The Brady Bunch - Merry Christmas From The Brady Bunch

 

Time for some of my annual Christmas postings...  and my first selection for this year is a doozy!

As mentioned in a previous post, the television program The Brady Bunch premiered on ABC in the fall of 1969.  The show was extremely popular with kids in its first couple of seasons, but that popularity wasn't reflected in the overall Nielsen TV ratings, which ranked The Brady Bunch somewhere near the middle (at best) to the back of the pack.  Still, the network and the producers wanted to further capitalize on the program's pre-teen popularity, and early in the second season, someone came up with the inspired idea of releasing an album full of Christmas standards sung by the kids as something that might appeal with their target audience.

It goes without saying that this recording was not exactly a labor of love by anyone involved... The kids (Barry Williams ("Greg"), Maureen McCormick ("Marcia"), Christopher Knight ("Peter"), Eve Plumb ("Jan"), Mike Lookinland ("Bobby") and Susan Olsen ("Cindy")) weren't particularly enthused about doing it - except for perhaps McCormick, who had some limited vocal experience, the rest of them had little if any significant singing talent to exploit.  Facing this fact and the relative brevity of time allotted to cut this disc, the production staff were even less happy to be involved in this project (album producer Tim O’Brien, who was also Paramount’s house producer, was later quoted as lamenting trying to pull something listenable from “six little kids who could not sing”).  And network management could have cared less about the resulting quality of the finished product - they just wanted something related to their semi-hit show out before the holidays.  In that atmosphere, production commenced in mid-October, 1970.

Recorded in less than two weeks, the album mixed group sing-alongs with solo performances on classic holiday standards (“We finished our vocals in one afternoon, and then listened intently as the audio engineers used every gimmick, trick and echo chamber in the book to get us at least up to ‘listenable’ status,” recalled Barry Williams).   None of the tracks are especially memorable; frankly, most of them are jaw-droppingly horrible renditions that soon segue into the realm of "Oh my God!" hilarity.  A prime example of this is their version of "O Holy Night", which I only recently listened to for the first time in years.  The song starts off semi-tolerable, until it reaches the chorus... at which point I burst out in incredulous laughter at its stunning awfulness.  The label had the cojones to actually release a single from this album, Susan Olsen's lisping rendition of "Frosty The Snowman" - there wouldn't be another.

It's not like there weren't any decent Christmas numbers to pull from the show; mother Carol Brady (Florence Henderson) laid down a beautiful performance of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” featured in the series’ only Christmas episode, that for some reason was not among the selections (I guess they just wanted to focus on the kids - bad decision).  

 

All in all, this record, in my opinion, has all the hallmarks of a recording of an amateur holiday pageant from some elementary school in the Midwest - good enough for parents and attendees to have a memory of their child warbling off-key Christmas songs, but nowhere near good enough to actually release for purchase.

One of the other weird things about this album is that the kids recorded it "in character". As shown below, some of the songs say "lead vocal by Bobby Brady, Jan Brady", etc., not by the actors' names. 

 

 

This thing was pushed out the door so fast, they obviously didn't spend a lot of time on spell checking or proper song annotation - "Marcia Brady's" name is spelled "Marsha" here; and some of the lead vocals are credited to the incorrect child.

These are the correct lead vocals for this disc:

1) The First Noel - Mike
2) Away in a Manger - Maureen
3) The Little Drummer Boy - all 6 kids
4) O Come All Ye Faithful - Eve
5) O Holy Night - Maureen & Barry
6) Silent Night - all 6 kids
7) Jingle Bells - all 6 kids
8) Frosty the Snowman - Susan
9) Silver Bells - all 6 kids
10) Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer - all 6 kids
11) Santa Claus is Coming to Town - Barry
12) We Wish You a Merry Christmas - all 6 kids

Not exactly the mark of a quality production.

 

Anyway, for good or ill for you this holiday season, here you are: The Brady Bunch Kids' debut album, Merry Christmas From The Brady Bunch, released by Paramount Records on November 2nd, 1970, and rereleased on CD (and renamed Christmas With The Brady Bunch) by MCA Records in 1995.  Get ready...

 

Whatever your reaction, as always, let me know what you think.

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