The Sound of the Universe Sighing After School: Vince Guaraldi's Christmas Miracle
It had to be one of two things. Either someone really knew what they were doing, or it was all dumb luck. Smart money’s on the latter, I’d say, but I’ve got a stubborn heart that refuses all that.
October 26th, 1964 was a dank regular Monday in San Francisco the day that Fantasy Records co-founder Sol Weiss hit the record button on the tape machine. Historical weather charts indicate that the city was likely dealing with at least a bit of drizzle that afternoon. They also say that there was a lot of fog and smoke.
I’m not sure what they mean by smoke, but I guess it could have been coming from the cigs Vince Guaraldi was chain-smoking. Weiss, who’d co-founded the popular jazz label with his brother Max 15 years earlier, was in the studio to record the jazz pianist who- despite having won a Grammy by that point- was hardly a household name. Outside of the rather insular jazz world, Vince Guaraldi, who was 36 at the time, was a talented, somewhat progressive musician who had known some decent success. Not much more, not much less. The music he was creating was good, but jazz wasn’t exactly competing with the Beatles. Guaraldi got by alright, but basically no one knew who the hell he was.
Then, almost overnight, everything changed.
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Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge one evening in a taxi, a tv producer by the name of Lee Mendelson was staring out the window and listening to the radio station that the cabbie had on when he happened to hear a song, a piano-based instrumental, that took his breath away. It was 1963 and Mendelson had been given the task of finding the perfect music for a planned documentary about Charles Schulz, the famed Bay area cartoonist who had created the immensely popular Peanuts comic strip.
This song, he’d felt right away, was the precise sort of music that the film needed. But there was just one problem. He didn’t know who the artist was and the DJ never said.
As soon as he got home Mendelson reached out to a friend, the esteemed jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason, described what he had just heard (probably hummed a bit into the receiver/ I like to think), and was handed the keys to the kingdom.
“Oh yeah,” Gleason told him, “that’s ‘Cast Your Fate to the Wind’, by Vince Guaraldi.”
“You want me to put you in touch with him?,” asked the critic.
“Yes, please.” Mendelson responded. “Yes I certainly do.”
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Vince Guaraldi, by all accounts, got a phone call sometime shortly after all that. He was told by Mendelson that he could create the soundtrack for the documentary if he wanted the gig.
Guaraldi, a jazzman who’d been around the block a time or two, didn’t need time to think it over. He took the gig. He met with the television folks and he eventually met with Charles Shulz himself. Everyone was on board. Then, just a couple weeks after that initial conversation between the two men, and long before Mendelson was expecting to hear much music from Guaraldi, the television man received a phone call in the middle of the night. It was his jazz piano player on the other end of the line.
Guaraldi seemed sort of electrified.
“Look, I have something I need to play for you, something I just wrote,” he told Mendelson.
Mendelson, woken from a sound sleep by the blasting phone was dubious.
“Can’t it wait until a better time, Vince?” he asked.
“No, no, no! I just wrote this! I need to play it for you right now over the phone so I don’t forget it, man.”
And so he did.
The song was ‘Linus and Lucy’.
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Nothing ever came of the documentary about Schulz. As far as I can tell, the big networks weren’t that interested and the thing died in the air before it ever had a chance to land. The footage has likely leaked into the hands of people creating other projects about the Peanuts creator, I would guess. But I can’t say for sure: so I won’t.
The failure of the film, though, should not be misinterpreted. As it turns out, many of the people who had been tapped to work on it ended up sticking around to be an integral part of what was to come. And what was to some was television. A lot of it. For the big time.
The music that Vince Guaraldi made for the abandoned documentary? Luckily, that did ultimately find it’s way into the mainstream. In December of 1964, Fantasy records released their sixth Guaraldi album (but their first with a Peanuts theme) a record called Jazz Impressions of "A Boy Named Charlie Brown". Featuring songs ostensibly intended to showcase individual Peanut’s characters, the music quickly became bigger than any songwriter’s intentions had envisioned. Critics mostly dug it. People out in the world seemed captivated by it. There was something ethereal and melodic about Vince Guaraldi’s music.
And that something was about to prove to be a hell of a lot.
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The next year, things lined up, and Mendelson, as producer, along with a former Disney animator named Bill Melendez on board as director, put together a crew and they all began working on the very first Peanuts TV special for CBS. With funding from the Coca-Cola Company, the wildly successful comic strip’s TV debut budget was meager even by 1960’s standards. Plus the entire thing was reportedly written by the Peanuts mastermind, Schulz, in just a few weeks. From the get-go, no one seemed all that optimistic.
In house, the executives at the network thought it was destined to flop. It was too slow, they griped.
The animation isn’t up to snuff.
