Charlie Brown's All Stars!

       The special Charlie Brown’s All Stars! was written and created by Charles Schulz, and animated, directed and produced by Bill Melendez and executive produced by my father Lee Mendelson in 1966, right on the heels of the release of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Just as they had done the prior year, they rushed to get the special out in time for the summer and baseball season, and of course, Vince Guaraldi scored the special.

       CBS television first broadcast the show on June 8, 1966. But since it is not tied to a holiday, it was not always broadcast again annually, like Christmas, Great Pumpkin, Thanksgiving, or many of the other specials. But it was our father’s favorite. He thought this was so fun, and exciting, from the opening chase of the baseball to Snoopy’s surfing, to the rained-out chance for Charlie Brown to win. Our dad thought they were able to do all the things they couldn’t do in Christmas, because they had some more time, and also they had the success of Christmas now behind them. And this, in turn, led to the success of It‘s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

       The special truly captures what Charles Schulz always wanted people to feel about his characters: They are just like all of us. Charlie Brown never wins the game, he rarely catches the ball, but he keeps trying. I learned this all too well when I voiced Peppermint Patty on This is America Charlie Brown: the NASA Space Station in 1988, when I said in reference to Charlie Brown, “Well, you know. He doesn't always do the right thing. And I can still strike him out on three pitches…[but] I gotta hand it to him. He keeps on trying. He doesn't give up. Just keeps plugging away ...” And that is what this is all about.

       I love the special, and I love the music that Guaraldi makes for it here. At only 8 minutes, this is the shortest soundtrack we have released to date. We have not yet found the original session tapes, but we combined the several songs Guaraldi laid down on the master show-reel to present this tight, quick set of medleys from the special, and let you enjoy this wonderful baseball-themed score now celebrating its 60th anniversary.

       With horns ablaze and excitement after the success of A Charlie Brown Christmas, Guaraldi delivered an old-timey jazz score perfectly suited for 1966’s Charlie Brown’s All Stars! He led his sextet through an abbreviated recording session on May 13th, 1966, at San Francisco’s Sound Recorders. Because we haven’t located the original music source tapes, as we have done for so many of Guaraldi’s other Peanuts scores, the not-quite-as-high fidelity sound pulled from the show master further emphasizes the score’s old-timey sound. This abbreviated soundtrack allows us to show Guaraldi and Peanuts fans just how fortunate we are, to have found so many of the other original music tapes, restored to the highest fidelity for our listening pleasure.

       Going from Christmas to All Stars, Guaraldi increased his band to a sextet, with Jon Coppola and Frank Snow taking care of the horn section. He also brought in guitarist Eddie Duran, who had played with Guaraldi since the 1950s, and who maintained a professional relationship throughout the pianist’s career. Lastly, his mid-60s trio crew was on hand: Puzzy Firth on bass, and Lee Charlton on drums. Charlton, the last remaining sideman from that era, joined Guaraldi when Bola Sete was on hand to play guitar.

       All Stars is chock full of classic Guaraldi themes, such as “Oh, Good Grief!” (track A4), “Surfin’ Snoopy (Air Music)” (track A5) and “Pebble Beach” (track A6). The cues fade in and out, during the course of the show. The only other Guaraldi score that operates this way is its predecessor, 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. Since we pulled the music from the show masters, our soundtrack similarly fades in and out. In the case of “Baseball Theme” (track A3), recorded as one cue and then cut up into myriad uses within the special, we stitched it back together into one track.

       When we interviewed drummer Lee Charlton on March 1st, 2022, he had clear memories of playing with Vince during this period. “It was very smooth,” he said. “Vince didn't show a lot of technique, but his touch was just beautiful.” Charlton — who has played with Ellis Marsalis, Wynton Kelly and Tom Waits — added, “I enjoyed the time playing with Vince, because he was a really good player. He reminded me of Wynton Kelly. It was a lot of fun.”

       Charlton also had thoughts regarding Guaraldi’s legacy. “Vince will be looked at as a good composer… especially on the Christmas album. Every Christmas, his songs are played. Even I love it.” Watching Charlton perk up, while being transported 60 years into the past, was a delight. When we played “Oh, Good Grief” for him, he immediately started singing along with the melody.

       It’s amazing how this music defies time, because of its ability to bring us right back to a seemingly forgotten moment, while also focusing on the feeling it evokes in the present.

       As 1965 gave way to ’66, Vince Guaraldi was riding high.
A Charlie Brown Christmas was a smash ratings hit, when it debuted on December 9: the second-most popular television show that week, trailing only Bonanza. Its 45 percent ratings share was even more significant: That meant 45 percent of the people watching television during that half-hour had tuned in to see Charlie Brown and his woeful little tree. Most reviews of the special heaped considerable praise on Guaraldi’s score, and the show’s soundtrack album — which had hit stores on December 4 — was flying off the shelves.

       “Theme to Grace”/“Humbly I Adore Thee,” a 45 single Fantasy Records had released on November 27 to promote the album Vince Guaraldi at Grace Cathedral, also received considerable radio play during the holiday season and into the New Year.

