Today, we will listen to one that almost everyone I know really likes: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” There are things about it that I like. Well, there’s one thing I like about it: “So this is Christmas?” That’s a great opening line and totally in keeping with the best that Lennon was capable of. So why don’t I like it?

There are a number of technical reasons that the song is less than stellar. Let’s start with the typically mushy production by Phil Spector — a man who destroyed a lot of otherwise fine music. There also isn’t much care taken in shoehorning the lyrics into that melody. Listening to “A very merry Christmas” is like listening to fingernails on chalkboard. It isn’t helped by the fact that we can hear Yoko Ono’s screeching on it. I’ve never doubted that she was a smart person, but she had no artistic talent to speak of. A poor person with that lack of talent would never have thought it acceptable to foist it on the public.

But to be honest, I could forgive all that. I just can’t take listening to John Lennon tell me how to improve the world from his installations at places like The Dakota. This was produced right at the time of “Imagine,” which has to be the most presumptuous song ever. But before you all tell me how wrong I am, remember that your opinions about these songs are just the same as mine: based upon feelings. I’m not saying that they aren’t competently written and professionally recorded; I’m not saying you shouldn’t like them; I’m just telling you why I find them annoying.

So this is “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”:

Today, we listen to “Feliz Navidad” by José Feliciano of the album of the same name. There is something about both the artist and song that makes me think that I should hate them. Yet they are both great. He’s a wonderful musician, but it’s much more than that. He’s got an excellent musical sensibility. He’s able to create really engaging music without pandering. This explains his unique ability to cover songs in a way that is more compelling than the originals. I challenge anyone to find a better version of The Star-Spangled Banner. He’s also quite a good songwriter, although he isn’t focused on it. He did, however, write “Feliz Navidad.”

I just read that back in 2009, a couple of conservatives created a parody of the song called, The Illegal Alien Christmas Song. It’s a funny thing. If I didn’t know where the song came from, I would assume that it was making fun of conservatives. It does an excellent job of distilling what the Tea Party crowd thinks of matters related to immigrants. Of course, it doesn’t help that the parody is not very clever. Perhaps if the writers had been more clever, it would have been clearer just how vile they were.

Anyway, there is a live version of the song, but its sound quality is poor. So here is the album track with lyrics so you can sing along!

I have a good one for you this morning: “Santa’s Lament.” It comes to us from Don Novello, or as you probably know him, Father Guido Sarducci. The strange thing about Novello is that he doesn’t have much of a personality when he isn’t in character. Thus his comedy is usually done through some character or other. Another one of them is Lazlo Toth (like Laszlo Toth), sort of a typical ill-informed America. As I recall, he pestered Richard Nixon for years over some small amount of money “Lazlo” sent him for an appearance that Nixon had to cancel. It’s funny stuff.

Anyway, the thing about Novello is that he clearly doesn’t care much for Christmas. “Santa’s Lament” tells the story of a fed up Santa Claus. You see, people are always asking him for stuff, but they never ask what he wants. “You would not believe the letters I get!” He also has bad things to say about the elves and the reindeer. That especially applies to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Santa explains exactly where that ungrateful reindeer would be without him. And it isn’t pretty!

In many ways, I am a vicious person. I thought it would be fun to do a week a Christmas songs. In general, I hate Christmas songs. And I could, if I wanted, try to find those Christmas songs that I actually like. But it seems like more fun to torture you.

Now that doesn’t mean that I’m going to try to present horrible songs. But I’m not going to shy away from them. And that brings us to today’s song, “The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot.” It’s one of those songs that people like because they get it. I distinctly remember liking the song when I was ten years old because it made me feel clever. Plus: it is a real tearjerker. Now I just feel vaguely embarrassed that the song would manipulate me both intellectually and emotionally. It’s worse than Beaches.

It was written by the Michael Carr, Tommie Connor, and Jimmy Leach. I can’t find any information about Leach, but the other two are well know British songwriters. Carr wrote the title tune in the 1939 Gene Autry’s vehicle, South of the Border. But I suspect the preciousness of this song comes to us from Connor who wrong the similarly sly, “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” And I might run that song, which I actually like.

“The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot” is probably best known to Americans as a Nat King Cole song. But it’s a bit too hip for such a sappy song. What’s more, it has that horrible spoken word center that makes me want to pull out my hair. So we are going to go with the first big recording of it by Vera Lynn.

It’s a nice version with exactly the kind of accompaniment that we expect from “The Forces’ Sweetheart.” She really is amazing. She has the ability to perform trite nonsense as though it were Homer.

There is a major character in my first unpublished novel, Jason. And he is the main character and narrator of my second unfinished novel. The only description of him I ever provided was that he had a Jack Lord haircut. (Writing tip: don’t over-describe your characters!) But that wasn’t based upon my experience with the show Hawaii Five-O. Rather, it referred to an amazingly smart and erudite junkie I once knew. I don’t know the show that well. But I certainly know the theme.

Okay, I admit it: it isn’t a great melody. It’s the kind of thing that I would play on guitar for a solo. It’s almost exclusively in the minor pentatonic scale. It’s very surf music, which is doubtless what the composer, Morton Stevens, was going for. But I most like the brass arrangements. Also there is a nice counter melody that is arranged for flutes and something else that I can’t quite place (clarinet or oboe, maybe). Anyway, it sounds great.

