I’ve got weird, varied musical tastes, ranging from ’50s lounge to prog to hardcore industrial to ambient D&B to lo-fi jazztronica. I’ve even been awarded for my encyclopedic devotion to uncovering and memorizing obscure trivia about bands, songs, and albums. Some of this I’m not proud of. Some of it I recognize is wildly subjective and deeply personal. To that end, I’ll say this: after way too much effort researching and tracking it down, I am convinced the album I’ll Be Home for Christmas by the Living Trio (with Chimes and Bells) is the sound of Christmas. Okay, at least it is in my house.
Growing up, I remember six Christmas LPs stacked on the spindle. I remember the names of five of them, and I’ve repurchased them on CD since then. The sixth one haunted me for years because it was the catchiest. I remember the distinct lazy accordion opening on the leadoff track, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” I remember the jangly hollow-body guitar, and the clean Hammond organ. I remember it was all medleys, including a couple of songs I’d only ever heard on that album. I could probably hum it start to finish. I just didn’t know the artist’s name.
My earliest memory of that record is wrapped up with that magical week when the tree was up, the presents were already under it, school was out, my grandparents would be arriving soon, and I was strictly forbidden to touch anything. Which I didn’t. I just lay under the tree looking at wrapped presents and hanging ornaments while that album played in the background and the lights blinked in that slow, hypnotic 1970s rhythm. Somehow, my brain filed organ, chimes, guitar, and accordion with Christmas back then.
Now jump cut fifty-plus years later. The people who put that record on are gone. The house is gone. The turntable is gone. That damn album, though, still plays in my head, rent-free.
So, I went on a quest to find it. This is an incredibly foolish thing to do. How many Christmas albums have been made since the invention of the phonograph? Challenge accepted! This one had to have been released pre-1972 or so. It had an electric guitar and a Hammond-sounding organ, so odds are we can narrow it down to post-1955. There were no vocals. To my credit, however, I could pretty much reconstruct a track order from what was in my head. Specifically, I absolutely knew it opened with a very distinct descending arpeggio run on some kind of harmonium-ish organ sound–something like a harmonica or melodica, but with a lot more notes. That meant, at worst, I only needed to listen to the first ten seconds of every Christmas album released between 1955 and 1973 on Spotify. Eventually, I would find it.
Spoiler: I didn’t find it on Spotify… and don’t think I didn’t try. After several days of uncovering some really fun albums—but not the one I wanted—I went to Google, Discogs, AllMusic, Wikipedia, anywhere that could run a keyword search on “1960s Christmas, organ, guitar, chimes,” and I went way down a rabbit hole. Then I realized this was my mother I was trying to second-guess. She was no obscure vinyl collector. This had to be the popular album that year.
Halfway down a list of “popular-but-forgotten Christmas albums of the late ’60s,” I clicked a link to YouTube and heard that damn descending arpeggio intro (which I now know is actually accordion) I’d been looking for for weeks. It was cathartic. My whole nervous system went, “Oh. There you are after all these years,” and I found myself actually tearing up at a low-res YouTube transfer of what I can only describe as kitsch elevator music on a fifty-plus-year-old record.
Then I read the comments, though. “I remember every single note of this LP. It is a priceless connection to my Dad.” “This was our Christmas record growing up. Thought I imagined it.” “I can smell my mom’s kitchen when I hear this.” Okay, then, as suspected, it wasn’t just my weird attachment. There were dozens of us. And like the Devil’s Tower chasers in Close Encounters, who knows how many are still out there but never made the connection? Whatever happened, we created a weird little pocket of the internet where all of us, separately, had come to say, “I thought I was the only one.” It helped more than I expected, and more than I like admitting.
So, is the album as good as I remember? Not even close. I still love it, though. Frankly, it sounds like early 1960s elevator music. The guitar is just slightly out of tune. The instruments come in too loud most of the time, then quickly adjust. That seems to indicate this album was recorded live, in a hurry, and on a budget. Which makes sense. The Living Trio was essentially a house band for RCA (like the Living Guitars, the Living Strings, the Living Organ, etc.) that re-recorded popular songs RCA put out on its Camden subsidiary label. They were usually budget releases—the kind that came free with the purchase of a turntable.
I read one account that in 1967, this album was possibly a free giveaway at JCPenney for customers who purchased $20 or more. Imagine that. Someone in a conference room said, “If they buy enough sweaters and electric can openers, we’ll toss in a Christmas LP. Make it sound festive. Make it cheap. Nobody’s really listening.” Nobody meant for this record to matter. It wasn’t the prestige holiday album of its day. There was no visionary producer, no iconic frontman, no mythic studio story. It was just session work for a paycheck. Probably a half-day gig in August of 1967 to come in and play an entire album from sheet music in one or two takes. They weren’t trying to make art; they were trying to make December sales. We were the ones who wired that album into our personal histories.
So, yeah, when I hear it now, it hurts. I went looking for it, thinking I’d find the sound of Christmas on vinyl. I found the sound of all the Christmases I can’t go back to. I still play it a couple of times a year, though.
These days, “Christmas Music” is a Spotify category that spits out hundreds of playlists: Cozy Christmas, Jazzy Christmas, Acoustic Christmas, Lo-Fi Christmas to Study/Decorate To. Objectively, they’re warm, polished, tasteful, and well thought out. That algorithm, and those playlists, don’t know you, though. The algorithm says, “Here is what most people like.” The Living Trio (with Chimes and Bells) says, “Here is what you heard the year your life quietly changed.”
