Old School Special: ALT 50s CHRISTMAS

Professor Mikey's Old School

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Old School Special: ALT 50s CHRISTMAS

Tailfins, sideburns, pony tails, juvenile delinquents! Santa got hip!

Professor Mikey

Dec 18, 2023

Transcript

Just to be absolutely, positively, midnight clear, “Alt-50s” isn’t a real term.

Yet.

An underground was afoot in the years of Ike and Elvis, but usually it was linked to “shelters,” and usually involved survival tactics for getting through the next thousand year nuclear winter.

This underground would evolve into the beat generation of Jack Kerouac, coffee houses, digable poetry, and bongoes.

Christmas in the 1950s is about as safe as you can get, what with Rudolph, and Frosty, and the snow that everyone got on their black and white televisions. But there was another side to the era. We may have heard Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run” a few times, but when it was new in 1958, it was an edgy reindeer game.

As the years keep piling on, I realize that fewer and fewer people are around who actually experienced Christmas in the 1950s.

You know the Fifties, the decade that dominates nostalgia like no others. The time when babies boomed. The era that rolled out Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and the 1955 Thunderbird. The decade that birthed rock and roll, television, frozen pizza. juvenile delinquents, poodle skirts, sideburns, the Kraft music hall, enormous tailfins, green Jello, Johnny Unitas, Mickey Mantle, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jayne Mansfield, Peyton Place, TV Superman, Marlon Brando, Kim Novak, Sergeant Bilko, the Andrea Doria, Gunsmoke, Lolita, cinemascope, J Fred Muggs, Sputnik, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Fifties were, and still are, a great escape. Television was amazing, three networks in fuzzy black and white devoted to the Old West. HD stood for Howdy Doody. Far more hip, but without the pictures, was radio, and the changing genres it produced. Rock music was still pretty new, mostly ridiculed by a mainstream,who preferred their children listen to more proper, wholesome music like Liberace.

Whats My Line? To tell the truth, I’ve Got a Secret. An hour or so of 50s Christmas music will not bring it all back. That’s okay too. The good parts are much more fun. Nobody wants to stock your fallout shelter, or explain segregated water fountains.

What’s left is not so much an innocent Christmas memory, but a collection of artists who saw the kinds of paydays that were happening for Gene Autry and Elvis. The spirit of the yuletide moved them into studios across the land where they tried to create their own seasonal recurring bonuses.

That’s the ground rules. Everything here was recorded in the 50s. Cool daddy. The fat man’s on his way. Get rid of that greasy kid stuff, put some mistletoe on your hula hoop, kick off your penny loafers, swivel your hips, grab a cheeseburger with fries and a cherry coke, roll the fuzzy dice.

The 50s are here for a quick holiday visit before the years pile them under a blanket of nostalgia and memory, like snow in the grooves of a 45 rpm flashback.