Here is Elvis Presley’s dirty-sex Christmas song, “Santa Claus is Back in Town”, written by the great duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote many of Elvis’ greatest hits.
The song includes images such as:
Santa abandoning his sleigh for a “big black Cadillac”
Santa demanding that “you” take off your “stockings” for him
Santa snarling about how he will be “coming down your chimney” tonight and you better be ready.
It’s still hard to believe he got away with it. It’s hard to believe this track exists at all.
Elvis recorded the song in 1957 at the ripe old age of 22, and it makes his confidently nasty performance that much more remarkable. In comparison with a lot of the other singers who were his contemporaries – those also on the Sun Records roster, but elsewhere as well – Elvis lived a pretty tame life. Many of the other Southern musicians circulating at that time were practically outlaws, drinking, drugging, womanizing, wild. Many crashed and burned early. Elvis wasn’t that at all. He had tons of sex, of course, but there’s nothing particularly wild about that. He didn’t drink at all. He didn’t like being around people who were drinking. He wasn’t a party-hound. He liked amusement parks and pinball machines. He was a kid, basically. In terms of lifestyle: at 22, or even earlier, at 18, 19, he wasn’t out living a wild juke-joint fire-liquor fast-women kind of life. He lived at home, his Mama wiped his mouth for him at the table (literally), and he drank milkshakes and dated a nice Christian girl named Dixie, and they went roller-skating and attended gospel concerts on their dates. Elvis was a “good boy,” albeit a poor Southern one, the son of sharecroppers.
In other words: he wasn’t raised in a “high-class” religions, where the APPEARANCE of holiness and “good”-ness was paramount, religions where people believed that salvation was possible here on earth if you appeared good. In Elvis’ religion, appearances didn’t matter at all, because everyone was too poor for that SURFACE nonsense. Church was about relief, release, comfort, community, freedom of expression, catharsis, the reassurance that their lives had value, even if the culture de-valued their class. Elvis was raised in the Assembly of God church, and the Pentecostals understood that salvation was not possible on earth, that if you asked for forgiveness sincerely, God would grant it. It was a religion that was – despite the speaking in tongues and all that – quite realistic about the condition of man. Others who know more about this than I do have observed that poor Southern mamas were more realistic about the sex lives of their children than middle-class mothers obsessed with appearances. (June Juanico, Elvis’ girlfriend in 1956, tells a great story about messing around with Elvis in his room in the house he shared with his parents – no sex, but “heavy petting” in the terminology of the day, and suddenly Gladys knocked on the door, saying through the door, “Elvis, honey, we need to make sure June doesn’t have any babies.” Hahahaha. “We.” But Gladys always said, when asked, “He’s a good boy.”).
The point I am trying to make is: Elvis’ powerful sexuality was not in conflict with his good-boy self. Neither ‘side’ was a lie. This is something most East Coast commentators looking on totally missed, or misunderstood. What was really fascinating about Elvis is that when he sang raunchy rhythm & blues, which he did practically from the beginning, he was singing songs that didn’t at all describe his actual life experiences at the time. He was a kid. He didn’t have a woman “way across town” who was good to him, and etc. But he understood the urgency of these songs, he understood everything. Elvis had a huge sex drive, as many teenagers do, and he expressed it in a way that was unafraid. He was unashamed about the existence of his own sex drive. This, in and of itself, was a revolution in the wider culture (then and now) – but to those closer to Elvis’ actual life circumstances – the poor Southerners, the teenagers, etc. – they all “got it.” Of COURSE Elvis was both a good mama’s boy and a total hound-dog. There is no contradiction. Only if you think sex is dirty do you see this as contradictory. He wasn’t a hypocrite, but that’s how a lot of reporters interpreted this duality in Elvis. They didn’t get it. They didn’t put in the time to try to understand it. Elvis was, of course, an anomaly in many MANY ways, a “sui generis” figure, but in other more important ways, he was representative. His teenage audiences got that totally. He is us. Just better looking. And braver.
But let’s go back to “Santa Claus Is Back in Town.” It was the first track on Elvis’ Christmas Album, released in 1957. It is still the greatest-selling Christmas album of all time. By a wide margin.
The album is filled with beautiful and traditional renderings of Christmas classics like “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Silent Night”, a couple of gospel favorites like “There Will Be Peace in the Valley”, and the now-classic “Blue Christmas”, with the soprano looping up and down the scales in the background (great interview with said soprano Millie Kirkham here).
You can’t get more traditional than this.
Interestingly enough, “Santa Claus Is Back In Town” was not perceived then as the most controversial number on the album. Elvis covered “White Christmas,” and his version is witty and light, he’s not making fun of it, but he is having fun with it, putting his own spin on it. Irving Berlin, who wrote the song, was, reportedly, not happy with it. At all. The story that he called radio stations across the land demanding that they cease playing it is suspect, in my opinion. But in general, considering Elvis’ notoreity at this time, hearing him singing conventional Christmas carols was shocking. This is hilarious when you consider “Santa Claus Is Back In Town,” the OPENING TRACK of the album – !!! – which even to modern ears is so over-the-top raunchy it still conceivably could be seen as shocking.
