Monday, August 29, 2011

Weather Report: Rain, Sleet Or Snow






Not everything Paul Revere and the Raiders recorded turned to gold. Their 1967 holiday album, A Christmas Present...And Past, never broke the Billboard Top 100 album chart or even launched a single. In fact one Columbia exec hated the album so much  he frisbee'd his preview copy across the room.

Rain, Sleet or Snow" would have been the single. A heavily distorted tongue-in-cheek rant from the point of view of an overworked holiday mailman, it sounds kind of like Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" at half speed.

On his website, singer Mark Lindsay admits the Christmas album is a mess but it reflected the counterculture attitudes of those times:
"Most of our singles weren’t political, but the Christmas album totally was. It was a disaster, but it reflected what we were feeling at the time. It was a good time for flower power and protest.”

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