content

Merry Christmas with the Mom and Dads

I only bought this because of the cover. Thinking this would be so horrid I'd have to replace my needle and bleach my ears after playing this I eagerly paid my dollar, and gave it a good cleaning. The first thing to note is that despite a cover Yosh and Stan Schmenge would drool over, this was played straight, and reminds me of my treasured Jim Gregrash records (if you know, you know). I can imagine The Mom and Dads killing it at a barn dance. Make no mistake, this was dance music, just not the dance music of my generation.

This is fun, old timey Christmas music, and frankly considering three of the members were born before 1920, and the youngest born in the early 1930s - they were older than most artists who were starting their careers. They'd only released their debut in 1970 a couple of years earlier. Late bloomers I suppose.

I honestly wasn't sure what to expect when I started looking up the band, but I wasn't expecting to see a bunch of gold and platinum CRIA certifications. Also, they were signed to MCA when the Christmas album came out. If there was a joke, then they were in on it.

They were by all accounts a relatively big deal here in Canada, and also Australia by the look of things. Sure, it isn't a style of music I listen to a lot, but heck if Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians were able to sell  between 100 and 300 million records (according to Wikipedia, and that's a heck of a rounding error. I'm guessing they didn't keep track of what they sold) it shouldn't be a surprise that a good old fashioned party band managed to rack up some decent hardware. Take that you long haired hippies.

As a kid I remember staying up with my parents to ring in the New Year with Mister Lombardo, and even at the time I thought it was really old fashioned and kind of cheesy. It may have been cheese, but somewhere in the recesses of my musical development a small corner was reserved for music like this. Playing Merry Christmas with the Mom and Dads pushes the right nostalgia buttons and makes me want to curl up in a chair and drink hot chocolate.

The album itself is parsed into two sections, the lead up to Christmas, and the slide into New Years. Both sides contain the classics you'd want to hear done polka style. They're a lot of fun. I just wish they'd have had some production value. I guess MCA distributed, but didn't advance for recording? Who knows. It must be how polka albums are recorded. Live from the floor, one mic in the centre of the room and hit record. Okay, maybe two microphones - the cover says it's in stereo.

Oddly enough it's part of the appeal. 

Sadly they've all passed on now, but they've left behind a reminder to a different time and place, and if you just listen and let yourself enjoy the ride, you'll find yourself tapping your foot and smiling.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Billy Rankin - Growin' Up Too Fast

Growin' Up Too Fast was never widely released on CD (if at all), and was one of the albums I really wanted to get back after a basement flood wiped out my vinyl collection in the 90s (when no one really gave a shit about records, and my insurance gave me a couple hundred bucks for an appraised $10,000 collection). Way back in 1984 my (dearly departed, and greatly missed) buddy Dave let me borrow his cassette copy that had a bonus track of " Get It On (Bang A Gong)" that when I bought the album didn't know it was a bonus track, or even what a bonus track was. If that sentence was hard to read just go back and skim it, I'm sure you'll get the gist. I'd find out later Billy was an off and on again member of Nazareth and wrote some absolutely killer songs for them. However, at the time all I knew was this guy laid it out cold with the first cut "Baby Come Back" and proceeded to lay down one killer tune after another and closed out the album (sans any...
Post a Comment
Read more

Styx - Paradise Theater

Styx was hands down one of my favourite bands as a kid. They were a strange band, even back then. They were a hard rock, almost progressive at times who had a penchant for sucky ballads. I know there's a tendency for people to zero in on "Babe" as the song that killed the band's credibility. The roots go way back to almost the beginning when Styx released "Lady" on their second album. It showed a side to the band that needed to be kept in check, and for the most part the band kept things on a pretty tight leash. The band had been setting a gruelling pace, releasing an album a year (two in 1972) and by the time they released Paradise Theater (if I end up writing theatre later it's because that's how we spell it here) in 1981 they'd dropped ten albums in less than a decade. I snapped this up as soon as I saw it, and it became a fixture on my turntable. Like the band had announced on "Borrowed Time" from 1979's Cornerstone , "Don...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lighthouse - Sunny Days

Bin diving at my local record store where there were more than a few choices to make. After picking out a half dozen treasures, I figured I'd stop looking and leave before I caused myself trouble at home. Lighthouse was one of those ridiculously large bands in the early 70s I didn't understand. I mean really, BTO was just four guys, The James Gang was three, until they weren't, what in the world do you do with a dozen guys in a band? Of course I had a radio — it was the first significant purchase I made with my money from cutting lawns. I think at the time it cost about 35 bucks, and had FM and other high frequency things I never got to use living out in the suburbs away from the reach of the big city FM signal. "Sunny Days" was a great song. I remember thinking it was cool and didn't switch to the other AM station when it came on. A few years later, when I got my first record player, the obligatory K-Tel anthologies would feature a myriad of cut up and edited...
Post a Comment
Read more