And the music isn’t right.
Many experienced TV veterans expected nothing less than a major Christmas time bust.
But they were wrong.
And it worked.
First aired on the night of December 9th, 1965, 'A Charlie Brown Christmas’, Charles Schulz weary-eyed kid homage to the ‘true spirit of Christmas’ was a brilliant display of art and emotion rarely seen by the TV guzzling American public at that point. The only show that more Americans watched the night it debuted was Bonanza, which, with all due respect, is a show for cowboy dreamer dumb-dumbs.
For our purposes though… who cares.
I’m leaving the TV special behind now. I love it so much, but I need us to talk more about the music.
Okay?
I need this.
Because the music is nothing less than magic.
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When Sol Weiss popped that record button on that autumn day in San Fran in 1964, there was no way that either him or Vince Guaraldi (who was in the studio to lay down a single track he’d just written for the Schulz documentary) could have known what was coming.
This is something that I like to think about.
On YouTube there is a short video shot in noir-ish black and white that purportedly shows the seldom filmed jazz genius with Weiss himself. The men are side by side in the Fantasy recording studios/ each looking fairly average, like common lads of the American ‘60’s. It is ghostly in a way, this clip is, to see footage of men such as these two when so little footage actually exists.
But it does offer up a possible (if not probable) glimpse into the single day session not long after the footage was shot when they cut a new original of Guaraldi’s called Linus and Lucy.
It was the song that Guaraldi had woken Mendelson up to listen to on the phone.
It is a song that has come to live in rarified air reserved for cultural titans. Alongside Babe Ruth moving his giant body on spindly legs around the bases in glitchy black and white/ alongside the silence of the footage of the boys in the U-boats heading for Omaha Beach/ alongside JFK going down in the backseat of the Caddy/ alongside the first Hammond notes of Freebird/ alongside the druggy kick of the fat hitting your bloodstream with the first McDonald’s fries down your hatch/ alongside the portraits of Frederick Douglass and the poems of Emily Dickinson and Hank Williams’ wry smile and Lincoln’s marble unshot head and Martin Luther King’s deep evocative unshot voice/ alongside the things that we have selected as a people, without ever really knowing what we were even doing, Linus and Lucy is just as fitting a lead off track to the soundtrack of our collective existence as any song that has ever been written.
Everything about it is familiar to us.
We were born knowing its every weaving note.
In many ways, it is a song that- should we remove it from our systems, systematically, like with a surgeon’s scalpel and maybe a laser beam, we would just as likely feel tremendous loss when we came to. Then, not knowing what exactly has been taken from us, we would likely panic/ set upon by some kind of intense demons that feed on us sensing a thing we don’t really quite fathom.
I don’t know. Maybe that’s a bit overzealous of me to imagine things that way.
Or maybe it’s exactly what would happen if that song was erased from the little icy skating pond in our ribs where it’s been playing for a long time now.
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Writing about music is obtuse and sort of self-defeating in a way. You probably can’t do it well and I know damn well that I can’t. A few have managed to make a living at it but, between you and me, I am not entirely convinced that any of them ever said much at all. It’s a matter of opinion, of course, all of this trying to explain the inexplicable. It’s a necessary evil in the same way that reading a menu seems odd as smells from the kitchen swirl up your nose.
One is always searching.
One is forever already there.
Still, I have no recourse here since I started this whole wander down into Vince Guaraldi’s Christmas record. I have to just come at it the same as anyone else would: I write some words and hope they will connect with you about the music I’m talking about. But also, beyond that hopefully, I close my eyes and hope that it’s in the space beyond the words where we truly meet; out back the vessel itself/ behind the language/ where people smoke in silence beneath the crystal clean stars/ that’s my dream for connecting with you about this.
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What has always stuck me the most about the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s 1965 soundtrack to ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ is the space.
The air.
The sound of the atmosphere that was recorded by the men in the room at the time.
I don’t know how intentional it was, although I do know that it does appear, at least in places and to varying degrees, in Guaraldi’s earlier recorded work. That alone is enough to indicate that the musician was behind something related to what I’m referring to. Recording studios are strange places for almost anyone who ventures into one. But head into one with the intention of playing your own music so it can be captured for eternity (or at least for now) and you experience a whole different place than the person who is there to record you. Or just to watch you record while they smoke cigarettes or drink a soda or look at the pictures on the control room walls, only half interested, the dim lighting and the comfortable couch all lulling them to sleep as you, the artist/ the musician/ the person trying to make magic happen/ struggle with your incessant B.O. and your flipping-out heart and your weird nervous excitement that sometimes doubles as joy but more often presents as stone cold dread.
In my own experience, as someone who wasn’t very good in a recording studio as a musician or as a witness, I fucking hated the places mostly.
