The inspiration for Lucy was Schulz’s wife, Joyce.5 They ultimately divorced in 1972, but although she was a hard-ass, she also pushed the shy Schulz and made him ambitious enough to create a multimedia and merchandising empire out of his drawing studio that earned him thirty to forty million dollars a year, all by drawing a strip a day for fifty years, without an assistant.
Schulz’s alter egos were, alternately, the beleaguered Charlie Brown, the thoughtful Linus (who needed his security blanket despite his wisdom), the consumed Schroeder (his piano a stand-in for Schulz’s drawing board), and the confident, whimsical Snoopy.
In 1963, producer Lee Mendelson approached Schulz to make a documentary on him.
We’ve just done a show on the world’s greatest baseball player … why not do one on the world’s worst baseball player, Charlie Brown?… He was very cordial but … he just wanted to focus on doing the comic strip at that time. I asked him if he happened to have seen the Willie Mays special on NBC-TV, and he said he had. “I really liked the show. Willie is a hero of mine. Why do you ask?” I told him I had produced the show and wanted to do something similar with him. There was a long pause, and then he said: “Well maybe we should at least meet. If Willie can trust you with his life, maybe I can do the same. But I can’t promise anything.”6
They made the documentary and called it A Boy Named Charlie Brown. (The title was later recycled, at the end of the decade, for the first Charlie Brown feature film.) Once it was in the can, Mendelson needed music. He was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when he heard the bossa nova–style “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” on the radio. Mendelson called San Francisco Chronicle jazz writer Ralph Gleason and asked him who had done the song. Gleason referred him to the song’s composer, Vince Guaraldi, a.k.a. “Dr. Funk.” The song had been a cut on his album Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus, a collection of songs inspired by the classic feature film about the Orpheus myth set in Rio de Janeiro during Carnival. “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” won the Grammy for Best Original Jazz Composition, and then Sounds Orchestral covered it and scored a Top 20 pop hit. Mendelson and Guaraldi spoke; then Guaraldi called him back two weeks later to play him a musical idea over the phone. Mendelson didn’t want to hear it that way, but Guaraldi insisted he had to play it or he’d forget it. “Linus and Lucy” became the Peanuts theme song—and a jazz standard.
In May, Mendelson convinced Coca-Cola to sponsor A Charlie Brown Christmas special, and CBS gave it the green light. Schulz wasn’t a fan of jazz, but he agreed that Guaraldi’s music worked, so they brought him back. To animate the special, Schulz wanted to use Bill Melendez, who had worked on Disney films going back to Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi, as well as many Bugs Bunny/Looney Toons cartoons. Melendez had already brought the Peanuts characters to life when Schulz licensed them to Ford commercials from 1959 to 1965. (Though Schulz decried commercialism, he also licensed his characters to Dolly Madison and Met Life.) Schulz trusted Melendez because he rendered the characters just as they were in the strip, though the ads are disconcerting when viewed today because Linus has a Brooklyn accent.
The previous year’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer showed that holiday specials could break the mold, with its story about misfits (including an elf who doesn’t want to make toys but would rather be a dentist) who stop the abominable snow monster and save Christmas. A fable about the value of nonconformity, it is narrated by Burl Ives, who was blacklisted for being “Red,” a Communist sympathizer.
Though Schulz’s hero was known for being “wishy-washy,” the 2008 biography Schulz and Peanuts reveals that, when it came to his art, his creator was not. In a meeting with Schulz, Mendelson pushed for a laugh track on the Peanuts special, since, he said, all comedy shows had them:
“Well, this one won’t. Let the people at home enjoy the show at their own speed, in their own way.”
Then [Schulz] rose and walked out, closing the door behind him.
Mendelson, shocked, turned to Melendez. “What was that all about?”
“I guess,” replied Melendez, “that means we’re not having a laugh track!”7
If the lack of a laugh track was upsetting, Schulz dropped a bomb when he informed the producers that Linus would recite the Gospel for one minute. Schulz said, “We can’t avoid it; we have to get the passage of St. Luke in there somehow. Bill, if we don’t do it, who will?”
