Have Yourself a Very Beach Boys Christmas

Between September and October 1963, 20 session musicians and four vocal acts decamped to Gold Star Studios in Hollywood to make a Christmas album with Phil Spector. Spector was a New York record producer who’d created the Wall of Sound—a Wagnerian diffusion of tone colors and opaque symphonic arrangements. It shaped the history of pop to come, positioning him as one of contemporary music’s first auteurs. He wasn’t a sensation or a prodigy by trade; his brilliance existed because he had total control over his artists’ recording sessions. His acclaim started in 1958, for his oversight on the Teddy Bears’ #1 single “To Know Him is to Love Him.” He was once an apprentice to Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, only to make a pivot and co-found Philles Records with Lester Sill at the age of 21. There, he was dubbed the “First Tycoon of Teen,” signed his first artist (The Crystals) and released the label’s first single (“There’s No Other (Like My Baby).”

Philles Records quickly established a roster of the Crystals, the Ronettes, Darlene Love and Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans—a Hollywood contrast to Motown’s amalgam of Mary Wells, the Supremes, the Marvelettes and Martha and the Vandellas in Detroit. By then, Elvis had made a great Christmas album, as did Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. It was a mellow endeavor used to push record sales rather than create substantial art. Those aforementioned releases were good, but they felt like collages—because they were, as most projects lacked a structured identity in such a singles-dominated, chart-minded era of popular music. There’s a reason why Philles Records only put out 12 albums in its eight-year existence: There were rewards to reap in 45s.

When all of Spector’s artists made it to Gold Star, they were welcomed by his de facto house band, the Wrecking Crew, to make a Christmas record aptly titled A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records. It became the first great collection of secular holiday standards (except for the Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry-penned “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”); it was a revue captured on wax, a baker’s dozen of the greatest holiday performances ever recorded. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t believe it’s the best Christmas album ever made. I’d even argue that it’s one of the best albums ever made, period. Thanks to his Wall of Sound, Spector turned the world’s greatest holiday into his own symphony through echo chamber reverb, maximalist ensembles and advents of formulaic combinations—instruments stacked on top of one another but indistinguishable to the untrained, average ear.

Whether it’s Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” or the Ronettes’ triplicate of “Frosty the Snowman,” “Sleigh Ride” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” Philles Records had struck gold and Spector became the greatest producer of his generation. While the Wrecking Crew were recording the instrumental for the Crystals’ “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” an awestruck, 21-year-old Brian Wilson attempted to contribute a piano piece to the song. Spector rejected it, though, because of poor playing—“substandard” is how the producer framed it. But A Christmas Gift For You quickly became Wilson’s all-time favorite record, just as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” was his favorite song of all time and inspired him to write what is, for my money, the greatest pop song ever captured on analog: “Don’t Worry Baby.”

Around the same time the Philles Records was making A Christmas Gift For You, the Beach Boys, who’d accumulated three consecutive Top 10 hits (“Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Surfer Girl,” “Be True to Your School”), took to Western Studios on Sunset Boulevard to make their first-ever Christmas song: “Little Saint Nick.” Brian had known of Spector’s recording across town at Gold Star and felt inspired to make one of his own. “I wrote the lyrics to it while I was out on a date and then I rushed home to finish the music,” he said. Taking a note from the “Little Deuce Coupe” arrangement, the Beach Boys turned their hot rod hoopla into a cruise-worthy trip about Santa and his sleigh. It rocketed up Billboard’s seasonal weekly Christmas Singles chart, peaking at #3, and wedged its way into the Top 25 of the Hot 100 by the year’s end. It wouldn’t take long before Brian Wilson wanted to make his own A Christmas Gift For You.

Between January and June of 1964, the Beach Boys found major commercial success, thanks to “Fun, Fun, Fun” reaching #5 on the pop charts and “I Get Around” hitting #1. Shut Down Volume 2 found great success upon its release in March of that year and, just before its successor All Summer Long climbed into the Top 5 of the Billboard Top LPs chart, the band split time between Capitol and Western Studios recording what would become The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album and outtakes of “Little Honda” and “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister.” And the band’s chart reign would continue while they waited to put their holiday record on the shelves, releasing Top 10 hits “When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)” and “Dance, Dance, Dance” back to back in August and October, respectively.

Five of The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album’s 12 tracks were original compositions by Brian, all of which are included on side one. “Little Saint Nick” gets a proper album treatment, with overdubs of sleigh bells, celeste and glockenspiel added to the track’s mix on stereo pressings of the record. “The Man with All the Toys,” “Santa’s Beard,” “Merry Christmas, Baby,” were featured after—all of which are sung or co-sung by Mike Love. On “Christmas Day,” Al Jardine sings lead for the first time ever. Brian took what he knew from Spector and challenged the sound barrier by doubling up on basses, tripling up on keyboards and making “everything sound bigger and deeper.”

