'Tis the season

Holiday cheer from Q Division, Bleu, and Kaos Kards

Cellars by Starlight by Jonathan Perry

Let's just say that so-called Christmas spirit was the last thing on Jen Trynin's mind last July when she began home-recording "The Christmas Song," her contribution to the new Q Division compilation Viva Noel: A Q Division Christmas. Ninety-degree heat and a house full of horseflies will do that to a person. "It was completely fucked-up," she recalls. "It was just unbelievably hot, and I was recording in the hottest room in the house. It was a mind-bending experience where you're trying to sing and your hands are sweating and slipping all over the guitar. And then it rained, and that must've been what unhatched the flies from somewhere. I don't know where they came from. They were green, and there were literally hundreds of them all over our apartment. I had to keep putting down my guitar and picking up the fly swatter. So I started killing them all. I got really good at it."

Trynin keeps those homicidal impulses at bay on her cover of the Nat King Cole-popularized classic (written by Mel Tormé), which kicks off Viva Noel in spare, stately style with little more than Trynin's acoustic guitar, a tinkling piano, and lots of angelic "la-la-la" vocals. It stands in stark contrast to Aimee Mann's slicker, more trad take on "The Christmas Song," a previously released recording that opens side "B" of Viva Noel. The holiday album, which features a who's who of Boston rockers covering yuletide classics, includes standards like "O Holy Night" reverentially delivered by the Sheila Divine, the Charlie Brown-popularized "Christmas Time Is Here" courtesy of Señor Happy, and the Hawaiian Christmas nugget "Mele Kalikimaka" amusingly (mis)treated by the Gravy -- or perhaps I should say Gravy singer Todd Spahr's crooning alter ego, "Fatty Pineapple." And rumor has it that Fatty will make a rare appearance at a show to celebrate the release of Viva Noel next Thursday, December 9, at the Milky Way. Both the bash and the CD will benefit the Mark Sandman Music Education Fund.

A Christmas compilation, says Q Division label manager Jessica Smyser, is something she and Q Division honchos Mike Denneen and Jon Lupfer had been wanting to explore for quite some time. The problem was that the idea tended to come up when the three of them were standing around an egg-nog punch bowl in late December -- far too late to mobilize a recording project. But this year the folks at Q Division finally got an early start. And they found plenty of willing artists in and around the local scene.

Sterlings singer Patrick Emswiler, who does an inspired Shane MacGowan-esque vocal turn on "Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me," confesses that he'd "always wanted to be on a Christmas compilation." As a kid with a December 23 birthday, he's found this a particularly prosperous time of year. Besides, he adds, "My dad always gets up and makes a fool of himself. Last year, he put on a pair of Speedos and gave a toast. It happens every Christmas." Recording "Santa" allowed the Sterlings to take a break from their usual approach. "We were making an album at the time, and everything was really loud and bombastic, with lots of electric guitars. But for this, everything was acoustic and bare with three-part harmonies. And we didn't put sleigh bells on it. I'm very proud of that fact."

Jules Verdone's "Little Christmas" is the only original composition on the comp, and it does have sleigh bells, but they do little to assuage the sense of pensive desolation that haunts the track. "We finished recording the song right after finding out that Mark Sandman had died, which for me made a sad song even sadder," explains Verdone via e-mail from Italy. "I think most of us have stared down one holiday or another thinking: the world tells me I'm supposed to feel good and instead I feel rotten. And after I had finished this song, I realized that I had inadvertently written a song with the word `lousy' in the chorus. This pleases me."

Feeling lousy at Christmas is simply not in Señor Happy/Sex Foxes bassist Joe McMahon's vocabulary: "We're like the von Trapp family at Christmas." A piano is pretty much mandatory furniture in the McMahon household, so it makes sense that when Joe was scrambling to find a last-minute pianist for the Foxes' cool-jazz take on "Let It Snow," he dialed his dad, who happens to be a jazz musician. "We had an 11 a.m. slot at Q Division, and I thought to myself, `Who can I get to do this? Who'd get it?' My dad had a gig that night, but he drove in two hours from Connecticut, and we did it in one take. He was psyched because this is the first time we had recorded anything together." The session also included Sex Foxes/Expanding Man's Dave Wanamaker, Tim Mayer on horns, and veteran jazz drummer Harold Layne. That, McMahon adds, brought about a pleasant discovery: "It turns out that both my dad and Harold had played with Sammy Davis Jr."

Merrie Amsterburg's contribution -- the Pretenders' "2000 Miles" -- comes as little surprise, since she's included the tune in her live set the past couple of years. "I've always been a Chrissie Hynde fan, and I've always connected with that song, which takes place around Christmas. But Hynde also wrote the song after Pretenders guitarist James Honeyman Scott died, and with Mark gone, it just felt fitting." Amsterburg's ethereal version was recorded at home with voice and mandolin.

The mood of Viva Noel varies from track to track, just as the musical approaches range from Trynin's stripped-down home recording to the Sex Foxes' fully arranged jazz-tinged version of "Let It Snow," replete with flute, clarinet, and saxophone. What's constant, other than the holiday theme, is that the artists pretty much play it straight. "We wanted something that you could play in front of your grandmother," Smyser emphasizes. "We didn't want to be irreverent, although a couple of songs do come close. We wanted it to have more of a classic feel, and I think we got that."

Or, as Denneen succinctly concludes, "It's a post-irony record."

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The folks at Q Division aren't the only local rockers feeling the holiday spirit this year. Local songwriter/producer Bleu has just released a CD of his own, A Bing Bang Holidang, to benefit the Boston Institute for Arts Therapy, a local charity that provides therapy through the arts for mentally handicapped kids, abandoned children, at-risk adolescents, battered women and children, and other individuals and families in need. (A CD-release party is scheduled for December 12 at the Paradise.) The disc features a soup-to-nuts mix of cocktail lounge, house music, and kitschy takes on traditional Christmas carols, along with several Bleu originals. The highlight, though, is "Boston All Star 12 Dayz," which includes cameos by more than a dozen high-profile Boston rockers including the Mighty Mighty Bosstones' Dicky Barrett, Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz, Mary Lou Lord, and Kay Hanley.

The recording session for the tune took place last month at Fort Apache studios, and for Bleu, Christmas came two months early. "I got a chance to work with all of the people who I've kind of worshipped in town. I think it was an opportunity for Boston rockers to do the `We Are the World' thing." To aid and abet the recording process, Bleu made hot toddies, egg nog, and a well-received batch of Christmas cookies. The idea for the disc was hatched after Bleu made an EP for family and friends last year that deconstructed old Bing Crosby records amid a Bleu winter wonderland of loops and beats. This year, both "12 Dayz" and another standard turned inside out, "Jingle Bells," are being made available to local radio. "I can only chalk this up to a Christmas miracle, and I mean that," Bleu emphasizes. "I can't believe `12 Dayz' worked. There were people we asked that we didn't get confirmation from until the day of."

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Did you know that when they're not playing their brand of "swamp rock," the folks in Slide "mostly sit around eating cheese products?" Well, you would if you glanced at the backside of card #12 in the Boston Bands 1999 series, the debut 83-card set published earlier this year by Kaos Kards Productions. The cards, most of them in full color, supply that kind of crucial information about the rockers you know and love, as well as a few you may never have heard of. The man behind Kaos is 30-year-old Charlestown resident David Plaue, a former telecommunications employee and avid sports-card collector who claims he's finally found his life's passion. "I've always wondered about the fact that only athletes had trading cards. But I thought that other people could have 'em too, and that they also could have stats on the back." Plaue's initial brainstorm was -- believe it or not -- to produce a series of local lawyer-themed trading cards (his wife's an attorney). She nipped that one in the bud. But she liked his other idea of commemorating the Boston rock scene.

"I came at it as an outsider, for the most part," says Plaue of the set, which sells for about 10 bucks. "I wasn't a huge local music fan or anything. But I was shocked at how cool all the bands were to me. I thought they were going to be a little stand-offish -- you know, who's this guy coming up to us out of nowhere trying to sell us on the idea of trading cards? But everybody was really into it."

Here's how it worked: bands paid Plaue $100 to be included in the card series. In exchange, he provided each outfit with 100 copies of its card. Bands also received a $50 gift certificate to Daddy's Junky Music (one of the co-sponsors of the set) -- and, of course, achieved a small slice of immortality.

All told, Plaue produced 5000 card sets -- roughly 1000 of which have so far been distributed to about 70 retail stores in the state. It's been a bit of a tough sell so far, he admits, though he's hoping sales will pick up now that the holiday season's here. Who knows? Maybe a few cards will even become high-priced collectibles, like, say, the prized 1986 Fleer card of Michael Jordan that graces Plaue's own card collection. Yep, unlike most of us, he did the smart thing and held on to those childhood shoeboxes of gold. "Oh yeah. My mom knew that if she ever threw them out, that would be the end of our relationship."