"Socks: A Rock 'n' Roll Christmas Tour" with JD McPherson
December 9, 2023
Cain's Ballroom
“Presents are coming,” JD McPherson said with uncharacteristic austerity, flanked by strings of C9 Christmas lights and hand-drawn Christmas tree cutouts. “It’s a hugely important time of year.”
The “Socks” holiday tour, held annually, visits Cain’s every other year. It’s named after McPherson’s fully original 2018 Christmas album of the same name, and the show and the album both lean into a holiday truth—it’s fun to get stuff.
The multi-generational crowd, half seated and half standing, dotted with light-up Santa hats and candy-striped suspenders, was full of people I’ve seen before at other “Socks” shows; it’s an end-of-year tradition for several hundred Oklahomans, it seems. They were rapt at opener Joel Paterson’s quippy banter and a set of mostly Christmas, mostly guitar songs from his jazz and Western Swing-influenced Christmas albums, the suitably titled Hi-Fi Christmas Guitar and The More the Merrier: Hi-Fi Christmas Guitar Vol. 2. He garnered a sincere laugh after introducing a song as a “deep cut off my new record. The full title is ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
The laughter turned to holiday cheers as McPherson and his band took the stage to the driving baritone guitar lead of “Bad Kid.” “I can’t help it / I was born like this / A permanent spot on the naughty list,” McPherson sang, tapping into the evening’s central character: a kid whose rock ‘n’ roll attitude is at odds with the warmer and fuzzier side of Christmas. Next, the neoclassic “All the Gifts I Need” showcased utility player Doug Corcoran on the baritone sax, an instrument more capable than any other of summoning a latent Christmas spirit. (If you’re keeping score on my feelings about the saxophone, it goes from maligned to essential starting on Black Friday and back again on December 26).
The whole reason for the season(al concert) was to have fun, and it radiated from the band onstage into the crowd of fans, many of whom brought their kids, young enough to have grown up with Socks as present in their holiday listening as any other Christmas record. It was probably for naught, then, when McPherson suggested earmuffs for the little ones before singing “Holly, Carol, Candy & Joy,” a cheeky ode to a festively named foursome that contained one of my favorite points of the set: a moment of enunciative genius where McPherson rhymed “Carol” with “girl,” which I won’t ruin by trying to explain phonetically.
Other memorable moments included a moody cover of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” and the performance of title track “Socks,” a bluesy dirge about the most hurtful Christmas gift imaginable. McPherson sang the word “socks” with comic, palpable disgust and took the opportunity to play his own bad Santa, hurling socks from his merch table into the crowd.
After a few songs from the non-Christmas McPherson catalog, the band invited Paterson out for a few more Christmas tunes including a cover of Buck Owens’ “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy,” the night’s second rumination—after McPherson original “Hey Skinny Santa!”—on Santa not weighing enough to be Santa.
The elusive Cain’s Ballroom disco ball lit up for precisely one song, closer “Twinkle (Little Christmas Lights).” It was a chef’s kiss usage of the disco ball medium if there ever was one, a physical manifestation of the evening’s sheer joy.
