Demented Ditty
A Novato veterinarian’s song about a reindeer accident becomes an indelible part of Christmas culture.

BY DAVID TEMPLETON

In the recent film Jarhead—Sam Mendes’s gritty comedy-drama about soldiers killing time in the desert during the first Gulf War—there is a powerful sequence set at Christmastime. In the scene, a lonely homesick sentry steps away from the rowdy Christmas party. Alone, he listens to Armed Services Radio, and a song is played that instantly causes the young man to feel even more homesick. In a potent and visceral and wholly sentimental way, that particular song reminds him of the people he’s left behind, the kind of Christmases he’s experienced in the past, and the America to which he may never return.

The song is “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” written by Randy Brooks, recorded over a quarter-century ago by a bluegrass duet known as Elmo and Patsy. Of that moment in the movie where the sentry is emotionally slammed by the infamous novelty tune about a geriatric hit-and-run on Christmas Eve, Elmo Shropshire—the Elmo in Elmo and Patsy—says, “That song, that crazy, weird song, it just really reminds the guy of Christmas.”

Though Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Mel Torme, Nat King Cole, Andy Williams, and the guys who wrote “Silent Night” and “Frosty the Snowman” are all spinning in their graves at the musical injustice of it all, the poor tedium-affected soldier is not the only one for whom “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” is a fond and lasting symbol of Christmas. Since its first appearance on the airwaves in 1979—originally on KSFO in San Francisco, and then in a big way during the holiday season of 1980 when it hit the national airwaves in a bootlegged form—“Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” has clippity-clopped its way into the hearts of millions of Americans, officially shoving Bing’s “White Christmas” aside to become, according to Billboard, the most-requested Christmas song on the radio. Each year, Shropshire, a career veterinarian who goes by the stage name of Dr. Elmo, records a CD full of new novelty tunes with a seasonal bent, and releases them along with a Patsy-less recording of “Grandma”; the former married couple, Shropshire and Patsy Trigg, divorced in 1985. The annual CD tends to sell well, especially within mega-chains such as Target, Wal-Mart, and Dollar General.

“My CD was Sony’s second biggest Christmas album last year,” Elmo grins, sharing a pizza in the downstairs office of his reindeer-decorated home in north Novato, where the gold and platinum “Grandma” records are proudly displayed on the wall. “The first biggest CD last year was Elvis Presley’s Christmas album,” he adds. “I’m OK being bested by Elvis.”

AMERICA’S LOVE AFFAIR with “Grandma” has always been a rocky one.

From the beginning, Christmas revelers have been divided over the song, with herds of people insisting they hate the song, while others—enough to have turned “Grandma” into a platinum record long, long ago—have always seen “Grandma” as a necessary antidote to the forced saccharine sweetness of the holidays. Not long after its release, Elmo and Patsy found their concerts being picketed by the Gray Panthers—an advocacy group for senior citizens—who claimed that with lyrics like “She’d been drinking too much eggnog, and we’d begged her not to go, but she’s left her medication, so she stumbled out the door into the snow,” “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” was both ageist and sexist, and predicted that the song would encourage violence against the elderly. Stations that elected to play the song were subjected to protests and a flood of letters demanding that the song never be played again. Pro-Grandma DJ’s frequently battled with station programmers over whether or not the twisted little tune should be played. Though the song does not inspire the same rowdy controversy that it did when it first appeared, it remains banned in certain corners of the national airwaves, and there are still plenty of folks who prefer their Christmas songs to be free of references to bludgeoning. A brief hour spent surfing the Web for references to the song uncovers a huge number of blogs and other public pronouncements accusing Dr. Elmo of killing the beauty of Christmas right along with poor hoof-marked Grandma. According to Elmo, San Francisco’s KOIT, with its all-Christmas programming playing in offices pre-Thanksgiving through December 25, still refuses to play “Grandma.”

“That’s right,” confirms Bill Conway, KOIT’s station manager and director of programming. “KOIT does not and will not play ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.’” Conway has a compelling reason why “Grandma” is on the KOIT no-play list, and it says something about the complex emotions the song stirs up for some people. “For years,” Conway says, “as a young programmer, when I was at a station where they did play the song, I would get calls from people telling me that their grandmother had died unexpectedly on Christmas or Christmas Eve, and the song was painful to them when they heard it. I always thought, ‘Well, get over it, it’s only a song.’ And then a few years ago, my own grandmother died on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t unexpected, but it was still very painful, and the next time I heard ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,’ I finally understood what people had been telling me. So it has nothing to do with the quality of the song, it’s nothing against Dr. Elmo, but that’s why KOIT will never play that song.”

