Mitch Miller, Christmas Sing-Along with Mitch (Columbia Records 1958)
Review by Kloghole
Last year, I stopped at my brother’s house. The neighbor upstream decided to flatten out their yard which meant the stream now flowed through a hayfield instead of the ditch. On its way back to the ditch, it made a detour through my brother’s garage. After the latest deluge, he had a pile of shit in the driveway drying out. We opened the lid on our childhood toybox. Floating inside was a homemade picnic table my Mom had constructed for our GI Joes. Also, drifting around the bottom of the toybox was the remnants of our Planet of the Apes treehouses. They brought back memories of the best christmas I can remember. There were so many goddamn presents, I thought Santa Claus stopped at the wrong house. My brother got a Zira doll and Dr. Zaius. I got a Gorilla soldier and Cornelius. Each of us got a treehouse. I can’t even remember what else. We had super-8 film of the whole affair. We would play it over and over again, watching the crazed look on our faces as we would rip through the wrapping paper, toss it aside, and eagerly tear into the next present to see what it was. We could not believe our luck. Those were the days. We were easily entertained.
That brings me to the subject of this review.
Explosive D responded to my challenge to review something out of my wheelhouse, and he provided Mitch Miller, More Sing Along with Mitch. While I may have heard this album as a child, I still have the Mitch’s Christmas Sing-Along with Mitch. While I was young, I was immersed in an eclectic mix of low-brow musical artists. I recall forcing my grandmother to watch Mars Attacks just to see the look on her face when the protagonists used Slim Whitman’s yodel to kill the Martians. To my dismay, she did not get the joke. I started to explain to her that Slim’s yodeling exploded the Martians’ brains, but I gave up as she became increasingly confused. Apparently, she was just as engrossed in the movie as the theater-goers.
Mitch Miller, Slim Whitman, the Kendalls, Roy Clark,
Elvis, Red Sovine, Gomer Pyle, and the like were all played in our household. In
addition to the stuff we had to
listen to such as Slim Whitman, my brother, my cousins, and myself would listen
to 45s on a little suitcase record player. I remember waking up to Johnny
Horton playing over and over and over again. I rolled over on the mattress my
grandparents threw down on the living room floor and told my cousin, Dawn,
“you’ll wear right through that record before I even get out of bed,” and my
Mom snapped at me that that wasn’t very nice to say. I meant no harm, but I
guess it was really only funny to me, like most of my jokes.
We graduated from 45s to cassettes, and Dawn would bring her tape player she used for playing audio books. We thought it was awesome because, not only did it play four-track audio books, you could slow down or speed up the tape. This was great when we wanted to listen to Alvin and the Chipmunks, Bridget the Midget, or the Purple People Eater. We would slow that fucker down to hear what they really sounded like. We also sped shit up, and we were able to play shit backwards when we came across backward lyrics.
Back in those days, we would do anything for a laugh. I am not sure what we found so fucking funny, but during holidays, all the cousins would sleep scattered about an 800 square foot, former one-room schoolhouse. We would crack wise under the kitchen table until my grandpa would pop out of his bedroom in his boxers like some chubby cuckoo who would threaten us with bodily harm instead of cheerily chirping out the time.
Mitch Miller was one of those albums that we would not listen to seriously. We had to fuck with it in some way, so we would speed up the record from 33 1/3 to 45. We might put our thumb on the turntable to slow it down. Anything to make us laugh.
So, after listening to More Sing Along with Mitch for a song and a half, I found myself pressing the speed button on the turntable. Ahhh, it’s much more bearable now. I have a feeling the album was meant for alcoholics who had a habit of breaking out the LPs late in the evening when they were thoroughly trashed. I could just see a room full of 50-somethings caterwauling along to “When Irish Eyes are Smiling” and “Shine on Harvest Moon.” The tempo is a bit on the sluggish side for me, so I had to ramp up the RPMs. The songs become almost listenable.