But they were a must and remains so today. No recording studios means no music, more or less. I mean, you can also substitute bedrooms and such for recording studios nowadays but you know what I mean, right?
Vince Guaraldi was probably something of an anxious uncertain when he first showed up to record the music for the soundtrack to ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’. At some point he developed a bad cocaine habit, so it’s possible that he was wired in that way even way back then, but again, I can’t say for certain. I doubt it somehow. This music, these songs, they seem too pure somehow to be tainted by dope. But then again, Ive always been a sucker for making things up so the music sounds even better.
No matter, Guaraldi and company’s sessions for the Christmas record, happened in two places as far as I can make out. First, they laid down instrumental tracks at a studio in Glendale, California, before eventually making their way into Fantasy's San Fran studio to record the kid’s choral voices that sing all over the album.
Into what facet of the actual recording process someone (Vince?!) attempted to push the wide open slate colored wintery sky right up on the actual music itself is anyone’s guess. There may be someone alive who knows the story. Or maybe someone told it all in some interview or book in the past, I don’t know. Truth is, there are parts of me that do indeed wonder about how and why the brushy snares of certain songs on the record seem to be happening in the middle of so much giant quiet air. At times, and there are many of them, I swear to you that I can somehow hear the sound of rigid silence vibrating all around the actual instruments playing. Do you ever notice it? Other records have occasionally been able to magically include this delicate eerie fragile gossamer sound, but not to the degree that Guaraldi and his bandmates did. Or not in the way that the engineer did. Or whoever did it. I mean, someone must have noticed it, right?
Someone must have been like, “Well, you know, fellas, there’s a nice little layer of creepy mystical atmosphere laying on top everything on the track like fog hanging over the city, don’t you know?”
It had to be Guaraldi, I think.
It had to be him.
Why else would he play with that ghost, allow it to sustain itself upon the empty spaces, to manifest itself in the tremendous soulful vibe of open galaxy that seems to hover over every single note he ever played on this thing? Do you fucking hear it, man, or what??!!
Do you feel the brush dragging along the snare drum like it’s a pine branch blowing in the wind at night on a little frozen pond where no one is around except the ghost of a kid who drowned there one, fell through the ice, a long, long time ago?
If you don’t wonder these things, along with a myriad of other alternating cozy and tragic thoughts, when you listen to all 34 minutes and 53 seconds of the original ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ album, then I don’t know what to think or feel or even say. Am I going mad? Or am I just realizing something that millions of people have always understood? I don’t know. I don’t understand. It’s all so brutal and lovely, like the dead of winter herself.
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It’s been some time now since my tastes sort of shifted. The younger me/ the young kid/ and then the young man who stood up/ early on/ to stare at my own skin in the changing hues of barroom neon that came burning off of rock-n-roll/ he is gone now.
In his place is a less switchbladey lad. I’m older, way older. Without giving away too much, I don’t mind telling you that I will probably need to lay down here soon to grab a little nap. Do you understand where I’m coming form? If you don’t, well, fair enough, I suppose. I smile your way and tip my hat. Either you’re young and strong and out upon the old roads I once traveled OR you’re a middle-aged rocker who looks like some version of Alice Cooper at the grocery store.
Okay, maybe that’s too harsh. But music brings out the worst in us just as often as it brings out the best, doesn’t it? When we think long and hard about it: what pisses us off more than people liking absolute shit music? Or people who don’t understand or even recognize that we (meaning me and: I don’t know: maybeeee possiblyyyyyy you) have given birth to our present musical tastes and standards via years and years of intensely rigid research and snobbery.
So this 52-year-old former rock/rolla who now loves bebop jazz and a little bit of classic country and a few songs by John Frusciante and a couple by Bob Seger and all the songs by Bruce Springsteen and one by the Beastie Boys and also Indian sitar stuff and some classical stuff if it sounds like crows in a cornfield or me being killed (quite gloriously, of course) at the Battle of Gettysburg: he isn’t to be doubted when he (meaning I) talks about some kind of snowy cloud of late afternoon December tenderness that some west coast Italian-American piano player pulled out of his maestro ass over half a century ago, is he??!
Am I???!!
What the hell is happening there in the seemingly small and orchestrated moment that exists when the final wavering notes of the kids singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ turns into the standard silence between songs as track 8 ends and before track 9, ‘Christmas is Coming’, begins… everything just hung out there in space/ real life midnight snowy woods cold clear space/ the kids’ voices lingering for an instant in the part of your brain that holds things even after they’re gone/ until the moment when Guaraldi’s piano appears in a rolling set of bass notes just standing there in place/ the bouncing bottom-ish density of something about to unfold itself into our space. The high hat taps. The bass dragging us slowly over the crest of the dark bright snowy hill onto a spill of melody tumbling down towards a field and a wood line off in the distance.
