“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (Darlene Love)

It’s Christmas Eve, the eleventh day of our twelve days of classic Christmas songs, and our classic Christmas song of the day is my very favorite Christmas song of them all, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is a near-perfect track that defines the season for me and features some of the best playing and singing you’ll hear on any recording then or since. It is a masterful piece of music.

The song itself was written by the team of Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, although Phil Spector horned in on the writing credit to earn a little extra spending money. The production is pure Wall of Sound, recorded for Phil’s legendary A Christmas Gift for You album. The sound is over-the-top bombastic, especially in the out chorus where drummer Hal Blaine unleashes everything he’s held back through the rest of the song. It’s a gut punching, power packed wall of sound, in a Christmas package.

Speaking of A Christmas Gift for You, Phil Spector assembled a veritable army of talent in September/October of 1963 to record his first and only Christmas album. The players included the cream of the L.A. studio crop, those musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, including such well-known and lesser-known names as Steve Douglas and Jay Migliori on sax; Leon Russell and Don Randi on piano; Ray Pohlman on bass; Barney Kessel, Tommy Tedesco, and Nino Tempo on guitars; the Blossoms on background vocals (along with some 17 year-old singer named Cherilyn Sarkisian—better known today as just plain Cher), perpetual Spector gofer Sonny Bono on percussion, and the aforementioned Mr. Blaine on drums. The arrangement was by the legendary Jack Nitzsche. Larry Levine engineered.

Once he assembled his masses, Spector essentially locked them in Gold Star Studio for two months and treated every track on the album as if it were a hit single. The musicians tell of living and breathing this Christmas album day after day, week after week, through the hot L.A. autumn. It kind of got into their heads, and their souls.

And then there’s Darlene Love’s vocals, on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and three other tracks. What more can I say about Ms. Love that hasn’t been said better by others? On all these songs her voice is a force of nature, heartfelt and soulful and emotional and just pouring it on and on and on. Perfect, really.

The result is arguably the best Christmas record ever and one of the top rock and roll records of all time, period. It’s definitely my favorite Christmas album and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is my favorite Christmas song.

Almost as good as Ms. Love’s legendary recording of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” were her performances of that terrific tune on David Letterman’s various late night shows, always on the last show before the Christmas break. In the earliest days, starting back in 1986 on Dave’s old NBC Late Night show, they did it with just the house band, then dubbed the World’s Most Dangerous Band, and it sounded great. (Here, you can see for yourself—it’s just Paul Shaffer on keyboards, Sid McGinnis on guitar, Will Lee on bass, and Anton Figg on drums. Look how much fun Darlene and the band are having—and how young they all look!)

When Dave moved to CBS and the Ed Sullivan Theater, Paul had a bigger stage and a bigger budget to work with, so he started bringing in more singers, more horns, more strings, and more of everything else he needed to get that big Wall of Sound sound. They also started to up the production value, getting bigger and crazier every year. One year they even flew the bari sax player in on a wire. Really.

The whole shebang was anchored by Ms. Love’s soulful, lung-busting vocals, a performance that each and every year was one for the ages. Yes, we’d get the sleigh bells and the double acoustic and electric bass line at the beginning, Anton Figg’s Hal Blaine-like drumming throughout, and (through 2012) Bruce Kapler’s remarkable recreation of Steve Douglas’ original (and quite difficult) bari sax solo, but it was Darlene’s singing that drove the thing, from start to finish.

Ol’ Dave closed up shop back in 2015 but Darlene Love is still out there (at age 82) singing her heart out. Post-Letterman, she refused to sing the song on any other late-night show, so she took “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” to The View, where she’s performed it every year since. It’s not the same, though; The View’s band is not as big (or as good) as Paul Shaffer’s assembled masses, the production values are daytime talk show chintzy, and, although Darlene gives it her all, it’s kind of a pale imitation of what we used to get. The world changes, alas.

Fortunately, we have video documentation of all of Miss Love’s Letterman performances. She first performed “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home” in 1986 and last in 2014, for an almost three-decade run—and every year was better than the last. As I used to say back then, and often still do, it ain’t Christmas ’til Darlene Love sings “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” on the Letterman show, so let’s watch her and the extremely augmented CBS Orchestra perform that perfect tune on David Letterman’s final Christmas show in 2014. It’s officially Christmas now.

Oh, and one last thing. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is getting renewed attention this holiday season thanks to Cher—that same Cher who sang backup on the original recording sixty years ago—including it on her Christmas album, released just this October. Cher’s recording is actually a duet with, you guessed it, Darlene Love, and those two grand old ladies sound as great today as they did way back then. They even sang it together at the Rockefeller Center tree-lighting ceremony at the end of November. It was something.

So, from the Phil Spector original to the Cher remake, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” remains, in my humble estimation, the very best Christmas song ever written. It doesn’t matter who’s performing it, it’s a great song—but even more so when the legendary Darlene Love is part of the package.