It’s raining ‘Kung Fu Christmas,’ not men
Paul Shaffer devotes a chapter to co-writing his gay disco pop hit “It’s Raining Men” in We’ll Be Here For The Rest Of Our Lives, but that’s not why I called.
I wanted to deconstruct “Kung Fu Christmas,” which appears on the 1975 National Lampoon album “Good-bye Pop.”
Shaffer composed “Kung Fu Christmas” and co-wrote the lyrics with Brian Doyle-Murray. Murray’s younger brother Bill was the mellow FM DJ Mel Brewer on the “National Lampoon Radio Hour,” which gave birth to “Good-bye Pop.” Shaffer collaborated on the music with Christopher Guest. Shaffer gives a page of his book to “Kung Fu Christmas,” writing how it became “a classic, at least among the three people who bought the album.”
I was one of those people.
“Thank you for remembering,” Shaffer said during a long conversation from Los Angeles. “I was very proud of it at the time. I wanted to do a big chorus like the [Philly soul group] Stylistics. I was fascinated with the four chords of [their 1971 hit] ‘You Are Everything.’ So I put them into ‘Kung Fu Christmas.’ Kung Fu was so big in the R&B lexicon of the time with [the 1974 Carl Douglas hit] ‘Kung Fu Fighting.’ Brian had the idea of ‘Kung Fu Christmas.’ He was a title guy. When he came up with that we knew what our work was.
“On the end when the fade goes on and on I remember the singers being there. Gilda [Radner] was there writing, too. Everybody was trying to write couplets for the fade, one on top of the other. Gilda’s was:
Pimpin’ bad daddy/in Super Fly clothes
Sellin’ Joy to the world/in her panty hose.”
“Gilda came in with that like it was the theory of relativity. I think I came up with:
Christmas Eve coming with its last minute bustle/
Santa tells the elves you better do the Hustle.”
Shaffer plays Royal Canadian sleigh bells and ill-fated Spinal Tap drummer Russ Kunkel (also from Bread) is on bass. Shaffer hired obscure soul singer David Hurdow for lead vocals. “The dialogue at the end was improvised,” he said. “We sent Chris [Guest] out to do a Barry White kind of a voice and Gilda the voice of his girlfriend: ‘Baby, I’ll buy you a glass bottom boat for Christmas.’ And Gilda says, ‘Oh, honey I don’t want no fish lookin’ up my skirt.’ It killed us. We had a lot of laughs doing that. And we did it in a very loving fashion.”