Henley’s Childhood Memories Help Put a Bow on ‘Please Come Home for Christmas’
Eagles were in Miami in the fall of 1978, behind schedule and short on ideas, and outside the studio, it was sweltering hot and humid. But the band had Christmas on their minds — more specifically, Charles Brown’s 1960 classic “Please Come Home for Christmas.”
The dust from the grueling Hotel California Tour was settling and the Eagles were convening at the Bayshore Recording Studios in Coconut Grove, just south of Downtown Miami, to work on their increasingly overdue next album, The Long Run. It was not a pleasant time for the exhausted band members, and their record company was not happy, either. One of These Nights and Hotel California made the Eagles a money-making machine and Elektra/Asylum wanted to cash in on it. But the label needed the next album ASAP and was checking in with the band regularly to get status reports. But as Glenn Frey put it, “We weren’t going to finish anytime soon.”
“The record label was bugging us because The Long Run was, at this point, 6.8 months behind schedule,” said producer Bill Szymczyk, adding that the band thought, “Well, maybe if we give them a Christmas single, they’ll get off our back.”
“We’ve always wanted to do a Christmas record,” Frey told the Los Angeles Times in November 1978. “Whenever we talked about it, Don would mention the Charles Brown song. The last time he went to his mother’s house in Texas he dug it out of his old record collection in the attic. He played it for us last September and I went crazy. I loved the song. We knew it was perfect for Don to sing. There hasn’t been a decent Christmas record in a long time. So, we went ahead and recorded it.”
Henley said he always had fond memories of Brown’s original. “When I was growing up in East Texas, there were basically two radio stations that were interesting,” he said in a 2003 conversation with Cameron Crowe. “There was KEEL in Shreveport, Louisiana, which I listened to in the daytime. Then there was the legendary WNOE in New Orleans, which I could pick up at night when the station boosted its signal. It broadcast this wonderful, eclectic mix of music, which was like nothing I had ever heard on pop stations in Texas. WNOE is where I first heard Charles Brown’s original version of ‘Please Come Home for Christmas.’ It always stuck with me. Our version is very much like the original.”
The track would be new Eagle Timothy B. Schmit’s first-ever studio recording with the band. “We knocked it out in a matter of two or three days,” Szymczyk said, “gave it to the label and they indeed did get off our back until we were finished.” The band stayed true to Brown’s original, save for the lyrical change to the song’s incipit, which the group altered from “glad, glad news,” to “sad, sad news.”
For the single’s B-side, they recorded “Funky New Year,” an original by Henley and Frey, as an ode to the New Year’s Day hangover. The song opens with a slow fadein of sounds from a New Year’s Eve party and then rolls into a bass-driven funk groove that Henley peppers with tongue-in-cheek lyrics about waking up the day after partying all night long, gems like: “Can’t remember when I ever felt worse/Nothing matters and everything hurts,” “I gotta perk up a little/My hair hurts,” and “Whose shoes are these?/Party hardy baby.”
With a single sleeve picturing all the Eagles, including new Eagle Schmit, sitting poolside with an artificial white Christmas tree, Asylum rush-released the song and it became the highest-charting holiday single in twenty years. Warner-Elektra-Asylum affiliates in Germany reported getting the shipment the day after it was pressed, which was “some sort of new record.” Though the label was excited to get something — anything — from the Eagles. Still, the label would have much preferred a full-fledged album.
Label profits aside, Frey was right about the then-Christmas music market stagnation. Apart from a few new holiday offerings each year, Christmas radio in 1978 was still dominated by the likes of Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, and Brenda Lee. And while artists would occasionally record new holiday fare, few of their efforts ever made it to the Top 20. In fact, there had not been a Christmas single in the Top 20 since Roy Orbison released “Pretty Paper” in 1963.
That changed with the Eagles single, which set a new benchmark for holiday music. Eagles fans were already starved for new material by then — the band had not released anything new in more than a year and a half. “Please Come Home” shot to #18 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in just one month and, remarkably, stayed there into February long after all other holiday songs had been stashed away for the season.
The Eagles’ 45 was the third time “Please Come Home for Christmas” had hit the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Brown, an American blues singer and pianist from Texas City, Texas, co-wrote the song with Gene Redd. Brown’s single on the King label rose to #76 over the 1961–62 holiday season, after peaking at #21 on the R&B singles chart in late 1960-early 1961.
It had season-over-season staying power, hitting #1 on Billboard’s Christmas Singles chart more than a decade later in 1972; it had sold more than a million copies by 1968 and became a staple. Brown died in 1999 at 76 years old, but his legacy lives on in the song.
The Eagles’ version remains the most popular, and Bon Jovi, Willie Nelson, Martina McBride, and Kelly Clarkson are among the many artists who have recorded covers.
By mid-December 1978, Eagles’ “Please Come Home for Christmas” had become one of the most-added singles on radio stations nationwide. On December 16, WNOE in New Orleans reported to Cashbox it had added the single to its playlist, bringing the song, performers, and airwaves full circle.
This article appear in the Time Passages book that tells the band’s epic history in detail: Eagles: Up Ahead in the Distance. This second of three volumes is the follow-up to Eagles: Before the Band.
