Chipmunks roasting on an open fire

Posted on by brucehhackett

If you like a hearty laugh at Christmastime — and who doesn’t? — there’s this guy named Bob Rivers you should know about.

kzok_riversThirty years ago this month, Rivers, a veteran disc jockey from Connecticut, was listening to the same old familiar Christmas tunes for the umpteenth time, playing incessantly on the radio, in the mall, at parties, everywhere.  “Enough!” he shouted, and decided he needed to give these seasonal songs a new twist.  Or, more accurately, he wanted to replace the real lyrics with something twisted.

In the tradition of musical comics like Allan Sherman, Tom Lehrer and Weird Al Yankovic, Rivers penned several parodies, using traditional Christmas songs, then gathered a few like-minded friends and studio musician acquaintances and made recordings of his amusing concoctions.  The result, released just in time for the 1987 Christmas season, was an album called “Bob Rivers’ Twisted Christmas,” a collection of Yuletide selections, both secular and hymn-like, with radically different (not to mention hilarious) lyrics. Read More

Who knows who cares for me, c’est la vie

Posted on by brucehhackett

It was the fall of 1970 when my favorite radio station started playing a beautifully spooky song about some sort of brave knight who had “white horses and ladies by the score, all dressed in satin and waiting by the door.”

maxresdefault-8Most people went nuts for the mind-blowing ending, which featured the then-new Moog synthesizer swooping all over the place.  But me, I was mesmerized by the singer, whose precise British voice reminded me of John Lennon in his “White  Album” period.

The song was “Lucky Man,” and the band was a new British progressive rock trio who — in the tradition of American folkies Crosby, Stills and Nash — wenhqdefault-2t by their last names as well:  Emerson, Lake & Palmer.  And that rich voice that so appealed to me belonged to the group’s bassist/guitarist Greg Lake, who last week became yet another in a long line of rock music heroes to pass away in 2016.

Back in March, we received the sad, then shocking news that keyboard maestro Keith Emerson had died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.  Now Lake is gone at age 69 after a four-year battle with cancer.  Drummer Carl Palmer, the last surviving member, must be looking over his shoulder these days. Read More