New to our countdown this year is Stan Freberg's "Green Christmas." I was pleased to know and work with Stan…one of those awesome occurrences in one's life when you find yourself alongside a boyhood hero. And this record also included another boyhood hero of fine who became a friend and co-worker, Daws Butler. In the above photo, Stan's the guy with his feet up and Daws is at top right. (The others are Peggy Taylor, June Foray and Peter Leeds. This was from Stan's 1957 radio show.)
In this record, which caused much controversy when it came out in 1958, Stan plays Scrooge and Daws is Bob Cratchit. And here's a photo of Du-Par's Restaurant which was (though no longer is) located on Vine Street in Hollywood, just North of the world-famous intersection of Hollywood & Vine. Du-Par's was once a proud chain of coffee shops all over Southern California but now there's just one left in Los Angeles. It's in the famous Farmers Market near where CBS is now but won't be for much longer….
Now, you may be wondering why the heck is Evanier putting up a photo of an old restaurant in a post about a Stan Freberg record? Well, there's a reason and I'll tell it to you after we all listen to that Stan Freberg record…
That's a great record, isn't it? Well, not everyone thought so. For the rest of the story, I'm just going to quote from Wikipedia…
At first, Capitol Records refused to release the record. Lloyd Dunn, the president of Capitol, told Freberg the record was offensive to everybody in advertising, and predicted that Freberg would never work in advertising again. Freberg responded with his intent to end his entire recording contract with Capitol. He spoke to a contact at Verve Records, and the company offered to release the record without even hearing it. Faced with this, Capitol finally decided to release it but provided no publicity at all.
The record was attacked in advertising trade magazines. It was played only twice in New York by one disc jockey, and the station's sales department threatened to have him fired if he played it again. George Carlin once told Freberg that he was almost fired from a DJ job in Shreveport, Louisiana for playing the record repeatedly. He told his boss it was "the most moral record ever made."
KMPC in Los Angeles played the record, but some advertisers required that their ads be scheduled more than fifteen minutes away from it. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times condemned it, but the author later admitted he had not listened to it. Similarly, Robert Wood, the station manager of KNXT-TV in Los Angeles (later president of CBS), cancelled a TV interview with Freberg because the record was "sacrilegious" and he did not need to hear it because he had read about it. KRLA, Pasadena (Freberg's hometown) showed it as reaching #3 in popularity in their printed survey. It is unclear whether this was based on sales or airplay.
Station KFWB, then known as "Color Radio Channel 98", where the record reached No. 3 on 3 January 1959, also kept on playing it. KFI, then the Earl C. Anthony station, played it a few times and then discontinued it, as did many other stations because of a negative reaction from the advertising community.
But of course, the rest of the story is that Freberg later got loads of work in advertising, including a campaign for Coca-Cola, which was a sponsor mentioned in the record. As Stan said, advertising people never hold a grudge when there's money to be made…and he thought that the Christmas after "Green Christmas" came out, some advertisers seemed a bit more cautious about mounting the kinds of campaigns that the record was all about.
And thank you for patiently waiting for the explanation about the photo of Du-Par's Restaurant. Here it is. If you scroll back up to the picture, you'll see the Capitol Records Building in the background. It's still there and it's where Stan recorded just about all his records including "Green Christmas." During that recording session, Stan got the idea for the cash register sound effects at the end. Capitol Records made tons of money but they didn't have a cash register on the premises. They didn't even have the recorded sound effect of a cash register.
So Stan walked down the block to Du-Par's where he talked the manager into loaning him their cash register for a few minutes. The manager, according to Stan, was a Freberg fan and he agreed. They took all the cash out of the register, leaving $3.00 in coins that were needed to make the proper sounds. Stan said that he personally carried the cash register to the recording studio and after they got the sounds they wanted, he carried it back to Du-Par's and waited while the manager counted the change to make sure it had been all returned. Great story, huh?