With apologies to Gaz, I'd like to steal a page or 13 from his blog and present, for the next 2-1/2 weeks, some of my fave holiday tunes, a song or 2 at a time, with accompanying YouTube clips. I'll try to choose those with actual videos where possible, but with some older songs, my choices may be limited (one of my all-time faves, Martin Mull's hilarious Curtis Mayfield parody "SantaFly", is nowhere to be found on the YT).
We begin, appropriately, with Roy Wood's "I Wish It Could Be Xmas Every Day", from 1973. Wood was one of the founding members of the seminal British band The Move, who were huge in the UK but fairly overlooked here. When the Move broke up in the early '70s, it essentially became 2 bands: the Jeff Lynne faction begat ELO (and we know how that turned out) and Wood formed a group called Wizzard.
In the summer of '73 Wizzard released a single, "See My Baby Jive", a gloriously retro rave-up that was one of the opening salvos in the let's-revive-and-reevaluate-Phil Spector movement that would reach its apex a few years later with
Born to Run and the re-release of the Spector Xmas LP. (It's worth noting that for much of the '70s, England was in the grip of a wave of late-'50s/early-'60s nostalgia that made our own obsessions with
American Graffiti and
Grease seem minor by comparison.) "SMBJ" was a UK #1(but flopped in the US much to my dismay) and its success resulted in Wizzard releasing a similar-sounding holiday single, also a UK success that was barely noticed here until years later. Here it is in all its glam glory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvjWrdt4jlY
