"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).