{"id":974194,"date":"2019-12-27T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-27T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/uncategorized\/uncategorized-news\/a-charlie-brown-christmas-at-50-the-making-of-a-classic-soundtrack-233002\/"},"modified":"2019-12-27T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-12-27T19:00:00","slug":"a-charlie-brown-christmas-the-making-of-a-classic-soundtrack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/music-news\/a-charlie-brown-christmas-the-making-of-a-classic-soundtrack\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A Charlie Brown Christmas\u2019: The Making of a Classic Soundtrack"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story was originally published on December 9, 2015<\/em><\/p>\n

The legend goes like this: In 1963, producer Lee Mendelson made a documentary about Peanuts<\/em> cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, for which he needed music. One night, Mendelson was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, tuned into a San Francisco jazz station. \u201cCast Your Fate to the Wind\u201d came on the air, a drifting cut where melodies appear and then disappear, and bouncing elation is matched by tiny moments of despair. The track was pianist Vince Guaraldi\u2019s mini-hit that year, and Mendelson was struck by how it sounded simultaneously adult and childlike. The next day, he called up the San Francisco Chronicle<\/em>\u2018s jazz critic, Ralph J. Gleason. \u201cDo you have any idea in the world who Vince Guaraldi is?\u201d Mendelson asked. \u201cYes, as a matter of fact, I\u2019m having lunch with him tomorrow,\u201d Gleason said. Mendelson met Guaraldi a few days later, and they agreed to work together.<\/p>\n

The documentary ultimately didn\u2019t sell. But two years later, Coca-Cola, who had seen the doc, called up Mendelson, and asked if he\u2019d ever thought of making a Christmas<\/a> special. Mendelson said, \u201cAbsolutely!\u201d and hung up the phone, then called Mr. Schulz. As Mendelson remembers it: \u201cI said, \u2018I think I just sold A Charlie Brown<\/a> Christmas<\/em>.\u2019 And Schulz said, \u2018What in the world is that?\u2019 And I said, \u2018It\u2019s something you\u2019re going to write tomorrow.\u2019 There was a long pause, and he said, \u2018Alright. Come on up.’\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The rest, of course, is history. A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em> aired 50 years ago, on December 9th, 1965. Over the years, the special has become a perennial classic: the 25-minute story of wistful Charlie Brown and his struggle to find the true meaning of Christmas in the face of holiday-season commercialism. \u201cI almost wish there weren\u2019t a holiday season,\u201d he sighs, at the story\u2019s beginning. \u201cI know nobody likes me. Why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?\u201d The genius of A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em> was the way it channeled the looming sadness and anxiety that come with the holidays \u2014 and the way its timeless, best-selling soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio tapped into that narrative seamlessly, with muted, melancholic jazz.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Popular on Rolling Stone <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Indeed, to create such an unabashedly anti-consumerist story with the backing of both Coca-Cola and CBS was a subtly radical accomplishment in 1965, as it would be now.  The executives at CBS were displeased with the finished product: its slow-moving animation, its religious undertone, its jazz soundtrack. They had no choice but to air it, though \u2014 they had already advertised it in TV Guide<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey wanted something corporate, something rousing,\u201d says drummer Jerry Granelli, the lone surviving member of the Guaraldi combo. \u201cThey thought the animation was too slow. They really didn\u2019t like that a little kid was going to come out and say what Christmas was all about, which wasn\u2019t about shopping. And then the jazz music, which was improvised \u2014 you know, the melodies only take up maybe 30 seconds.\u201d Yet A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em> was an immediate, massive success.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The first of many specials that Schulz and Guaraldi would collaborate on with Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez, A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em> came together in just six months. \u201cWe brought Vince Guaraldi in to reprise the music he had done for the documentary, plus some Beethoven and some traditional music,\u201d Mendelson says. <\/span><\/p>\n

