Merry Christmas To All…
No Christmas–whether very secular or very solemn–is complete without a nod to the (in)famous 1977 Bing Crosby holiday special featuring David Bowie. Their joint rendition of "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy" is the stuff of legend and probably did more to close the generation gap than a thousand encounter sessions.
The phony patter ("…I'm sure glad you came by to work on the pianer today…") between Der Bingle and the Androgynous One–then at the height of his Twiggy Stardust look–is priceless and, if I'm remembering correctly from the Gillespie family room, left both my parents and my siblings thinking that the world had indeed gone splendidly mad. Remember folks, this was manna from heaven in the age of Carter, Son of Sam, global cooling, and the inability of the Americans to win the Little League World Series (if foreign teams were allowed to compete). And that's not even dealing with the omnipresent threat of a conversion to the metric system, which frankly seemed more frightening to me as a math-tard than the possibility of a thermonuclear war.
But the real paydirt from the Crosby special, IMO, is Bowie's rendition of "Heroes" ("It's all in the way you say it," muses Bing by way of intro), which makes everyday feel a little more like Christmas and is viewable here by simply clicking on the image.