According to the copyright, the newest song on the album is from 1925. Mitch is keeping it fresh in 1958. To help the partygoer sing along, the album includes the words to songs. Now, that is not necessarily a good thing. The album starts out with “Ev’rybody loves a baby that’s why I’m in love with you, pretty baby, pretty baby. And I’d like to be your sister, brother, dad and mother, too. Pretty baby, pretty baby. Won’t you come and let me rock you in my cradle of love, and we’ll cuddle all the time. Oh! I want a lovin’ baby and it might as well be you pretty baby of mine.” I’m sure most women would be moved by the line, “It might as well be you,” but she would have to first overlook the implied incest.
It is funny how you can have a nostalgia for something that was not particularly pleasant. Holidays were usually fraught with drama, but the illusion of joy all wrapped up in shiny paper made it notable. I also reflect on those days differently than when I experienced them. One particular ritual that I recall always left me feeling shitty. In middle school, we used to exchange a gift with a random student in the classroom. One year, I got a batmobile and batboat I already had. Another year, I received a beaded bell. I looked at it, and could not for the life of me figure out why someone would give an eleven-year-old boy a beaded fucking bell. I just chalked it up to my miserable fucking life and my awful luck. Despite my feelings about it, I kept the bell all these years. One day, I came across it, and the thought struck me that the reason a student would give someone a beaded bell is because the student's parents could not afford to spend the money on some store-bought commodity. At that point, I realized that I was the privileged one in that relationship. What that little ritual did was to clearly identify class divisions and make two little boys feel bad about themselves. One of many lessons of the horrors of capitalism that is the heart of the christmas celebration.
Our nostalgia is wrapped around these little commodities.
They take on a life of their own and become tied to the things that really do
matter. Alienated commodities and the genuine creations of those that we love
occupy similar territory in our memories. Later in the summer, I returned to my
brother’s house to find that he had done some landscaping to keep the
floodwaters from rushing through his garage. The toybox was no longer sitting
in the driveway, so I assumed he moved it back into the garage. We wandered
about the property, and after showing me his handiwork, started pointing out
all the shit that had washed through his yard again. There was trash and cord-wood
tangled in his fence. He then mentioned that the toybox was carried away by the
floodwaters. My heart sank. Our Mother had made that picnic table that was in
there, and our parents made the toybox. I cannot remember not ever having it in
our life.I am at that point in my life where I see a lot of things wash away before my very eyes. The toybox is only one thing from my childhood that I will never get back. A lot of things that meant a lot to me as a child went missing. My Evel Knievel collection, my Schwinn with the banana seat, and my Matchbox car track set all disappeared over the years. We recently lost about half of my Mother’s artwork in my brother’s house fire. While the toys reminded me of my childhood, things like my Mother’s artwork compound the sense of loss of family. The commodities were a link to the past, but my parents’ handiwork is a direct tie to the people in my life.
As I get older, years wash by. Just like the toybox that was ferried downstream, I have a lot of my life behind me. As I begin to contemplate what little time I have left, I come to realize that a lot of the things that I felt had meaning, really only have meaning to me. Questions like what will become of all the pictures of my family, my Mother’s artwork, and my grandparents’ home lose some of their poignancy when I realize that I have noone, really, to pass them down to. Even if I had children, there is no guarantee that they would value the bizarre little trinkets, that I have saved, in the same way I do. Often, the lifetime of collected nostalgia ends up callously tossed in a rented dumpster as overworked offspring hastily prepare the sale of anything of value to settle outstanding debts and placate greedy relatives, who hover like buzzards over the carcass of one’s life. As you all celebrate the holidays in your own unique way, just take comfort in the fact that billions of years from now, no one will be around to care whether the stories of your childhood and those things that you hold so dear have disappeared shortly after you.
So after listening to Sing Along with Mitch, it reminds me of all that I have lost over the years – all of those things that have been carried away by the torrent of time. For that, I feel a bit of malice, but for the musical contribution, I have to award it a rating of two constipated turd nuggets. Christmas Sing-Along with Mitch fairs a bit better with one constipated turd nugget because of the nostalgia, but no one should have to listen to songs about baby jesus.
Sweet Dreams Motherfuckers!