       The Vince Guaraldi/Bola Sete Quartet, accompanied by bassist Eugene “Puzzy” Firth and drummer Paul Distel, still was one of the most popular acts in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Their booking at El Matador, from December 20 through January 16, saw eager fans waiting in lines that wrapped around the building.

       “He was the first guy who turned me on to lighting,” Distel explained, during a 2010 interview. “When we’d go on stage — Yamaha used to sponsor him for his pianos — at college concerts, whatever, there’d be this big beautiful Yamaha piano, with a little sign that said ‘Donated by Yamaha.’ It’d be almost black on the stage, except for the little light on the piano, and then we’d move into our instruments. Then they’d put a pin light on him and his hands, and he’d do a little fifth thing, with this pin light on him. Then we’d come in, and — pow, pow — a blue light would hit me, and a red one would hit Puzzy.

       “Vince used lighting and ambiance really well.”

       Guaraldi, Firth and Distel reprised the Grace Cathedral Jazz Mass on January 23 at Marin County’s Church in Ignacio, an “experimental ministry” headed by Charles Gompertz, and set in a shopping center building that resembled a multi-purpose room.

       “It was designed to attract people in ways that traditional churches weren’t,” Gompertz explained. “It was innovative, and it worked pretty well; we went from nobody to about 300 parishioners in a year.”

       The church itself, and its reprisal of the Grace Cathedral Mass, became the subject of an episode of KPIX-TV Channel 5’s public affairs show, In the Marketplace. (The show didn’t air until September 6.)

       “We got our 15 minutes of fame there,” Distel recalled, with obvious fondness. “It sounded fantastic. Vince’s music fit so well in that setting. It was very nice, because they had a 125-piece young people’s choir. They were really, really good!”

       Sete, eager to head his own combo, bid farewell to Guaraldi on February 7. Just a few weeks later, he was fronting his own trio at the Trident, in Sausalito, accompanied by bassist Sebastian Neto and drummer Paulinho Magalhães. Not wanting to lose the cool bossa nova sound that had been enhanced by Sete, Guaraldi quickly replaced him with guitarist Jorge Morel.

       On March 8, Guaraldi got an unusual scoring assignment from Lee Mendelson: An Adventure with Spice Islands, a short industrial film produced for the Leslie Salt Company’s Spice Islands brand, for public relations, educational and sales purposes. The amusingly stereotypical “storyline” followed a “typical housewife” who discovers Spice Island herbs and spices during her efforts to become a better cook.

       Guaraldi brought in Eddie Duran (guitar), Firth (bass) and Pete Magadini (drums) for the single studio session. Dr. Funk’s primary theme was a laid-back, piano-driven bossa nova melody that evoked white sand beaches more than kitchen spices: a charming composition that deserved greater exposure than it would get from this in-house corporate project. No surprise, then, that Guaraldi would resurrect the tune on a future album.

       When the annual BMI Awards were presented on April 12, honoring songwriters for success in the field of popular music during the 1965 calendar year, Guaraldi received another Citation of Achievement for “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.”

       The following day, Bay Area newspapers reported that Guaraldi had sued Fantasy Records, in an effort to sever all relationships with the label. Fantasy promptly counter-sued. This had been building for several months, starting when Guaraldi arrived for an appointment at San Rafael’s law offices of Rockwell, Fulkerson & Clarke back on December 6. The resulting back-and-forth stream of depositions, complaints, cross-complaints and just-plain-bickering would continue for two years, until the twin lawsuits were dissolved in Guaraldi’s favor on December 27, 1967. Trying to put all this out of his mind, while maintaining his performance career, must’ve been a nightmare.

       But — as the theater adage insists — the show must go on.

       Indeed, Guaraldi had been thinking about the next Peanuts special even before A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted on television.

       Although numerous sources claim that Mendelson was contracted for additional shows only after the holiday special was a hit, that simply isn’t true. Back on October 21, 1965, San Mateo Times television columnist Bob Foster — in a short plug for the upcoming Christmas special — also noted that “[Coca-Cola] must be pretty happy with having been sold the first half-hour special in history. This week they completed a deal with Lee for him to produce a baseball special for next June.” On December 10, newspapers across the country noted, in their reviews of Peanuts’ TV debut, that “The program, A Charlie Brown Christmas, was referred to by CBS-TV as ‘The first of a planned series of Charlie Brown holiday specials.’ ”

       One detail not immediately specified was the next special’s title. When Mendelson and Bill Melendez took out a trade ad shortly after Christmas aired, laden with laudatory quotes from Time Magazine and nine other publications, Snoopy carried a sign that read “See you on CBS-TV June 8th for Charlie Brown’s Baseball Special.” A short piece in the December 16 San Francisco Chronicle claimed that “The next Peanuts special will be televised in color on June 8 and will be titled Good Grief Charlie Brown, a baseball show.”

       But by the time Guaraldi entered San Francisco’s Sound Recorder studios to lay down the show’s score, on May 13, 1966, everybody knew it would be called Charlie Brown’s All-Stars! Guaraldi fronted a sextet for this sophomore special; he was joined by Frank Snow and John Coppola (trumpets), Duran (guitar), Firth (bass) and Lee Charlton (drums).

