I had the goofiest idea the other morning.
Yes, Mannheim Steamroller, aka Louis “Chip” Davis Jr., the man who kick-started both the New Age music industry and the 70s trucker craze–and, if you ask me, an evil semigenius who plots tirelessly to destroy Christmas from his 100-acre rural stronghold in Nebraska.
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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.
So last month I nearly peed my drawers when I found, in the Reader reviewables bin, Mannheim Steamroller Christmas: A Night Like No Other. A goddamn Mannheim Steamroller novel, nearly 200 pages, compleat with a sixteen-minute companion CD (four and a half minutes of which is a turgid dentist’s office version of “Jingle Bells”). Davis’s name is on the cover, but the text is by someone named Jill Stern, who gets no other Google hits. I find it suspicious that we didn’t hear about Stern’s subsequent suicide. I mean, she has to have jumped out a window.
The new book, Davis told me, is a way to convey his disappointment with the modern Christian world, its disconnection from the old carols and the ancient customs their lyrics celebrate–and to describe and promote those old traditions so people will seek them out again. No shit, I thought, having trudged all the way through the end of the book (“Evan’s mom came in with steaming mugs of cinnamon hot chocolate topped with towers of whipped cream. Evan sipped his. ‘Mmm, good,’ he said. ‘But you know, we should have wassail sometime’”). It was odd to hear an author brag that his plot was a mere mule for his idee fixe. Such a project should be doomed to fail. But perhaps his fans are lovestruck enough to read the whole thing, and perhaps some of them really are unaware of everything before “Jingle Bell Rock,” and maybe in fact this will help the masses better understand history, or the history of the European winter solstice anyway.
Just because we couldn’t prove Deep Throat existed didn’t mean we threw the Nixon dossier into the landfill. Perhaps the Mannheim Steamroller, dopey, square, and forced though it seems on the surface, is in truth far too cunning for my conscious mind to parse. Perhaps I’m missing untold levels–levels where putting jingle-bell hats on Yorkies, forcing your offspring to walk through a blizzard, and sprinkling cluster bombs like snow globe snowflakes on the heads of civilians in order to end terrorism all dance around the Yule log with the elves of perfect sense.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Scott Dobry.