Today we get to a song that I hadn’t even thought about when the week began, the Mission: Impossible theme by the great Argentine composer and bandleader Lalo Schifrin. There’s so much to love about it. First, of course, there is that great 5/4 time signature. But that’s not really what it is. It’s actually a measure of 6/8 time followed by a measure of 2/4 time. It’s a very common, but still somehow thrilling, device. I first noticed in the Buffalo Springfield song “Broken Arrow” (not that exactly, but the moving from a 6/8 to 2/4).

I love the horn arrangement — especially the really low ones which I’m thinking are trombones. But overall, you get the feel of what I normally associate with Henry Mancini. Flutes can be really effective in this kind of music, but they aren’t used that much. Mancini, of course, was very fond of them. The arrangement of the song was also done by Schifrin, which makes me keen to check out more of his work.

If you want, you can hear Lalo Schifrin do the song live with a full band. It’s wonderful. You can also hear the whole single. But I present the original because all the elements I’ve talked about are clearer:

I’m going to do another Mike Post theme today. It’s for The Rockford Files, and he wrote it with Pete Carpenter. I’m not that fond of it. It’s fine. It’s not annoying. But it is hardly the Barney Miller theme. But I wanted to related a story about the show.

When I was younger, I loved the show. (It is still a very good show with excellent writing.) My friend Will and I used to watch it when we were in middle school. And we saw one episode that had a great impact on us, “Beamer’s Last Case.” In it, Rockford comes back from vacation to find that someone has been impersonating him. He finds out that it is a mechanic at the garage he uses, Fred Beamer (James Whitmore Jr). Beamer has read too much Dashiell Hammett. But he has stumbled upon an actual case involving some local gangsters.

The problem is that he is getting in Rockford’s way. What’s more, Beamer is setting himself up to get murdered. So Rockford sends him away on a bus to northern California on the track of the “Artichoke King.” (There actually was a guy known by that, Ciro Terranova, but he died in 1938.) So Beamer is on the bus, but he can’t be silent. He loudly explains to the woman next to him what he’s doing. And this resulted in one of Will and my go-to lines to sum up stupid bravado, “Do I pack a gun? Yes, I pack a gun!”

This was back in 1978. There was no internet. So that line is just what we remembered after the show was over. And so that is what we repeated. But decades later, I saw the show again. Sadly, we got the line wrong. It is, “Do I carry a gun.” And it works brilliantly in the episode. But if you had to sum up the Beamer character in a short space, “pack” is really helpful because it adds that feel of 1930s hard-boiled detectives. Not that anyone knows what Will and I are talking about most of the time anyway.

I would like this theme a lot more without those Moog and harmonica synth sounds:

Cartoons often have great music to go along with them. Unfortunately for our purposes this week, most of them have vocals like the theme from The Jetsons. But one song I’ve always really liked is Danny Elfman’s theme for The Simpsons. It so reaches back to old cartoon themes. I don’t actually know if it is performed by a real band. It certainly sounds like it is, which is all that actually matters.

The song is written in the “acoustic scale.” Basically, it is just the major scale with an augmented fourth and a flatted seventh. It’s the augmented fourth on the third note of the melody that gives it that cool sound: C-E-F#. No one would expect that F# coming out of the gate. Of course, over time it is impossible to imagine any other note. Otherwise, it most reminds me of The Flintstones, even though melodically and harmonically they don’t share much. But they feel kind of the same.

When it comes to television themes, I most like Barney Miller. It was written by two veterans of television: Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson. Like most of these, the music is simple. In this case: very simple. It’s basically just a vamp on a single (dominant-7) chord with that unrelenting four bar bass line. The whole line is then transposed up and then back down. After the instruments come in, the bass gets pretty funky, improvising around and beyond that line. There is also a bridge, of course.

It is also the case that the show Barney Miller is great. I always find it interesting to go back and watch shows that I liked when I was much younger. Often, they really don’t hold up that well. But Barney Miller is as good as anything on television now. It isn’t just that the humor still works. The show has a remarkable amount of humanity — both regarding the officers and the criminals. I’m sure I could get a thousand words out of discussing how it has a more advanced understanding of crime than most political pundits.

Anyway, here is the song in its three minute version:

Probably the first time I noticed that you could do interesting things with jazz arrangements was while watching The Bob Newhart Show in syndication. The song is called, “Home to My Emily.” I still love those kinds of Don Sebesky horn arrangements. Not that he has anything to do with The Bob Newhart Show them. And I have to admit that the song doesn’t quite do what it used to for me.

It was written by the show’s co-creator Lorenzo Music along with his wife, Henrietta Music. He is probably best known as the voice of Carlton the doorman on Rhoda. He was also apparently the voice of the lead character on Garfield. I never saw it. But Garfield does stand out in my mind as a push back to the trend in comics of the time, which was to actually be funny.

Anyway, here’s the theme song. It’s not bad:

For this week, I thought we would do television show theme songs that I admire. But not just any. I want to features songs that are of a distinct type. But I don’t have a name for it. They are, roughly speaking, jazz instrumentals. These are often some of the most memorable songs. Usually, they are well written, but it is mostly because we hear them so much.

Probably the most well known practitioner of this kind of art is Mike Post, who wrote the music for pretty much every show you can think of from the early 1980s. I may come back to him later this week. He’s actually not one of the my favorites, but he seemed like a good person to start with. And the show I picked is Hill Street Blues. Now this is an interesting show. My friend Will loved it. But I have never seen it. It must be good, though; it is where David Milch got his start (he wrote a very large number of the episodes).

Anyway, here it is: