I stole the idea. I took the credit.
Hard to explain now in the age of everything-ever-recorded-now-available-on-digital-demand, but in prehistoric 1990s it was rare to hear holiday songs beyond the caroling standards and hymns. A song like The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping, now a certifiable standard, was really only available to hear on college radio or the new wave/indie rock station. I thought people would delight in compilations of songs that went beyond the usual red nosed reindeer fare.
I lived in NYC at the time and scoured record shops for rarities and compilations of songs that would yield something weird or interesting takes on the old songs. I found Christmas TV special songs, punk rock Christmas songs and too many weirdo funny/not really that funny parody songs. I pulled my favorite unique good songs, wired up VHS to audio so I could sample pieces of video and mishmash it all together.
My standards were broad, a mention of winter-related or Christ-related material qualified the song for inclusion, so overlooked B-side type songs like Winterlong by Neil Young (improved upon by The Pixies), Prince’s The Cross and One of Us by Joan Osborne were sprinkled in alongside the Santa Claus-y stuff by jazz and indie bands, one-liners from The Simpsons and MST3k. But no songs that were too religion-ish or too anti-Christmas, there’s plenty of bad to go around at the holidays; the goal of the mixes was to create surprise and buoyancy, not zealotry. Still, a song a gorgeous as The Posies’ Christmas had to get in one year, even though the words are not-so-subversively anti-holiday, I hoped no one listened to the lyrics too closely.
Stringing together two cassette decks for mass production, I burned through lots of Maxells and TDKs in real time, dubbing tapes all day and night. I customized the covers with hand stamps and pen scrawl, handed them out to people I knew as gifts, sent out copies to friends and family faraway. People loved them. I still hear from old friends who tell me they drag out the cassette deck in December just to play the tapes, one guy invested in an analog-to-digital conversion setup specifically to convert the tapes to mp3.
I’ve never told anyone I stole the whole idea. No, I don’t mean I stole the music. I mean, yes, I stole the music, but I stole the music in order share the music and that’s different and anyway it’s not at all what I am talking about. No, I mean I stole the idea for making a multimedia mixtape from a guy who I briefly knew at a job I briefly had in a small city I briefly lived in.
J was the first real friend I made after college at the first “real” job I had after college. He shared a small house with a roommate who was very into folk music and listened to famous NYC folk and world music radio station WFUV. Roommate was a big fan of Loudon Wainwright III, Shawn Colvin and other singers over 35 I’d never heard of. Roommate was also the first politically correct person I’d ever come across, exclusively using Tom’s of Maine hygiene products and food products labeled organic like Amy’s. In an early forerunner of cancel culture, Roommate would not allow J — a massive rockabilly fan — to listen to Jerry Lee Lewis due to the stories about Lewis being a pedophile and murderer. This infuriated J to no end.
While it is true he questioned many of my preferences at that time (worth questioning: Howard Stern, canned soup, illegal sports betting) R was a very generous, funny dude and through his PC-ness, introduced me to new cultures and opinions. Right around Christmas time R handed me a cassette labeled “Christmas Songs” on the spine. It was a compilation tape of holiday music I had never heard before, no Bing Crosby or Peggy Lee here, all songs culled from various sources of various quality, with dialogue from movies and tv shows interspersed between the songs. Threaded together it was a celebration of holidays, but from different perspectives with songs that had heard before: a snip of dialogue from “It’s a Wonderful Life”, when Potter says to Bailey “Merry Christmas to you, in JAIL!” segueing into Christmas in Jail by The Youngsters followed by Christmas In Prison by John Prine. The year after that, he gave me another Christmas tape, thematically based around country music. (There was a Garrison Keillor bit in that one, it hurt, but I got over it.) The year after that I was gone away. Never saw Roommate again.
A year or two later, I completely ripped him off and started making mixed media holiday tapes. People who liked would say, “that is so cool! You had such a great idea.” And I’d be all, “hell yeah it’s a good idea” when I should have been giving credit to R for stealing his material.
I’m fessing up for the first time. For years I thought somehow it would get back to R that I was making these tapes, and he would call me up and, I don’t know, make me feel bad for stealing his idea. Cancel me. But meanwhile I received tapes, CD’s and now Spotify playlists from other friends who made holiday themed mixes. Yeah that’s right, they ripped me off. That’s how much influence I have. I may be pretty self-centered but truth is everyone was always making holiday mixes all over the place and there was really no one stealing anyone’s ideas, everyone was inspiring everybody else and despite the continually output of holiday albums, there really is a finite amount of good material to mix with.
When you do it, when you feel like you’re stealing something from another writer or musician, you think you’re going to produce something that will sound just like the original and you’ll get busted, called out. Hardly. Unless you’re truly copying something, your thing will still be different.
Or, that’s what I tell myself every time I borrow your idea.