The “White Christmas” thing is a great window into the tenor of the times, and how threatening it was when Elvis moved into the mainstream. (And, not coincidentally, the mainstream gobbled him up. Four years later he’d make Blue Hawaii and become an all-American movie star, the opposite of “threatening”. That situation could not and did not last, but this is yet another commentary on not only the times, but how culture works.) There was no escape from Elvis in 1957. Many still thought: Why didn’t he go back to the Swamp-Land from which he sprung? (There was a LOT of regional prejudice in this attitude.)
Elvis got so much bad publicity in 1956 (it had already started to neutralize in 1957, with the Ed Sullivan performances, as well as the movies, which softened his persona). Jukebox owners declared they would not stock their jukeboxes with “N-word music”, DJs smashed his records in public, PTA groups and pastors denounced him as dangerous, the Mayor of Jersey City gave a press conference where he said Elvis would not be welcome in Jersey City. Elvis proclaimed his innocence: he was just doing what the music made him feel, what the music made the audience feel. And “nobody’s getting hurt,” my favorite of his comments on the matter.
But here, in a Christmas album, Elvis almost TAUNTS the critics with “Santa Claus is Back in Town.” It’s heartening: even with all the controversy, and even knowing that the controversy hurt and confused Elvis, he did not back down. He did not cave. Instead, he LEADS OFF the album with a song so sheerly sexual it borders on public indecency. And then for the rest of the album, he buttons it up, sharing his love of Christmas carols, and his adoration of Jesus. BOTH expressions were sincere. (Many saw his Christianity as a cynical marketing ploy. Or, they were turned off by his denomination. There’s a lot of class prejudice in this, as well as regional prejudice.) These critics misunderstood Elvis, misunderstood his culture, his religion.
If you want to hear why Elvis Presley was controversial, don’t listen to “I Got a Woman” (although listen to that, too). Listen to “Santa Claus is Back in Town” and listen, in particular, to what he does with his voice on “You be a real good little girl …”
It is outrageous.
Tom Petty says it better in his Rolling Stone “Top Elvis tracks” piece (unfortunately, the link no longer works!), so I’ll let him take over:
“Santa Claus is coming down your chimney tonight” sounds absolutely filthy when Elvis sings it. It might be his best blues vocal ever, with those beautiful stops that nobody could do but him.
The fact that the song starts with The Jordannaires gentle traditional quartet, singing “Christmaaaaaas….” in a churchy way makes what happens afterwards even more shocking. That opening is a feint, a trick, a fake-out: it makes you think the song will be one thing, and the second Elvis comes in, it turns into something else entirely.
Compare his vocals on that track with images like this one (Elvis loved Christmas), and you can see how destabilizing a figure he really was.
Elvis asked you to reconcile the boy who loves Jesus with the boy who cackles like a sexy demon during the bridge of “Santa Claus is Back”. Neither was an act. Both are true.
Can the culture embrace such inclusion and inclusiveness? Shouldn’t ONE side be truer than the other? We are so much more comfortable when only one thing is true at one time.
Elvis says, Both are true.
Can you handle it?
One thing that always makes me smile about this whole album and “Santa Clause is Back in Town” in particular is how much it showcases Elvis’s ungodly (and oft-overlooked) skill as an arranger…It’s like he had to develop a whole different approach to recording just to make a place where all those things “nobody else could do” would fit in. It’s not that nobody had pulled off a Christmas-carol opening seguing into a white hot blues before…it’s that nobody else had even thought of it.
Merry Christmas Sheila!
Ha! Yes such a good point. You have to think it up.
And merry Christmas to you too!
This is so good! It really is shocking that they opened the album the way they did and I can’t imagine the Colonel thinking it was a good idea. I picture a female teen talking a suspicious parent into getting the album for them at the hardware store and part of the persuasion technique from the teen was to verbally tick off all the family friendly time tested holiday classics on the album. Then they get home and are milling about the living room where the family console hi-fi is located and mom starts to wrap a present when the needle drops and mom and pop are relieved when they hear the opening bit you describe but of course all that is shattered as E wails the first few lines and by the time it gets to “Got no sleigh with reindeer, no sack on my back
“You’re gonna see me comin’ in a big black Cadillac!!” Pop is nervously looking out the window as he pulls the curtains shut and looks at his daughter with fear in his eyes haha I’d have done the same thing!
hahahahaha!!! Andy – yes! This is EXACTLY how it went. I’m laughing out loud. The poor dad!
It’s funny to think that 10 years later Elvis’ so-called “Christmas special” then turned into the black-leather WTF-ery that it did – with nary a Christmas tree in sight. Fake out again!