Here's a Christmas favourite from Vancouver's Stonebolt. The "news" voice you hear is another Vancouver favourite: legendary CFUN deejay Daryl B!

Stonebolt's David Wills has the story:

"I can’t recall exactly whose idea it initially was — likely Daryl's. He was a good friend of our managers at the time, and was very supportive of the band; so much so he even helped promote some of our shows. I believe we recorded this in the late fall of either 1977 or 1978.

We were all familiar with the Simon & Garfunkel version, and since it wasn’t something our record label was involved with, we decided to do it as a special Christmas promo at our own expense. The recording of the music and vocal tracks was done in a hurry, at the original Ocean Sound back when they had their first studio in North Vancouver.

As with the original version, Daryl chose a bunch of the really sad and disheartening news stories of the day, and wrote and voiced the nameless ‘newsman’ copy, which was then mixed to gradually fade in over the top of our song, just like AM radio stations' signals used to drift in late at night. CFUN played the heck out of it that Christmas season, and I think other stations across the country picked it up too.

Stonebolt reunited in 1997 to play some events, and had so much fun that we did it off and on afterwards, between our other music projects. Around the time of our Regeneration/Best of CD in 2000, Ray Roper and I decided to record an updated version of Silent Night, with updated news copy. Ray tracked the new keyboards and strings at his home studio, and he, I, and Brian Lousley did all new vocals. Since Daryl was in Winnipeg and in very poor health by then, we recruited Tom Lucas — another CFUN alumnus — to be the news guy. We did updates again in 2001, and once more in the late 2000’s, this time using Tom Jeffries (yet another CFUN-er) to voice the news.

There never seems to be a shortage of bleak news stories to update the Silent Night broadcast. Maybe next year the guys and I will produce a ‘good news’ version!

RIP Daryl B! Love - the Stonebolt boys."

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