Still, Dr. Elmo himself—the man who can claim to have sung “Grandma” more times than anyone else in the world—insists that the weird little song is uplifting and meaningful to a whole lot of people.

“It’s a sweet song,” he says. “And it’s a good song. From a songwriter’s perspective, it has everything. It grabs your interest immediately with the opening lines, then, it’s got all the usual warm and fuzzy things we’re used to hearing about Christmas—even though Grandma gets killed. It’s twisted, and it’s got a bit of a mean streak, but it affirms the existence of Santa Claus and in a weird way, conveys a sense of wonder about Christmas that a lot of people have a hard time feeling anymore.”

No doubt about it, there is a large portion of people for whom “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” stirs up the same kind of feelings about Christmas that older folks get from hearing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

“Think about it,” says Elmo. “For people under 40 years old, they’ve heard ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’ more times than they’ve heard ‘White Christmas.’ ”

In the case of Jarhead, it wasn’t whimsy or cynicism that led the filmmakers to choose “Grandma” as the bittersweet symbol of Christmas longing. During Desert Storm, Armed Services Radio was only allowed to broadcast four Christmas tunes, selected for their secular nature, given that the war was fought in an Islamic region where there are laws against the public promotion of non-Islamic religions. “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” really was one of the four songs, along with such stuff as Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas.”

“Dr. Elmo is a twisted genius,” says Novato musician and songwriter Doug Adamz, with whom Shropshire has written and recorded. “He has a way of taking something kind of edgy and offbeat, and singing it in a way that makes it warm and fuzzy. I can’t think of anyone else who does what he does the way he does it.”

SHROPSHIRE’S HOUSE ON a hill in Novato is clearly the home of Dr. Elmo. Carved reindeer adorn the living room fireplace, cartoons bearing references to the song are framed and hanging on the walls, and in the master bathroom, the sliding glass shower door has been etched beautifully, and bears the images of Santa, his sleigh, his reindeer—and Grandma standing in the snow about to be clobbered by a low-flying hoof.

“We try not to go too far with the reindeer stuff,” Shropshire laughs. “But it’s good to be reminded of how I got where I am today.”

How did Dr. Elmo get where he is today? How does a bluegrass-playing veterinarian become a controversial holiday icon, one with an office packed with memorabilia, and brand new plush toy reindeers and reindeer-riding motorcycles that play “that song” at the push of a button? The story begins in 1978.

“I was playing up in Lake Tahoe with my bluegrass band,” Shropshire says. “When we got there, we arrived one morning and there was this big snowstorm, so the old band—the one we were taking over for—couldn’t get out and they had to stay for the evening. That night, they came to see our show, and afterwards, this guy came up to me and said, ‘You know, I have a song I wrote that I think would be perfect for you.’ So we went back to his dressing room and he sang ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.’ His name was Randy Brooks.”

Shropshire, whose repertoire up until then consisted mainly of tunes like “Fire on the Mountain,” was smitten by the weirdness and edginess of Brooks’s subversive Christmas song.

“I heard it once and thought, ‘Wow, what a song!’ “ he says. “I learned it as soon as I could, and a couple of nights after that, I started playing it at the Hyatt at Lake Tahoe. People had a good reaction,” he laughs. “I mean, they certainly responded to it. It really had an effect on the audience.”

A few months later, in the spring of 1979, sensing that he was on to something, Shropshire pulled some savings together and recorded a single of “Grandma.” It was clear from the beginning that not everyone shared Elmo’s sense of enthusiasm for the song.

Says Shropshire, “The guy who owned the recording studio heard it and said, ‘Elmo. You got some great bluegrass. I don’t understand why you’re messing with this reindeer song. I don’t see anything worthwhile in it.’” He took the record to a high-powered music attorney he knew, and the attorney was similarly non-impressed. “He said, ‘Naw. I listened to it. I don’t think there’s any chance for it at all,’ ” Shropshire recalls.

For every high-powered music-industry insider who told Shropshire he was wasting his time, the singing veterinarian encountered dozens of people who loved it. He printed up 500 singles of “Grandma,” and spent the next several months trying to figure out how to distribute them. Through a friend of a friend, he got one into the hands of Gene Nelson, the popular Bay Area DJ who was then at KSFO, when it was still a music station. After sending it to Nelson, not long before Christmas of 1979, Shropshire waited to hear back, but no call came.

What happened next is a story Dr. Elmo clearly loves to tell.

