MUSIC FOR DECEMBER 2024
‘LOOKING FOR THAT CHRISTMAS FEELING’
Digitally colorized in later years, the image above started out as a black & white rendering of a storm dumping snow on Portland, Maine, in 1980. I took it with an ancient Kodak Brownie that stayed in my Volkswagen Squareback for just such opportunities. I was on my way to work one Saturday in the library at the Guy Gannett newspapers.
This was a time when, between college classes and shifts at the newspaper, I had a seven-day work week. I was feeling some strains of adulthood, something expressed a year later in this Song of the Month! — “Looking For That Christmas Feeling.” (The Walter-and-Margaret intro appeared three years later in response to concerns about climate change…and we hadn’t seen anything yet.)
The Boarders were my first band to perform “Looking For That Christmas Feeling” for an audience, in the mid-’90s, and it was part of the holiday repertoire of successor trio Howling Turbines, heard here rehearsing it in anticipation for a 2000 date at the Free Street Taverna. (Gretchen Schaefer plays bass and Ken Reynolds, drums.)
Hear “Looking For That Christmas Feeling” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Looking For That Christmas Feeling” copyright © 2010 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Top photo: Snowy Fore Street, Portland, Maine, 1980. Bottom image: A poster promoting a 2000 Howling Turbines holiday show at the Free Street Taverna: photo by Jeff Stanton, wreaths and Santa hats by Gretchen Schaefer, layout by Doug Hubley.)
