December 18, 2002

Santa's soundtrack
By John O'Neill

ANOTHER HOLIDAY SEASON is upon us, another year without one decent Christmas album. Sure, Los Straightjackets try to hip up the holidays with their instro-surf slant on the "classics," but frankly it gets to be a bit much right around "Feliz Navidad" with the "La Bamba" intro. Cute? How's about stale? Or thin? Bah, Humbug? Maybe I might be riding the four wise-ass men a little hard, but, in the genre of rock, where you can assert that it's all been done before, never has the maxim been truer than when rock does Christmas. I mean, what could a band possibly bring to "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" that you haven't heard? Bossa nova shuffle? Buddy Rich-style drum break? Rave-up? A nod to the artist formerly known as Bing Crosby? You get the drift (and the correct answer is, I'll take a straight Burl Ives, hold the clever). Some things can't be improved on, and in most cases the attempt should have been scraped in the first place. Unless maybe you happen to be a little band called the SLA. I imagine they could do anything up to and including mugging the mall Santa and still come up roses.

Don't ask me how exactly it came to pass, if only because I blush at the idea of falling head over heels for married men, but it was indeed love at first glimpse of these Cro-Magnon rockers. Receding hairlines, burgeoning beer guts, zero fashion sense – all attributes I could relate to since the recent betrayal by my own body, and which add up to an utter physical train wreck from a record-corporation standpoint. They all appeared to be roughly the same age as me, too, and when each member admitted no knowledge of the other SLA, it only confirmed the belief that these guys were my lost high school stoner brothers. I would have been happy enough to pal around with them whenever they were out on bail, except they also turned out to be 100 percent, balls-to-the-wall rock hounds. And I don't mean your garden-variety revivalist rockers. These guys were delivering the package with that special aggression that comes from lives spent being complete and utter outcasts – feral, uncultivated dopes who treated playing like it was little more than bowling night. Meanwhile the crowd was slack-jawing all around the room over the uncluttered fury of it all. I was no exception, except maybe twice as off the rails. The band not only one-upped Aerosmith with "Train Kept a Rolling," but they also pulled a masterstroke with a paralyzing take on DMZ's "Bad Attitude," which until that point in time would have made my long list of things that can't be improved on. And they made it look easy.

So Christmas at my house is a tad odd. The tree is fab, and the stockings are hung with negligible care. But the disc player is cooking all the time with the SLA's unreleased CD-R. The look of the pad is Christmas on Walton's Mountain, but the soundtrack says all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth kicked in. Here's to starting new holiday traditions.