The seventh day of Hot Roxmas

Someone recently described Game Theory's "A Child's Christmas Saving The Whales" from their 1989 True Gamesters holiday tape as "an extremely silly rock opera". I don't think that's fair description of it. Maybe if it were an elaborate story about a Puerto Rican juvenile delinquent named Rael, who had to face a series of bizarre creatures and dangers in the New York City underground in order to rescue his brother, who turns out to be a manifestation of himself, then it would be an extremely silly rock opera. As an eight minute narrative about a little kid in Marin county finding the true meaning of Christmas after being saved from a whaling ship by rock superstar Stick, "A Child's Christmas Saving The Whales" is more like a skit.

The title comes from Dylan Thomas, by way of John Cale (I heard a version of Cale's "Child's Christmas in Wales" sung by Nico on KFJC the other day.. has anyone heard hat?) and features Michael Quercio as Denise (the boy), Gil Ray as Denise's dad, True Gamester Emily (who had a last name too, but I don't remember it) as Denise's mom, and Scott Miller as the narrator. Gil has a new blog, which I've added to my blogroll. His comment from last Friday's entry on Lolita Nation is one of the highlights of my blogging career. It's like getting a comment from Phil Collins on a post about The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Each generation has it's favorite bald drummer, and Gil Ray is ours.

When this tape was issued, I was, by most accounts, a Game Theory fan. I knew about the Quercio/Becker version of the band, and had seen them play a few times in late 1989, but was completely unaware of the True Gamesters. I didn't hear "A Child's Christmas Saving The Whales" until a few years later at the dawn of the internet age, thanks to the generosity of the same guy who called it an extremely silly rock opera.

"A Child's Christmas" was later made available for download from the Loud Family web site, so everyone who ever had an interest in hearing the skit has probably already heard it, but here it is again. The file, which was either downloaded from loudfamily.com or digitized by me, is encoded at 96kbps, a lower bit rate than I'd choose now, but it works fine for something that's more than eight minutes long and "pert near spoken word", as my grandpa used to say.



Game Theory - A Child's Christmas Saving The Whales
(from the 1989 True Gamesters Christmas tape)