My wife Pam Wendell - she was a salesperson - had the idea of making CDs and little displays and packaging them in a box and selling them to drugstore chains. Then we’d have to pay them back, or no money would exchange hands. There were a lot of independent record distributors, but they’d 100 CDs - and at the end of a season, they’d send back, like, 98. How did you capitalize on the radio exposure? I’d send a letter saying, “This is played on the radio, and I think it’s going to be good.” Almost every one would take the letter I wrote, and they had big Magic Marker on it, saying, “Stop sending me this shit!” In 1983, everybody started taping it from KSFO in San Francisco. At that time, there were probably 80 companies. Right after Christmas, the bottom would drop out. In 1979, maybe 1980, when we first came out with the record, it was played a couple times. If we get 50 requests for it, we’ll play it again.”ĭo You Hear What I Hear? Christmas Is One of the Few Times We All Listen to the Same Songs I was driving to work and Gene Nelson said, “Well, we just played this song a little while ago, and a whole bunch of people called in and said they hated it. One took it to a radio station in San Francisco and they started playing it. I made a recording of it to give to some friends for a gag Christmas gift. I was still working at my veterinary hospital. At that point, I wasn’t professional enough to think about any recording business. I thought the joke would be over after one or two times. Randy brought the song to me in Lake Tahoe. How did you come to be the performer on the song but not the songwriter? There’s something great fun about being an entrepreneur.” “We did it all ourselves,” says Shropshire, 86, of Novato, Calif., in a phone interview between gigs performing the song at New Jersey soup kitchens and psychiatric hospitals. So the track has a happy ending - for everybody but Grandma. And that’s not even counting TV, film and toy licensing. Elmo albums that contain the two different versions of the song have generated an additional $7.12 million-plus. So Shropshire pulled a Taylor Swift-before-there-was-a-Taylor Swift and re-recorded the track under the name Dr. Much of that goes to Sony’s Epic Records, to which Shropshire signed a distribution deal in the early ’80s, which meant the veterinarian lost control of the master recordings - and a lot of potential income. record sales and streaming over the years. “It was probably one of the most exciting times I’ve ever experienced.”īillboard estimates the song’s publishing has generated $800,000, but the original Elmo & Patsy master-recording version of the single has brought in $2.5 million through U.S. “It was an amazing rush,” says Trigg of the early “Grandma” days, before she and Shropshire divorced in 1985. The Endless Green of 'White Christmas' & Other Holiday Hits 1 on Billboard‘s Christmas Songs chart, then graduated to toys, films and TV shows. But Shropshire, who owned the master-recording rights, turned out to be an aggressive DIY record man, recording a full-on album containing “Grandma” and lining up distribution through big drug-store chains. Trigg’s parents published “Grandma” through their Tennessee gospel-music company, Kris Publishing, which meant Brooks made money every time it sold. Then it took off - first on KSFO in San Francisco, which played it as a lark, then at more and more radio stations around the country. Elmo & Patsy performed it as part of their act, then booked studio time and recorded it as a single. Brooks met them outside a Lake Tahoe hotel in 1979 and wound up playing them the song. The others were Elmo Shropshire, a veterinarian, and his wife, Patsy Trigg, a bluegrass duo that performed at casinos in the Southwest under the name Elmo & Patsy. One was Randy Brooks, nephew of the late comedian Foster Brooks, who wrote the song but couldn’t convince his own group to play it. At first, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” made three people laugh.
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