It Was the Last Song
Bing Crosby Recorded Before David Bowie Beat Him to Death With That Big Bertha
Golf Club
Two blows was all it
took,
and Bowie's fangs
were priapismic too;
The blood still ran
warm, so the Thin White Duke feasted 'til Bing was whiter than Georgia in 1952,
and he stood erect,
eyes glowing in demonic mode;
he faced the moon,
swore allegiance In scripts not heard of since caves with scrawlings on
walls
collapsed In Middle
East expeditions crushing handlebar mustached professors from Oxford to
death;
And Bing played his
golden harp, looking down he
removed his belt to
give the feeding frenzy boy a good old-school pre-Sunday church trashing
2018 marked the earliest snowfall in the southern US since 1952. A year later (and a year before) Bing Crosby recorded “White Christmas,” the world,s best-selling single (100 million copies). Crosby had recorded the Irving Berlin song on his radio show, “The Kraft Music Hall,” on 25 December 1941. He recorded it again in 1942 as part of the soundtrack for the Holiday Inn” musical film. It garnered Berlin an Academy Award, spent 11 weeks atop the Billboard charts, and demonstrated that secular Christmas songs could be commercially successful; Decca Records re-released it in 1945 and 1946, and it went to #1 both times. It was reprised in the musical “White Christmas,” the year’s to-grossing movie. The 1942 remaster was damaged due to over-use, so Crosby redid it in 1947. The “Merry Christmas” album which contained it was released in 1949 and has never gone out of print. In 1948 “Music Digest” claimed that Crosby’s recordings accounted for more than 1/2 of the 80,000 weekly hours allocated to recorded radio music, and over his long career (and beyond) he sold more than 1 billion analog records and tapes. His last recording was done on 11 September 1977 for a TV special “Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas.” He was joined by “the Thin White Duke” David Bowie on “The Little Drummer Boy” (written as “Carol of the Drum” by Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941). Bowie and his wife entered the studio wearing full-length mink coats, full make-up, and bright red hair. Bowie originally balked at doing the song, so Ian Fraser, Larry Grossman, and Alan Kohan wrote “Peace on Earth” in 75 minutes as an added counterpoint; Crosby sang the Davis song, and Bowie the new tune. Bowie recalled that he “was wondering if [Crosby] was still alive. He was just… not there. He was not there at all. He had the words in front of him… And he looked like a little old orange sitting on a stool. 'Cos he'd been made up very heavily and his skin was a bit pitted, and there was just nobody home at all, you know? It was the most bizarre experience. I didn't know anything about him. I just knew my mother liked him.” Crosby died of a heart attack 5 weeks later, on 14 October, after a day playing golf. The show aired on 30 November in the US and on 24 December in the UK. The song was used as a bootleg single with Bowie’s “Heroes” until RCA Records officially released it in in 1982. It debuted on the UK singles chart in November and climbed to #3, selling over ¼ million copies in its 1st month and became one of Bowie’s best-sellers (over 400,000 just in the UK). Bowie recalled that “we were so totally out of touch with each other.”
ReplyDeleteCallaway Golf Company launched its “Big Bertha” drivers in 1991, named after the infamous German super-heavy siege artillery developed by the armaments manufacturer Krupp just before World War I. At a time when most drivers were made of persimmon wood, the Big Berthas were crafted entirely of stainless steel and had larger heads.