This year, garage rock heroes the Fleshtones released a Christmas album, Stocking Stuffer, which was part of our Christmas wrap-up in OffBeat. For the piece, I interviewed singer Peter Zaremba about making the album. Here’s an excerpt:
What inspired you to do a Christmas CD?
We’ve always had the inspiration. We’re all fans of the classic Christmas songs. What went beyond the inspiration was Glenn Dicker of Yep Roc [their label] sent me an email asking if we thought we could do a version of “Hooray for Santa Claus” from the movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I gave it one listen – it was pretty terrible, actually – and I immediately said “Of course, we’ve always wanted to do a Christmas album.” We went down with Ivan Julian who we’ve worked with on the last few records, and knocked it out on a steamy early July on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side.
I’ve always been fascinated that, how people have to cut Christmas songs in summer to get them out in time for Christmas.
Definitely. Maybe that’s a good lesson, like planning ahead. “White Christmas” was recorded July 13, someone told me – don’t quote me on the date. We got in the mood right away. I was singing all these Christmas songs, driving everyone crazy for a couple of weeks. I got right into it. Then people sent us tapes of various songs, but we didn’t really find anything in all of that. We knew what we wanted to do. We wrote about half of the songs, maybe more, and the rest are covers.
What’s the story on “Six White Boomers”?
That’s by Rolf Harris. He had a hit here with “Tie Me Kangaroo, Down,” but he’s a national icon in Australia. Dave Faulkner [from the Hoodoo Gurus] sent us that one, though we totally changed it and did an AC/DC attack on it.
“Mr. Santa Claus”?
That was a hit for Nathaniel Mayer, a Detroit rockin’ soul kinda guy [and a Ponderosa Stomp veteran who sadly passed away with little fanfare November 1], and we can’t find out who wrote that. “You’re All I Want for Christmas” – the last version I know is Brook Benton. I figured not that many people know it.
With all of these things, we wanted to do something with the songs. We were inspired by the [Phil] Spector Christmas album [A Christmas Gift for You], not in the sense of his big, overblown productions, but in transforming the songs a bit, trying to do something with them.
That seems like the challenge of cutting classic songs – how to put your own fingerprints on them.
We didn’t want to do a straight ahead version of any of these. We do “Run, Rudolph, Run,” and we don’t transform it very much. We do play it the way we play that type of music, kind of Yardbirds-y, garage-y, raved up. A little difference from what Keith Richards and Chuck Berry did with it.
Is that the great rock ’n’ roll Christmas song?
That is the great rock ’n’ roll Christmas song [laughs]. Simply put, it is. It’s the one that rocks out on its own and isn’t arch. It’s operating totally within the framework of accepting the reality of Santa Claus and the reindeer. It’s not like “I Don’t Believe in Christmas” by the Wailers.
One of the things I like about Stocking Stuffer is that it doesn’t fall into that trap. I’m rarely satisfied by rock ’n’ roll Christmas songs because they’re often too self-consciously cool or ironic, looking down their noses at Christmas.
Why do that? People get older and get disillusioned as it is. Some people wanted us to do “Father Christmas,” the Kinks’ song, and we said no. [The song deals with class tensions as a Salvation Army Santa recalls being robbed. The chorus: “Father Christmas, give us some money / We got no time for your silly toys / Well beat you up if you don’t hand it over / Give all the toys to the little rich boys”] We’re not going anywhere near that direction at all. This is a Christmas album celebrating Christmas music, and the fact is that we enjoy that time of year.
