By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My facts of life in the late 1970s—a self-absorbed teenager and the youngest member of my divorced family—erected barriers that sometimes stymied my boyish notions of happy living.
One of the biggest and most frustrating of these adolescent obstacles was the juxtaposition of my keen interest in music and my utter lack of consistent control over the car radio.
This all played out, of course, well before the halcyon days of individual portable audio devices that arrived with the Sony Walkman and other precursors to today’s smart phones. For travel music back then, we had only the car manufacturer’s standard issue AM-FM console.
My family drove a champagne-gold colored Ford Maverick, an inexpensive two door compact sedan. As explained in my 2021 Monastery Mornings memoir, we used it for long trips to visit our friends—Trappist monks—living at our second home, a Catholic monastery in Northern Utah.
As youngest in the family, I always was stuck in the back of the car, an automotive exile leaving me far removed from the radio control power that the teenaged me craved. Only occasionally did I get to select our drive time tunes and savor the banner rock and roll decade that was the 1970s.
When I did get to pick our music, I chose radio stations that played Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” or “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” The disk jockeys spinning the works of ABBA, Queen, or The Eagles worked just fine for me too.
Although my tastes ran a bit more in the conventional rock lane, I’d even park on stations playing music by a British avant garde artist named David Bowie. I particularly liked his funk rock anthem “Fame” from 1975 and his “Space Oddity” song (“Ground Control to Major Tom…”).
More often than not, however, it was my mother—presiding from the all-powerful passenger-side front seat—who chose our travel soundtrack. Inevitably, she turned the radio dial to 570 on the AM channel.
KLUB 57 played the music of Mom’s teenage years in the 1940s.
And so, on most trips to the old Huntsville Trappist monastery, we listened to Glenn Miller’s big band sounds, enjoyed ballads from Nat King Cole, and were serenaded by love song crooners like Perry Como…and Bing Crosby.
Bing—a crossover star of the airwaves and the silver screen—occupied a special spot in the family music pantheon. He won an Oscar for playing Irish-Catholic priest Fr. Chuck O’Malley in the 1944 film Going My Way while singing, “Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar…”
This stark dichotomy created a rather deep musical chasm in my young life, with Bowie on one side and Bing on the other. I was surprised and delighted then, one late November evening in 1977, when I stumbled upon a bridge crossing that steep ravine.
One evening just after Thanksgiving, we settled in at home to watch one of the first television specials of the holiday season. Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas featured our family’s favorite old crooner on a jaunt to Great Britain to visit his long lost relative, the fictional Sir Percival Crosby.
Over the course of 50 minutes, Bing encountered what one might expect to find in London at Christmastime in the 1970s. He met the ghost of Charles Dickens, sang with both the reconstituted spirit and English model/actress Twiggy, and did a holiday medley with his family and the famous Trinity Boys Choir.
Before all that festive activity, as Bing relaxed in Sir Percival’s fine Tudor mansion, a neighbor—Bowie—stopped by to visit. Bowie and Bing chatted amiably, and then sang one of the most improbable duets in Christmas Carol history.
I was flabbergasted and mesmerized to see the two polar opposites of my strange music world performing together, quite harmoniously, on the same screen. Like me, at the time Bowie and Bing were in unusual life places.
Bowie, then age 30, was known for wild performance art shows and unusual characters, such as his androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust. When he sang with Bing, Bowie was in his “Berlin Era,” living in the West German city trying to escape from both the spotlight and his drug addiction.
Bing recently had emerged from semi-retirement. In March 1977, however, his showbiz comeback was set back when he fell into a Pasadena orchestra pit during a rehearsal and suffered a serious back injury. No one knew it, but the devout Catholic also was near the end of his life.
The unusual duet that so captivated me almost did not happen. Bowie showed up on set in full flamboyant makeup, wearing a red wig and fur coat. Crosby’s family was shocked. Bowie later said he only appeared on the show because his mother was a big Bing fan.
During rehearsals, Bowie announced he did not want to sing “The Little Drummer Boy.” Bing sang it, mostly alone, while Bowie performed a counterpart rendition of “Peace on Earth,” a new song the show’s musical directors hurriedly wrote earlier in the day, just for him.
It worked.
The Bing/Bowie duet (which you can watch here) is lovely television holiday magic, and one of the two emotional high points of the show. (The other is Bing’s final performance of “White Christmas” at the end.)
After it was released to the public, the Christmas duet was Bing’s final popular hit. He died in October 1977 (at age 73) after a golf game in Madrid and just six weeks after filming the song with Bowie. Bing never saw the duet broadcast.
The other members of Bing’s golf foursome in Spain said he was happy and singing during his final hours on the course. His widow Kathryn paid tribute: “He’s always been a very simple man. I think he’s remembered in his songs, isn’t he? That’s the way it should be.”
The Christmas duet also was one of the best-selling recordings of Bowie’s career. Over the next few years, Bowie went on to pop music superstardom, with other hit singles like “Under Pressure” (with Queen), “Modern Love,” “China Girl,” and my personal favorite, “Let’s Dance.”
In later interviews, Bowie said that Bing was “not all there” when they sang together, and never really knew who Bowie was. Maybe Bing had more insight (and foresight), however, than Bowie realized.
After the show, Bing called Bowie a nice “clean-cut kid.” In the second half of his life, Bowie lived up to that praise.
He shook off his drug addiction, repaired his relationship with his son, and had a daughter with the Muslim Somali-American actress/model Imam during their 25-year marriage.
Having considered becoming a Buddhist monk as a young man, Bowie famously knelt and prayed the “Our Father” on stage during a 1992 tribute concert to Freddie Mercury. He had the Serenity Prayer tattooed in Japanese on his left calf.
When Bowie died in 2016 at age 69, his wife wrote in tribute to him, “The struggle is real, but so is God.” Vatican Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi—president of the Pontifical Council for Culture— eulogized Bowie as “always on the unstable boundary between the sacred and the profane” but one who spoke “in his own way, of the spiritual.”
Turns out I was not the only one enthralled with Bing’s and Bowie’s unusual duet. In 2010, comedians Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly recreated it. The same year, Jack Black and Jason Segal covered it too, in animation form.
I’ve watched hundreds of holiday musical specials, but I’ve often wondered why I remember the Bing/Bowie Christmas duet so well and so fondly. As a younger man, I had a theory.
Maybe memorable sparks flew that day because two different men, from divergent eras, on essentially the same spiritual journey via very distinct vessels, crossed paths so briefly but so brilliantly and poignantly.
As a much older man now, I have another theory.
Near the end of their duet, as the song reached its musical and emotional climax, Bing and Bowie sang a universal message together: “Every child must be made aware, Every child must be made to care, Care enough for his fellow man, To give all the love that he can.”
I never heard that song broadcast from our car radio on the road during our many pilgrimages to the Huntsville monastery.
I did, however, hear that message…to give all the love I can…voiced whenever I visited the monks at their lovely little bit of Heaven on earth.
It was a blessing, and a great gift, given each Christmas, and every day in between.
(A version of this story appeared in The Salt Lake Tribune on December 17, 2023.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
