Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Darlene Love (1963)

It's a big night for music on TV - Richard Thompson, Levon Helm, Nick Lowe and Allen Toussaint on Spectacle: Elvis Costello With ... , and for the 23nd year, Darlene Love, age 68, belting Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) for a thrilled David Letterman audience.   

Written by Phil Spector, Jeff Barry and the late Ellie Greenwich, Christmas was the only original number on an LP of 13 secular holiday songs Spector gave his trademark Wall of Sound treatment in 1963.  Performed by Love, the Ronettes and the Crystals, his regular stable of artists, their efforts received little notice at the time, justifiably eclipsed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy the same day it was released.

As luck would have it, however, Christmas has metamorphosed into a holiday classic with a cult following. First seen on Letterman's show in 1986, when it was still on NBC, Love has performed the song with Paul Shaffer and the band, along with various luminaries as additional musicians and backup singers, every year since, except for 2007, when the writer's strike brought television to a screeching halt.  A lot of people were disappointed that the strike could not be resolved in time for this show to go on - such a tradition it has become - or at least that some special dispensation could not be made for it to go on despite the labor dispute. 

Of those I have seen, Love's 2005 performance is my favorite.  That's the year she was on Broadway in Hairspray and she just tore the song up with her gorgeous powerhouse voice. (Ellie Greenwich was one of the backup singers that year.)  Whether she is singing in front of others or behind them, she is a one-woman wall of sound, and arguably one of the hardest working women in the music industry, a fact acknowledged by her nomination this year to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (this is not her year to be inducted, however).    

If you've never seen the Letterman gig, don't miss another year.  It's worth every glorious second.

It Hurts To Be In Love, Gene Pitney (1964)

Continuing with our cavalcade of male vocalists whose talents were well beyond what anyone would consider normal - let's look at an early song by Gene Pitney, It Hurts to Be In Love.

Gene Pitney and I were born in the same hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, so for some dopey reason I always felt a kinship with him. One of the pre-Beatles artists who proved able to withstand the siege of the British Invasion, Pitney was already very well known in 1964 as a singer, musician and songwriter when this song broke into the Top 10.

It's a recording with many unusual qualities, not the least of which is that the unrequited love theme is presented in such rocking fashion. Get out there on the dance floor, kids, and work off that heartbreak! Love sucks, but there's no reason not to get the endorphins flowing just the same!

The dramatic Pitney treble, usually multi-tracked to even more acute effect, also had the perfect showcase in this song. One of the notable features is the intervals of rushed lyrics - the breathless "who's not in love with you" and "no matter what you do" are awesome touches.

The song was co-written by Howard Greenfield, Neil Sedaka's Brill Building partner, with Helen Miller, and seemed a perfect vehicle for Sedaka. In fact, the song's first incarnation came in the form of a Sedaka demo but various contractual issues prevented its release. There seems to be a controversy over whether the Pitney version of the song was accomplished by merely laying his vocals over the existing backing tracks of the demo (see this interesting blog where some fairly first-hand knowledge from a commenter disputes the conventional wisdom).

And the controversies keep coming: One of the many songs Pitney wrote for others was He's A Rebel, by the Crystals. Should be a fairly straightforward statement, except that as I looked for the connection between Pitney and Darlene Love, who inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, I come to find that Phil Spector allegedly used Love and her Blossoms to record the song to rush it out ahead of a Vicki Carr version, yet still gave credit to the Crystals, who were not available for the recording session when it was scheduled. Oh, bad form, Phil!

By the end of his life in 2006, Gene Pitney had had many more interesting associations, but further anecdotes will make this post too long. I'll end with a final oddity of which I was completely unaware: before It Hurts was released, that same year Pitney recorded That Girl Belongs to Yesterday, written by none other than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, their first song to chart in America. How bizarre is that?