Even though he hadn’t attended church regularly for the last seven years, Schulz taught a Methodist Sunday school for adults and drew a single strip panel about teenagers called Young Pillars for the Church of God magazine. He tried to avoid the issue, but if asked about church by the press, he said, “I don’t know where to go. Besides, I don’t think God wants to be worshipped. I think the only pure worship of God is by loving one another, and I think all other forms of worship become a substitute for the love that we should show one another.” In his Sunday school classes, he would raise a topic but just listen to people discuss it and not offer his opinion.8
Mendelson made one last push to cut the biblical recitation for the sake of entertainment, but Schulz “just smiled, patted me on the head, and left the room.”
* * *
At the beginning of A Charlie Brown Christmas, the bags around Charlie’s eyes indicate that he is heavily stressed out. “I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess. I might be getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I’m still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.”
He is also disturbed by the over-the-top Christmas decorations on his dog’s house, his little sister’s unbridled greed, and the commercialization of the sacred holiday, echoing the folkies who booed Dylan at Newport. (Wisely, an opening sequence with Snoopy catapulting Linus into a Coca-Cola sign was cut.9)
Psychiatrist Lucy encourages Charlie to direct the school Christmas play to “feel involved” with the holiday, and then instructs him to buy a tree for the show—preferably a pink aluminum one. Instead, Charlie picks out a sickly little natural one, just as Jesus, champion of the weak, would have done. The kids all denounce Charlie for not having picked a good tree.
“Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” he howls.
“Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.” Linus recites the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, verses 8–14, which announces Jesus’ birth. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men. That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
Inspired, Charlie tries to decorate the tree on his own, but the heavy ornaments appear to kill it. Then the rest of the gang uses the decorations from Snoopy’s house and turn Charlie’s wilted sapling into a beautiful tree. Charlie joins them in singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” in the snow under the sparkling stars.
Compared to the gentle standards of today’s children’s programming on Disney Jr. and Nickelodeon, the kids’ cruelty to Charlie and his depression are pretty severe. The CBS executives didn’t like the special; they thought the music was weak and that the kids who performed the voices sounded amateurish. Indeed, most of them were real little kids, not pros, who had to be recorded reading one sentence at a time, with their lines edited together later. But the show was already listed in TV Guide, so CBS honored its commitment to run it. The network just wouldn’t be ordering any sequels.
The special aired on December 9. The execs of little faith were stunned the morning after to see that it brought in a 49 share of the Nielson ratings, meaning half the TVs in the country had tuned in. It was the second-most-watched show that week, behind Bonanza, and the highest-rated Christmas special in history. Variety called it “Fascinating and haunting,” and it won an Emmy and a Peabody.10
“Charlie Brown is not used to winning, so we thank you,” Schulz said when accepting the Emmy.
Schulz vetoed
the idea of polishing the amateur voices and low-budget animation for future rebroadcasts, as these made the show as real and endearing as the little tree. Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown soundtrack would go on to be one of the best-selling holiday albums of all time. The perennial airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas became a unifying bastion of tradition in the face of the culture wars that lay ahead.
* * *
As equally unorthodox as a cartoon character with a security blanket reciting the Bible was a rock band reaching No. 1 with lyrics from the Book of Ecclesiastes, the same week the Peanuts TV special aired.
In the late 1950s, Pete Seeger’s publisher told him he couldn’t sell his protest songs. Angry, Seeger decided to turn some verses from the Bible into a song, and created “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in just fifteen minutes.11 His only original contributions were the title and six words at the end about peace.
That song the publisher easily sold, to the Limeliters and Marlene Dietrich. At the time, Jim McGuinn was in the Limeliters’ backing band, and he arranged the song for Judy Collins to sing on Judy Collins 3.
On the Byrds’ tour bus, when they weren’t playing tapes of Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane, McGuinn’s future wife, Dolores, asked him to play the song on his acoustic, and he jazzed it up with a rock-and-samba beat.12 It took the band seventy-eight takes to get it right13—cracking that snare at the perfect moment would have been tricky even if drummer Clarke hadn’t been a newbie—but at last it was molded into the ultimate single for the holidays.
