MatR: Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Southside Johnny, Jesse Malin, and more: Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)

Rolling Stone named it the Greatest Rock and Roll Christmas Song of all time.

It didn’t start out that way, though.

When Darlene Love recorded “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” in 1963 as the only new song for Phil Spector’s compilation album A Christmas Gift for You, the song went nowhere.

Perhaps it was a matter of timing (the song was released on the very day President Kennedy was assassinated), or perhaps a matter of content–for anyone paying attention to the lyrics, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is a dark and lonely song, and 22-year-old Love plumbed its depths with her heartbreakingly urgent performance.

And yet, there’s something hopeful in the song’s loneliness, something yearning and eternal in Love’s longing vocals. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” pulls all kinds of heartstrings, and it seemed pre-destined to become a hit.

So Spector gave the single another shot the following year, but again, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” failed to enter the charts. And for the rest of the 1960s, throughout all of the seventies and into the early eighties, what we now consider to be Love’s signature song was all but forgotten.

Then came the 1984 film, Gremlins.

Gremlins opened with Love’s song playing over the opening credits, reintroducing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” to modern audiences.

Eighteen months later, a late-night television host invited Darlene to perform the song on his show, Late Night with David Letterman. It was a simple performance with the house band, but it gave Darlene the television exposure she’d always deserved.

The famously curmudgeonly Letterman was no fan of Christmas music, but “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” was an exception. He was a fan of both the song and its singer, and as promised during their interview at the end of that clip, Letterman invited Love back to perform it again the next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. For almost three decades.

With each year, the performance grew in power, arrangement, orchestration, and celebration.

Love sang her song for Letterman’s audience every single year for 29 years–and then when Letterman’s show left the airwaves, Love took her annual performance and moved to The View.

With such dependable annual exposure, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” finally found an audience, but hit single status still proved elusive. But in December 2014–more than 50 years after its initial release, it finally entered Billboard’s annual Holiday 100 chart… at #99.

Four years later, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” cracked the Hot 100 itself, peaking at #50.

And just this very week, Love charted with her Christmas song again, reaching an all-time high of #17–meaning that as you read this, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is at its all-time pinnacle of popularity, almost 60 years after its first attempt at the charts.

Bruce Springsteen didn’t wait for the rest of us to catch up, though. A lifelong fan of the Spector wall of sound and the great girl group singers, Bruce latched on to “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” at his very first Asbury Park holiday show in December 2000, and he featured the song in each and every one of his holiday shows through 2003.

Bruce’s penultimate performance was one of his very best, and fortunately it was captured on video. In the clip below, Bruce takes lead vocals, backed by The Max Weinberg 7. But watch and listen carefully across the stage–you’ll hear contributions from Jon Bon Jovi, Little Steven, Nils Lofgren, Garland Jeffreys, Willie Nile, Southside Johnny, Lisa Lowell, Jesse Malin, and more–all in a delightfully joyous rendition of Darlene Love’s holiday classic.

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
First performed: December 17, 2000 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: December 8, 2003 (Asbury Park, NJ)