“I was out of town, and I’d just gotten back into San Francisco, and turned on the radio,” Shropshire recalls. “And there was Gene Nelson, saying, ‘What should we do? Should we play it or not? I’m going to take another phone call, and if we don’t get 50 phone calls, I’m not playing it.’ I’d listen as he took a bunch of calls from kids saying, ‘Play it! Play it!’ and every few calls there’d be someone saying, ‘Don’t you ever play that song again. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life!’ Gene Nelson would be going, ‘We have 47, 48, 49 calls,’ and by now I was really interested, and I was dying to know what song it was that was causing all this fuss. And finally, Gene said, ‘OK, 50 of you have called in wanting to hear it so here it is—Elmo and Patsy’s “Grandma Got Run over by a Reindeer.” ’ It was my song!”

NELSON CONTINUED PLAYING the song, and before long, it was picked up by Dr. Demento, who played it twice in the weeks before Christmas.

“Then,” says Shropshire, “Christmas was over, it’d played on KSFO and on Dr. Demento a couple of times, and I thought, Well, that was great!”

But the next year, Nelson started playing the song again, and this time, it was picked up by stations all across America.

“For the next 10 or 12 years, every year, on December 26th, I would think, ‘OK. That’s the end of it. It’s never gonna come back,’ ” Shropshire laughs. “It was 15 years or so before a lot of people started thinking of ‘Grandma’ as one of the Christmas standards.”

Even then, with the song becoming a household name, Shropshire was unable to persuade any record company to release the song in stores.

“They’d take my letter and send it back to me,” he says. “Especially Capitol Records. They’d take a big felt marker and write, ‘Stop sending this! We hate it!’ ”

In 1982, after he’d been rejected by every record company in the country—”two or three times, in some cases,” he laughs—he optimistically decided that perhaps they wouldn’t release “Grandma” as a single because they were waiting for him to produce a whole album of novelty tunes. That led to such titles as “Grandma’s Killer Fruitcake” and “Grandpa’s Gonna Sue the Pants off Santa.” In 1983, using his own money, he recorded a full album and produced an MTV-style video.

“The album cost me $12,000 to make, and the video was a lot more than that,” he says. “I hired a director, they brought a big semi-truck up here and spent two days camped out in my living room making this video. So I sent that to MTV in early October, and it wasn’t till the end of November that somebody called up and said, ‘This is MTV. We want to play your video. We love it!’ At first I thought it was some friend of mine playing a prank. But it was really MTV. They sent me this big, long contract, and pretty soon they were playing the video a lot!”

Finally, in 1985 he signed a contract with Epic, which is now Sony, which bought the album and the video. When Epic put it out in 1985, with a clever distribution and marketing campaign, they sold nearly 250,000 albums and 500,000 singles in the month of December alone, making it Epic’s biggest selling record of the month, beating out even Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

What has sustained the song’s popularity, and launched Dr. Elmo as high-demand annual Christmas concert act, is the way he worked the radio interview circuit. This year, beginning in November, Shropshire will have conducted nearly 300 radio interviews with stations all over the world. The interviews continue to keep people interested, promote his new CD—he now has a deal to produce a fresh CD each year—and re-introduce listeners to Dr. Elmo.

The interview shtick began in 1995, when Shropshire was still working at Arguello Veterinary Hospital at the corner of Arguello and Geary in San Francisco.

“I remember this one day, we were really busy,” he says, “with a cat on the table and people lined up in the waiting room, and this guy calls me at the hospital and says, ‘This is Ross Brittain from Z100 in New York. I just got this new album of yours. I love the fruitcake song. Can you sing a little bit of it,’ and I said, ‘Ross. I’m sorry. I’m working. I have a cat on the table. Can I call you back this afternoon?’ But he said he was a morning guy, and went, ‘Come on, just sing a little something,’ so I sang a couple lines of ‘Grandma’s Killer Fruitcake,’ and then he started asking about other songs, and just to get him off the phone, I sang a bunch of little pieces all in a real fast row, and finally hung up and went back to the cat.

“That night, my message machine was full—he has a morning DJ prep that he sends out on the wire service so other DJs can see what he’s been doing and the jokes he’s making and all that. And on that day’s prep, he mentioned that Dr. Elmo was a great interview. So now all these disc jockeys started calling up asking me to sing stuff on the radio show, and suddenly a whole new thing was born.”

Finally, after 26 years, Elmo is convinced that this is more than a transitory fad, and he now believes that the demented song he made famous will outlive him to offend and delight generations in the future.

“Like it or not,” he laughs, “I think ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’ is a permanent part of American culture. I don’t know what that says about American culture, but whatever it is, I’m glad for it.”

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