The Strangest Duet In Music History Is This Week’s VIDEO YOU DESERVE!
It’s Christmas week!
And so, this week, we give you a very special holiday VIDEO YOU DESERVE!
We know Mondays can be rough, so, every Monday, we give you a music video. A fun, funny music video. Something that’ll make you smile, make 
you laugh, make you reminisce, and make you realize that back in the day, music video creators were probably either insane or heavily intoxicated. But were also incredibly entertaining.
We call this feature, The Video You Deserve, and you can find it every Monday on your site for fun, free entertainment and features, QuadCities.com.
And today’s video is one which has been enjoyed for decades, and which certainly fits the spirit of the season.
The legendary song was filmed on Sept. 11, 1977, for Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas special, and featured perhaps the oddest duet in music history, but one which became an iconic classic.
At the time, David Bowie was at the height of his ’70s fame, having become a worldwide star with a streak of hits that began with “Space Oddity” and had run through Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke, from the global number one “Fame” and into critically-acclaimed discs like “Heroes,” which was about to be released. In the meantime, Crosby was at the twilight of his career (and life, as it would turn out), and was largely a star of a much older generation.
Highlighting the dichotomy between the two, a 2014 interview with Mary Crosby (Bing’s daughter) in Billboard, painted the picture. “The doors opened and David walked in with his wife,” she recalled. “They were both wearing full-length mink coats, they have matching full makeup and their hair was bright red. We were thinking, ‘Oh my god.'” Nathaniel Crosby, Bing’s son, added: “It almost didn’t happen. I think the producers told him to take the lipstick off and take the earring out. It was just incredible to see the contrast.”
On top of it, Bowie wasn’t a fan of the tune at all. Ian Fraser, who co-wrote the “Peace on Earth” portion, told The Washington Post in 2006, said Bowie “came in and said, ‘I hate this song. Is there something else I could sing?’ We didn’t know quite what to do.”
However, Bowie was talked into it, and he and two other men working on the special — Buz Kohan and Larry Grossman — spent 75 minutes working up a new arrangement of the songs, and, after they were finished, Bowie and Crosby knocked out the recording in an hour.
In an interview in American Masters: Bing Crosby Rediscovered, Kohan said “Bing loved the challenge” of the arrangement, “and he was able to transform himself without losing any of the Crosby-isms that relaxed the feeling and the atmosphere that he would always create whenever he was on camera.”
The song ended up being perhaps the most enduring aspect of Crosby’s career. Despite being a mega-star during his time, now in 2020, a little more than four decades after his death, this tune is pretty much the only thing the vast majority of anyone from Gen X and beyond know regarding Bing. And the irony is, he never even saw the “Merrie Olde Christmas” special — which became a hit — air live. Crosby died Oct. 14 of that year; the special aired on CBS on Nov. 30.
And that would’ve been it, it would’ve disappeared into the sands of time as a “space oddity.” However, that Christmas, and in those following, the video and song began to build up a cult following that grew to the point where, smelling money to be made, “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” was actually released as a single in November 1982, and — crucially — the video snippet from the show was put out as a promotional vehicle.
It soared up the charts in the UK, hitting number 3, and becoming an instant classic to be played in the years after during the holiday season. In the U.S., it never charted, however like so many other holiday tunes, it got picked up by radio during the season, and was played as a backdrop to shopping in retail stores and on radio during holiday music marathons.
However, it was that decision to use the video clip from the show as a promotional snippet that really turned it into an enduring classic in the years to come. Without that, it might have just become another bit of wintery fluff like “Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time,” instead of the iconic part of pop culture it’s achieved.
That Christmas season of 1982, the promotional clip was released as a little network called MTV started to take off and reach a massive group of pre-teens and teens. The video began to be enjoyed and revered by a new generation, Generation X, which had previously had little to no knowledge of Crosby, but for whom Bowie was quickly becoming an icon. During that decade when MTV still played music videos, every Christmas season was accompanied by “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy” being put into heavy rotation — in part because of Bowie’s popularity among Gen X, but ALSO because of the more practical fact that there were up to that point very few music videos of Christmas music. The ubiquity of the video once a year made it part of the pop cultural zeitgeist for the new generation and cemented it there for years to come.
In the decades that followed, millenials and Gen Z likewise gained a love and appreciation of the song, to the point where it’s become as much of an evergreen hit as “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “A Christmas Story,” and to the point where there have been several parodies of the tune, perhaps the most famous (and funny) being one that Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly did in 2010 for Funny or Die.
And what a strange postscript for perhaps the most unusual and unlikely pairing in music history.
As Mary Crosby recalled in 2014, “They sat at the piano and David was a little nervous,” she recalled of the taping. “Dad realized David was this amazing musician, and David realized Dad was an amazing musician. You could see them both collectively relax, and then magic was made.”
And here’s the proof of that magic, today’s Video You Deserve:
https://youtu.be/n9kfdEyV3RQ
