Mannheim Steamroller Christmas: A Night Like No Other
Well, technically it was far from morning, and come to think of it I’d been up for a while. More accurately, it came during one of those first stabs at thought you take on a day whose noon ablutions consist of peeling your eyelids up over your contact lenses and scraping a fellow reveler off your floor so you can argue over which restaurants have coffee and a smoking room. The night before, I’d fallen off the wagon after a monthlong ride, so I was horribly hungover, and it took that cup of mud, solid sustenance, half a pack of cigarettes, a walk, and a solitary sit with a second cup of coffee and a Red Streak cover story headlined “Burning Bush” to get the gears grinding.
But then came 1984–the year Mannheim Steamroller released its first Christmas record. Suddenly, instead of cheesecake vocalists flirting with Santa we got “18th-century rock ‘n’ roll,” as Davis likes to call it. Uh…dude! His revamped “Deck the Halls,” the album’s big hit, is enough to make any self-respecting music fan yak up her turkey: that insistent pastoralism, the antique strings and woodwinds slammed into a driving, flat, robot’s-ear version of a rockin’ rhythm, the steely whine of the synth timbres Davis favors, and worst of all, no singing.
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Well, I…I sort of agree with the book’s clumsy moralizing. But I was so horrified that a man who bought a private jet with profits earned by crappifying Christmas actually had the cojones to write a book complaining about the crappification of Christmas that I had to call him up and ask him about it.
But get this–it’s his fault. Before American Gramaphone, Davis said, “Christmas music used to be looked down on.” Not by most listeners, of course, but by industry types, who told Davis they liked his music but Christmas records weren’t moneymakers. They were what artists lacking inspiration did to fill out record contracts or prop up careers, and they usually sold for around two bucks. So Davis put out that first Christmas record, priced at $18.98–in 1984, mind you–and, unbelievably, it’s moved six million units since. The third year after that, Davis continued, everybody and his brother had a Christmas album out, a trend that continues to this day. “The only thing I feel bad about,” he said, “is that now I have to fight for shelf space.”
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “How can you tell? You never know for absolute sure unless you are that person. No matter what you set out to do, you can get derailed….But I sure liked playing at the White House for him!”