       Guaraldi decided to freshen up some of the selections from A Charlie Brown Christmas and 1964’s never-aired A Boy Named Charlie Brown documentary. “Pebble Beach” (track A6) and “Baseball Theme” (track A3) fit the bill nicely, with the latter benefiting from perky trumpet highlights and a feisty swing bridge. Guaraldi re-cast “Oh, Good Grief” (track A4) as a slow, bluesy, New Orleans-style strut with lots of improv keyboard work. He also wrote some new cues.

       The story opens as poor Charlie Brown makes an impossible dash to catch a high fly ball, dodging various obstacles and even running into and out of a house, backed along the way by a smokin’ percussive theme titled “Charlie’s Run” (track A1), played solely by bass and drums. Guaraldi followed this with the show’s fleeting title theme (track A2): a doleful little melody punctuated by brief trumpet fanfares, which follows poor Chuck as he morosely leaves the field, having dropped the aforementioned fly ball.

       Later, when Snoopy grabs an orange surfboard and charges into a children’s plastic wading pool, he rides the waves to a buoyant composition dubbed “Surfin’ Snoopy” (track A5) — a new title given a piece Guaraldi original called “Air Music” — which boasts Firth’s cool walking bass. The most sweetly lyrical newcomer is a soft jazz waltz titled “Rain, Rain, Go Away” (track A7), inserted in the final act, as Charlie Brown stands atop the pitcher’s mound amid a downpour, insisting that “a little rain never hurt anybody” ... while Snoopy zooms past on the same surfboard. No surprise: a longer, more sumptuous arrangement of “Rain, Rain, Go Away” would be featured a few years later, on 1968’s Oh, Good Grief!, Guaraldi’s debut album for Warner Bros.

       Folks who’ve not watched this special since it originally aired will be surprised to discover that “Linus and Lucy” isn’t part of the score. At this point, the song hadn’t yet become an essential element of these specials, so Guaraldi didn’t feel obliged to repeat it. (Perhaps with encouragement from Mendelson, Guaraldi would grant “Linus and Lucy” showplace status later that year, during the opening moments of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown ... after which it would become permanently fixed in the public consciousness as “the Peanuts song.”)

       Much more intriguingly, a portion of “Surfin’ Snoopy” was “borrowed” for another purpose.

       A Charlie Brown Christmas had been a rush job, and Mendelson and Melendez were unhappy with many of the visible animation errors; they also felt that some scenes needed to be tightened and/or clarified. CBS and Coca-Cola agreed to front some money, so they could tidy things up. The changes are significant: brief new animated scenes — such as the close-up of Lucy’s fingers, when she counts, “One, two, three, four, five” — a bit of new dialogue here and there, smoother edits between scenes ... and a lot more music.

       The jiggling and shuffling of the existing Charlie Brown Christmas cues aside, the most notable change was the inclusion of four more pieces of music. Three of them — “Charlie Brown Theme,” “Happiness Theme” and “Frieda (with the Naturally Curly Hair)” — were resurrected from the 1964 documentary.

       The key detail was the fourth new tune: the aforementioned “Surfin’ Snoopy,” inserted to back the 35-second sequence when Snoopy decorates his doghouse. (A close examination of the versions in Christmas and All Stars, via digital overlay, reveals that they are indeed the same piece of music.)

       The clincher: Guaraldi’s copyright deposit for “Air Music,” filed with the U.S. Library of Congress, is dated May 20, 1966, consistent with its actual debut in All Stars.

       Consider what this means: The version of A Charlie Brown Christmas that everybody has watched for decades, whether via TV reruns, VHS tapes, DVDs, Blu-rays or streaming options, is not what viewers saw on December 9, 1965!

       Charlie Brown’s All Stars! debuted on June 8, not quite a month after Guaraldi’s combo laid down the score. A few weeks later, on June 25, the industry publication Cashbox — in a lengthy appreciation of the show — noted that “Guaraldi is now in the process of filing suit against the Fantasy label. As a result, there are no plans at this time to release the soundtrack from All Stars. We hear that Charlie Brown will be seen about four times each year on television. Tho’ CBS and Coke would like to go weekly, Schulz is unwilling to saturate the tube with the world’s greatest failure.”

       (Four times a year?!? Weekly?!?!?! Thank goodness saner heads prevailed!)
Although Guaraldi likely couldn’t get that lawsuit out of his mind, his spirits certainly were lifted when California-born singer Shelby Flint released a cover of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” in early August. It charted on Billboard’s Hot 100 for six weeks, peaking at No. 61 on September 17.

       By then, of course, Guaraldi already was thinking about Great Pumpkin.

       As had been the case with A Charlie Brown Christmas, both Charlie Brown’s All Stars! and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown were nominated for Emmy Awards in the category of Outstanding Children’s Program. The double nominations likely split the vote, because when the awards were presented on June 4, 1967, both Peanuts shows lost to Hanna/Barbera’s live action/animation production of Jack and the Beanstalk, starring and directed by Gene Kelly.

       Happily, history always has the final judgment. The two Peanuts specials have become iconic American traditions, whereas Kelly’s Jack and the Beanstalk quickly faded into obscurity.