This album advertises itself as being by Bill Haley “and Friends,” and that’s fair because Bill Haley himself appears on only four out of the eighteen tracks on this album. Then there are two tracks by The Comets, Haley’s backing band, out on their own and tracks by various people who were in either The Comets or Haley’s previous group The Saddlemen. Haley and the Comets doing Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and Jingle Bell Rock is suitably cool, but I also really liked the two tracks by the Comets, recorded in the eighties, a bopping version of Blue Christmas and a stellar instrumental tune called Ring a Chime. And then there’s Rockin’ Rollin’ Christmas, a track that is actually by a Haley impersonator; before you scoff, give it a spin – it’s one of the best tracks on the record and the impersonation is eerily accurate. There are a couple of rarities by Bill Haley & the Saddlemen, Haley’s group prior to the Comets. The Saddlemen are pure country and Haley’s voice is frankly unrecognizable on these two ballads, so they’re very different from the songs and sound Haley used with the Comets. Unfortunately, these two tracks are incredibly poor quality, though one of them, A Year Ago This Christmas, still really works as a great country weeper. A lot of the other tracks are of middling quality that seems to indicate that they were taken from vinyl or deteriorated tapes; on some the voices are painfully loud and you can barely hear the music and on others everything is muffled and crackly. The eighteen tracks here add up to a bit over forty minutes (songs used to be short, you know?) and of those eighteen tracks, I’d say about a third are good. It’s too bad as some of these are both genuine rarities and also really great tracks. For instance, Ring a Chime & A Year Ago This Christmas, aren’t available anywhere else. But this one just isn’t worth it. 2 stars.
tl;dr – hodge-podge collection features poor sound quality on many tracks and a host of tracks that fail on their own merits; a handful of great rarities can’t make up for the bad stuff. 2 stars.