Ho, Ho, Ho . . . All the Way to the Bank

Many people will complain that the holiday season has been stretched too far. They will note with dismay how certain shopping malls now string up the red and green lights even before Halloween. They will bristle when “The Miracle on 34th Street” is televised on Thanksgiving night. Do not count Elmo Shropshire among these traditionalists. Shropshire, perhaps more than any other American, has reason to wish the yuletide lasted all year.

Who, the inquisitive reader will ask, is Elmo Shropshire? He is a 60-year-old veterinarian who spends 11 months of each year tending to pet cats and dogs. The 12th month, this month, he devotes to The Song.

Da Vinci painted Mona Lisa. Rodin sculpted “the Thinker.” Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace.” Dr. Elmo, as he calls himself, entered the pantheon of artistic masters through a trick door. He’s the guy who sang “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

Now, snicker not. “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” amazingly enough, is the song that more than a decade ago supplanted Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” as the most popular holiday tune in record-land. Dr. Elmo has the Billboard charts to prove it.

“Yes,” he concedes, flashing a slightly twisted little smile, “I’ve become a Christmas tradition.”

*

It began in the late 1970s with a Lake Tahoe blizzard. Dr. Elmo, who had picked up music in his late 30s as a hobby, was performing in a casino lounge with his then-wife, Patsy Trigg. Their act was an imperfect blend of comedy and country. He’d sing his “You Done Sprayed the Love Bug with DDT.” She’d follow with a heartfelt rendition of the classic “Crying Time.” Anyway, a musician who had been trapped by the snowstorm came up and told Dr. Elmo about this song he’d written. Randy Brooks was his name. His own band, he sniffed, wouldn’t perform the song, but he figured Dr. Elmo might be more open-minded. Brooks began to sing:

Grandma got run over by a reindeer

Coming home from our house Christmas Eve . . .

As most AM radio listeners now know, the chipper ballad told of a grandma who drank too much egg nog, wandered off to retrieve her medication and later was found dead “with hoof prints on her forehead and incriminating Claus marks on her back.” Right away, Dr. Elmo recognized the greatness in the song. As he recalled the other day in his home studio here, it had “everything you needed” for a hit. It was “cute.” It was catchy. And it even made use of more than three chords.

Everyone should believe in something, and Dr. Elmo believed in the “Grandma” song. He purchased the publishing rights and with Patsy recorded a single, which no one bought. He passed the song along to disc jockeys, who refused to play it. He approached record company executives, who filled his files with rejection letters. Along the way, his marriage ended. At last, he sold his veterinary practice, raising cash to produce a video.

“At that point,” he said, “I had about $50,000 invested in this one song. And it still hadn’t made me one dime. I was so depressed. I said to myself: I have lost my mind.”

*

The breakthrough was incremental. A San Francisco disc jockey started playing the tune. Booked as a warm-up act, Dr. Elmo was picketed by 40 Gray Panthers, whose signs demanded: “What’s so funny about a dead grandmother?” A gift from the publicity gods, the protest produced national press and stirred underground demand for the song. And then one morning, months after he’d sent out his video, Dr. Elmo received a call: “She said it was Lisa Something from MTV, and that they loved the video . . . “

That was in 1983. Today “Grandma” has sold more than 4 million copies. From Thanksgiving to Dec. 25, Shropshire spends every day either on the road performing or on the telephone engaging in banter with drive-time disc jockeys. Oh, it’s not all sugarplums. He still dreams grand musical dreams, but it’s tough getting booked year-round when “everybody knows you only as the the Grandma song guy.” So he’s branched out, recording tunes about the Betty Ford Clinic and Dr. Kevorkian. Funny stuff like that.

Still, no matter how much the artist might feel imprisoned by his masterpiece, there are consolations. He can go to the mailbox and fish out royalty checks. At last count, the song was generating more than $80,000 a year. He can leave his studio and soak in the backyard hot tub, behind his fine house in the Marin County hills. He’s more or less set: If he didn’t enjoy the work, Dr. Elmo would never have to fix another Fido again.

You can say there’s no such thing as Santa, Dr. Elmo sings at the end of The Song, but as for me and Grandpa, we believe.

You bet he does.