And then we are sledding!
I am speeding!
Movement!
Love!
Transfixed and elated!
My entire being transformed, so brilliantly, into a child again!
Young again! At Christmas, nonetheless!!
Do you hear it?? Oh, can’t you hear the sound of all that vibrating expanse?! Of that stretching blanket before us?! That velvety land which makes no sound but roars with the tones of an ocean around the bend!!??
I don’t know who Vince Guaraldi was or how he was born or what dropped him dead one day when he was only 48 years of age. I only know that he played some music once that remains one of the best records ever recorded. Not just for Christmas/ not just for a TV show/ not just for once a year/ and not just to be labeled a ‘soundtrack’ like some kind of fucking product or whatever. This guy, this piano jazz guy, he was something very, very special indeed. And this music, this Charlie Brown Christmas album, it makes me deranged with joy/ unhinged by the release of so much feeling into my body at once. Everything about it, from the transcendent hissing of the absolute void wrapping each song in its wings like some angel mama saving us all, to the kids singing spectacularly and perfectly off-key at precisely the right places and times, to the church basement upright piano notes that literally must have held Vince Guaraldi together like bones/ his every sparse note made sparser by his use of air/ his every cluster of notes made a rough beautiful little street gang by his old lady fingers/ everything he did/ on this record/ seemingly touched by some sort of spiritual ether designed to lift us all/ bless our soiled hearts/ out of the darkness and into the light/ if only for a few ephemeral moments, as the music unfolds and the season teases and here comes the sound of the universe sighing after school.
If you are reading this, I appreciate you. Thanks for stopping by. And thank you for your support of Thunder Pie. If you don’t feel like paying me for my writing work yet, no worries. But if you’d like to, I’d be very grateful.
I hope you and your family are having a good holiday season so far. See you next Friday.
Serge
Thunder Pie is Edited by Arle Bielanko
Photos: SB, except Vince Guaraldi Trio from internet.
Email: sergebielanko@gmail.com
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Things I Loved This Week.
‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ soundtrack. Just turn it on and let it do it’s thing.
I found this short video clip from 1963. It features Vince Guaraldi in the Fantasy Records recording studio in San Francisco with Sol Weiss, co-founder of the label. To me, it is kind of ghosty and eerie. Maybe because there’s not much candid footage of Guaraldi out there that I’ve come across. YouTube really delivers magic sometimes.
In honor of my birthday this past Tuesday, Arle donated some beer money to one of my absolute favorite YouTubers, Steve Wallis from Camping with Steve. And when you do that: he lists your little message at the end of one of his stealth camping videos. So I got to be surprised by the one Arle secretly set up and it really made me happy. You can catch it on this video (around 19:45).
I listened to a short podcast from the New York Times featuring writer, Calum Marsh, reading his article ‘For Florida Vibes, Grand Theft Auto VI Turned to Tom Petty’. It fascinated me because it’s all about a game my son Henry loves meeting an old Tom Petty deep cut that I always loved. Check it out.
My step-kids Milla and Piper each made me some homemade Christmas ornaments and surprised me with them on my birthday this week. Milla’s came with a homemade card that was freakin’ mega too. If you have a blended family then you might understand just how super cool it feels when your step-kids show up for you like that. It really made my day. I love them a lot.
The version of ‘Fairytale of New York’ that was performed by a bunch of incredible musicians at Shane McGowan’s funeral was truly special. It was like something out of folklore/ something that could never actually occur in real time besides the actual rustic Irish coffin of a tried and true legend’s dead body. It was a sublime couple of minutes / you should give it a go.
I started decorating for Christmas. We don’t have a tree yet. I don’t feel the rush to do all this by any timeline anymore. My Pop-Pop used to insist that the tree go up on Christmas Eve. Even the idea of putting it up on Christmas Eve afternoon made him a little pissy. Haha. Maybe it’s just me being me. Maybe the more modern people are putting the tree up super early/ the more I want to put it up on New Year’s Eve.
For over 20 years now I have listened to only 2 Xmas CDs...
Guaraldi's, which is absolute magic....we put it on repeat on Christmas morning as the kids are diving into their gifts....
...and Elvis....where the king leers the immortal line...."Well, you be a reeeeaaaal good little baby
Santa Claus is back in town.....", sounding hilariously filthy......
The space between the notes is my favorite- I love how it takes its time, but doesn't overstay its welcome. My kid has been playing double bass for almost four years and I have been absolutely WAITING for him to get to this music. He's not used to the timing because he's used to orchestra, but knows it so well from us playing it every year. It is pretty cool :)