Song of the Day 12/22: The Beach Boys, “Alone on Christmas Day”

You’re probably familiar with “Little Saint Nick,” the Beach Boys’ tune about Santa’s new hot rod. Alternate transporation for Santa was a popular theme back in the ’50s and ’60s, when various songs placed Kris Kringle in airplanes, helicopters, rocket ships, UFOs – anything but that so-19th-century sleigh. It debuted in 1963, then appeared on “The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album” the following year.

That was the only Christmas album the Beach Boys released before they became an oldies act, but it’s not the only one they recorded. This song is from “Merry Christmas from the Beach Boys,” an LP scheduled for released by Warner Bros. in 1978 but scrapped at the last minute. Though most of the tracks were produced by Brian Wilson, some were recorded years earlier, and the record company was skeptical about his participation in the project.

He certainly had nothing to do with this song. Mike Love wrote it with Ron Altbach, the band’s keyboard player at the time (he had provided the piano on the King Harvest hit “Dancing in the Moonlight”). The first time anyone heard it was when the unreleased album appeared as a bootleg in 1984, but while several songs from “Merry Christmas” were officially released in the ’90s, “Alone on Christmas Day” wasn’t among them.

The song emerged from obscurity in 2015, when Mike Love re-recorded it as “(You’ll Never Be) Along on Christmas Day” and, more significantly, French rockers Phoenix covered the song for “A Very Murray Christmas,” Bill Murray’s 2015 holiday special. A lot of people thought it was a Phoenix original.