BOSTON. Gary Nilesberg has been struggling to make a living as a songwriter for a long time, a fact that explains the nineteen part-time jobs he’s had over the past 8 years. “I would make enough money to go into the studio to record a demo, then send it off to Nashville,” he says over a cup of coffee at Cafe Italia looking out on the busy Downtown Crossing shopping area. “And then I would wait. And wait. But my landlord wouldn’t.”
It was at one seasonal temp position working for a department store that Nilesberg, frustrated at a shift that extended from eight to ten hours, looked up at a crush of shoppers grabbing boxes of Iso-toner gloves almost before he had a chance to add price tags and muttered to a co-worker “Don’t they fucking know it’s Christmas?” “That was the light bulb that went off,” he said. “I was like the guy who discovered ‘June’ rhymed with ‘moon’-I was off to the races.”
On his next ten-minute break Nilesberg took pencil and an expired mail-in rebate card and crafted every songwriter’s dream; lyrics and a melody that have become a hit that promises to keep him–and his children if he ever has any–in royalties until the earth is destroyed by an asteroid. “The words just flowed out,” he says of “Don’t They Fucking Know It’s Christmas,” which he recorded in his apartment wearing a Santa cap and uploaded to the World Wide Web, where it became a viral hit.
Bowdlerized as “Do They Even Know It’s Christmas” for radio and in-store play, the song has become a lightning rod for pro and anti-Christmas partisans, sometimes making for strange bedfellows. “While I do not appreciate the continuing vulgarization of our everyday speech, I endorse the young man’s sentiments,” says Rev. Arthur Winnesdale of St. Swithin’s-on-the-Common, one of the few remaining mainline Protestant churches still operating in what was once known as “The City of WASPs.” “If everybody would get their acquisitive instincts under control, and make a rather sizeable end-of-year donation to their church . . . or synagogue . . . the world would be a better place.”
While the lyrics may seem flippant or disrespectful when compared to traditional carols such as “Silent Night,” Nilesberg says he hopes they will endure “because they came straight from my heart.” “Listen to this verse,” he tells this reporter, as he tunes his high E string and clears his throat:
I don’t know what it with people around Christmas–
No man is an island, but I’d like to be on an isthmus
When they start grabbing and pushing and shoving their boxes.
Onto all their houses I want to cast poxes.
So rude, so ungrateful, my ass they should kiss-mus–
Don’t they fucking know it’s Christmas?