On side two, the band try their hand at more traditional holiday numbers—including A Christmas Gift For You inclusions like “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” and “White Christmas.” Dick Reynolds, the man responsible for arranging all of the Four Freshmen’s records, conducted the 41-piece orchestra on “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” “Blue Christmas” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” while Brian—who idolized the Four Freshmen while growing up—arranged all of the rock tracks. But because “Little Saint Nick” had come out a year earlier, the Beach Boys elected to make “The Man with All the Toys” the record’s lead single. Though it failed to chart higher than 116 (Cash Box) and 143 (Record World), “The Man with All the Toys” is one of the best-selling Christmas songs in history, albeit a less-successful follow-up to “Little Saint Nick.”

The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album re-contextualizes what it means to make a truly great Christmas record—and I would argue that only one Christmas album made after it is better: Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. If A Christmas Gift For You set the template for conceptual, non-standard holiday albums, then The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album set out to demystify its own source of inspiration. Just as Brian took Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and remade it into “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” he rewired “Little Deuce Coupe” into the much catchier, sunny and splendid “Little Saint Nick.” Elsewhere, the deeply funny “Santa’s Beard” pairs well with the symphonic “Blue Christmas,” a take on the Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson-penned track that, if you pay close attention, sounds like the type of ornate, epic composition Brian would whet on Pet Sounds two years later. Listening to the oohs and ahhs of Brian, his brothers Dennis and Carl, Mike Love and Al Jardine sounds like a black-and-white photo of kids with Schwinn bikes and freshly unwrapped BB guns on Christmas morning; there’s a certain mix of playfulness and sentimentality baked into such a tight window of novelty.

But what’s most fascinating, in retrospect, about The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album is how well it bridges the band’s two most-distinctive eras together. The “I Get Around” / “Don’t Worry Baby” double-single release in May 1964 marked a significant shift for not just the Beach Boys, but for Brian Wilson’s songwriting. Both songs still merged doo-wop and surf music just as the band’s previous hits had, but the melancholia of “Don’t Worry Baby” and the instrumentation of “I Get Around”—with the enmeshment of treble, reverb, guitar and saxophone swells, organ fills, a go-go-go melody and the entire group’s vocals distinguished individually and collectively—let the Beach Boys commandeer pop music and imbue it with a colorful inventiveness rarely seen in the immediate years after Buddy Holly’s death. Not even six months later, the Beach Boys would release their then-greatest album, The Beach Boys Today!, which included the Wrecking Crew and became, as I wrote months ago, the “greatest pre-masterpiece record ever made.”

What fills the gap between “I Get Around” and Today!, The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album rocks as a precursor to Brian’s favoring of chiaroscuro—tonal contrasts in art that separates light and dark, a way of fusing halves of a record together through tempo separation. It’s why the upbeat, pop-oriented side one slows into a classical, traditional side two culminating in a performance of “Auld Lang Syne” cut down the middle by a spoken-word tangent from Dennis Wilson. Just as Phil Spector took the mic on “Silent Night” a year earlier and declared that it was “so difficult at this time to say words that would express my feelings about the album to which you have just listened,” the Beach Boys’ script affirms the journey we took with them, too: “We hope you will treasure [the album] the way we do,” Dennis tells us. “Mike, Brian, Carl, Al and I would like to wish every one of you a very merry Christmas.” How choice the domino effect we’ve been made privy to is—that, because Spector hated Brian’s piano playing, we have Today!, Pet Sounds and remnants of SMiLE.

And, while Pet Sounds is considered the end of the Beach Boys’ surfer boy posturing, the album’s chaos and baroque, high-vis pastiches of pop innovation sounded like big, alien fragments of beauty the first time I heard them—sitting in my childhood bedroom with headphones on, brand new colors draped over me like I was witnessing Mozart compose his Requiem in D minor. Perhaps that is why it is so rewarding to return to The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album every winter, if only because the way Brian Wilson pairs philharmonic stratum with sugar-sweet bombast feels especially accessible and cutting-edge, even 60 years later—long after we’ve come to understand exactly how the reverie of the Beach Boys’ cultural excellence has impacted the last three generations of popular music.

And that’s because the Yuletide sounds good between Brian Wilson’s lips. If The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album proves anything, it’s that the Beach Boys were never going to just be some band singing about drag racing and chasing babes through Los Angeles County. By the time the “Christmas comes this time each year” conclusion of “Little Saint Nick” faded out, the Beach Boys were already a much different band than the 20-something-year-old kids singing about Ford Thunderbirds and letterman’s sweaters. These Christmas songs, heard by millions across six decades, make it undoubtedly clear that the Wilson brothers, Mike Love and Al Jardine were maestros not of Spector-parallelism, but of ambitious, trenchant pop fervor.

Much like how “Don’t Worry Baby” decorated self-doubt and hapless humility in a transcendent, perspective-changing key-shift, The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album captures the nuances of timeless holiday grandeur and its sometimes-inescapable monotony. The work is joyous and yet solemn, harmonious yet rollicking. The vibrancy of Dick Reynolds’s arrangements did not yet color Brian Wilson’s musical fantasies like the Wrecking Crew would on Today! and Pet Sounds, but, still: a xylophone twinkles and a cavalcade of woodwinds flutters, expanding like eyes waking to a blooming dawn; a world is cracking open and the symphonies are aching. In a dream like this one, Dennis Wilson is there to wish us well on our way and a triad of voices join in with him. May old acquaintance be forgot, indeed.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.