Employing his background in easygoing, West Coast jazz, and working with a local children\u2019s choir that sounded perfectly off-key at times, Guaraldi crafted future classics through original compositions and re-arrangements of holiday standards. Like the characters themselves, the songs merge bits of Schroeder\u2019s bookish sophistication, Charlie Brown\u2019s heavy heart, and Snoopy\u2019s unpredictable mischief. The songs are both smooth and snappy, with Granelli\u2019s brush and stick sounds pushing them steadily along. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"Vince<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went in and did it in three hours,\u201d recalls Granelli, who was only 24 at the time. \u201cThat\u2019s just the way jazz records were recorded. I think we even went to work in a club that night.\u201d Some of the songs were already part of the group\u2019s repertoire. \u201cWe were improvising all the time, so each night, the song kind of evolved.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The trio\u2019s version of the 1824 German carol \u201cO Tannenbaum\u201d exemplifies this process. Guaraldi, Granelli and bassist Fred Marshall took the song\u2019s harmonic foundation and ran, moving the composition into more explosive, bluesy territory. In the special, the song plays as Charlie Brown and Linus look around for a Christmas tree. \u201cThis doesn\u2019t seem to fit the modern spirit,\u201d says Linus, when Charlie Brown picks out the smallest, most dilapidated one he can find. The funny sound of flat piano keys chirp as the tree\u2019s twigs fall to the ground.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLinus and Lucy\u201d was one of the holdovers from the Schulz-documentary days; in A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em>, it is the centerpiece of the soundtrack, capturing a moment when inner anxieties subside and the season feels fleetingly fine. \u201cMy playing is really very simple on that record, but it\u2019s exactly what captures the story,\u201d says Granelli. \u201cIt moves the music forward doing very little. Just the way the brush starts on \u2018Linus and Lucy,\u2019 so it doesn\u2019t conflict with the bass line, and then it goes to the Latin part, and then it goes back to the left hand, the conga drum part.\u201d
<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cChristmas Time Is Here\u201d was originally an all-instrumental piece. \u201cGuaraldi had written a very beautiful melody for the opening skating scene, but about two weeks before it was about to run on the air, I thought, \u2018Maybe we could get a lyricist to put some words to this,’\u201d remembers Mendelson. \u201cI called a few lyricist friends of mine, and everyone was busy. So I sat down at my kitchen table and I wrote out a few words, and we rushed it to the choir that Vince Guaraldi had been working with in San Francisco. And he recorded it, and we got it into the show about a week before it went on the air.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThey really didn\u2019t like that a little kid was going to come out and say what Christmas was all about, which wasn\u2019t about shopping.\u201d \u2014Jerry Granelli<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s deceptively simple, but at the same time, impressively complex, kind of the way Charles Schulz approached his newspaper strip,\u201d says Derrick Bang, author of Vince Guaraldi at the Piano<\/em> and multiple books on Peanuts<\/em>, of Guaraldi\u2019s soundtrack.<\/em> \u201cHe never wasted a line; Guaraldi never wasted a note. Every note was important.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re living in times where so much is done to manipulate us,\u201d reflects Granelli. \u201cAnd things last for, what, a news cycle? A few minutes? This [album] is something that\u2019s lasted 50 years. And not only lasted, but grown \u2026 I think there\u2019s just a humanness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole thing from beginning to end has been surreal,\u201d Mendelson says. \u201cThe fact that it\u2019s become such a permanent part of the holiday season is surreal. And every time I hear it on the radio, or I hear it in a store, or someone says, \u2018wah, wah, wah,\u2019 I realize we\u2019re very lucky to have been associated with Mr. Schulz and his characters. It all comes back to his characters, and his philosophy, and his humor.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story was originally published on December 9, 2015 The legend goes like this: In 1963, producer Lee Mendelson made a documentary about Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, for which he needed music. One night, Mendelson was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, tuned into a San Francisco jazz station. \u201cCast Your Fate to the Wind\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-974194","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-27 04:55:51","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KFMU Solar Powered Radio","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=974194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/974194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=974194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=974194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kfmu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=974194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}