* * *
Rubber Soul hit stores December 3. The Beatles’ label mate Brian Wilson and some friends listened to it while sitting at a table sharing a joint. Wilson said,
It blew me fucking out. The album blew my mind, because it was a whole album with all good stuff. It was definitely a challenge for me. I saw that every cut was very artistically interesting and stimulating … I suddenly realized that the recording industry was getting so free and intelligent. We could go into new things—string quartets, auto harps, and instruments from another culture. I decided right then: I’m gonna try that, where a whole album becomes a gas. I’m gonna make the greatest rock ’n’ roll album ever made! So I went to the piano thinking, “Goddamn, I feel competitive now” … I said, “Come on. We gotta beat the Beatles.” That was the spirit I had, you know? Carl and I had another prayer session, and we prayed for an album that would be better than Rubber Soul. It was a prayer, but there was also some ego there. We intertwined prayer with a competitive spirit. It worked, and the next album [Pet Sounds] happened immediately.14
Wilson’s usual lyricist, Mike Love, was on tour, so on December 6, Wilson contacted a jingle writer named Tony Asher (born 1938), whom his friend Loren Schwartz knew. Wilson played Asher Rubber Soul and said they had to write material to top it. Asher took a three-week break from his ad agency. Wilson and Asher would talk about their love affairs, then Wilson would tape record brief musical ideas he called “feels,” which he’d play on the piano. “Once they’re out of my head and into the open air, I can see them and touch them firmly. They’re not ‘feels’ anymore.”15 At the end of the day, Asher would take the tapes home and write lyrics for them.
On December 22, a year after his nervous breakdown on the plane to Texas, Wilson was back in the studio working on a song about the “worst trip” he’d ever been on, “Sloop John B.” It was a West Indian folk song about a shipwreck that the Kingston Trio had covered. Jardine had played it for Wilson earlier in the year, trying to convince him that the Beach Boys should cover it. They did, but Wilson didn’t let him sing lead on it. Wilson took the first and third verse for himself and gave the second verse to Love, because he thought Love’s voice was more “commercial.” Hal Blaine slammed the drums as hard as anyone in a year of hard-slamming drummers, and then locked in with Carol Kaye’s bass. To make it folk-rock, Wilson had an electric twelve-string delivered to the studio for Wrecking Crew session guitarist Billy Strange to play; afterward Wilson gave it to him along with an amp and five hundred dollars in cash.16 The sax and flutes melded with the clarinet and organ until all the instruments fell away except the Boys’ vocal polyphony, so you could hear Wilson’s arrangement in all its resplendent glory.
* * *
On December 7, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts finally decided the case of Georgie Porgie, a.k.a. George Leonard Jr., the musician who was suspended indefinitely from Attleboro High School because he wouldn’t cut his hair.
The Court decreed, “We are of the opinion that the unusual hair style of the plaintiff could disrupt and impede the maintenance of a proper classroom atmosphere or decorum. This is an aspect of personal appearance and hence akin to matters of dress. Thus as with any unusual, immodest or exaggerated mode of dress, conspicuous departures from accepted customs in the matter of haircuts could result in the distraction of other pupils.” If schools didn’t have the right to enforce their code, the Court said, they would not be able to handle “unpredictable activities of large groups of children.”17
The ACLU took on a similar long hair high school case in Dallas the following year, and lost as well.18 Leonard never did go back to high school, but continued on as a professional musician.
Johnny Cash also was in court that month. He returned to El Paso on December 28 and pleaded guilty to crossing the Mexican border with 1,143 pills in his luggage. Eventually he’d get off with a thirty-day suspended sentence and a thousand-dollar fine. But the December trip started a new chapter of drama for Cash when a photo taken of him and his wife, Vivian, on the courthouse steps was put to nefarious use by the National States’ Rights Party. They were white supremacists, quasi-Nazis, complete with armbands, and part of the Ku Klux Klan. Their national chairman had served three years for bombing the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In the South, three years was all you got for terrorism if you were white. The party’s newspaper, the Thunderbolt, ran the picture of the Cashes in their January issue with the headline “Arrest Exposes Johnny Cash’s Negro Wife.” The article railed, “Money from the sale of Cash’s records goes to scum like Johnny Cash to keep them supplied with dope and Negro women.” It also called Cash’s children “mongrelized.” When Cash toured the South, the Klan ran newspaper ads reading, “FOR CASH, CALL THIS NUMBER.” The phone number led to a recording that told callers to boycott Cash concerts because the singer was married to a black woman.19
“If there’s a mongrel in the crowd, it’s me, because I’m Irish and one-quarter Cherokee Indian,” Cash snarled.20 Vivian just wanted to ignore the issue, but Cash’s manager, Saul Israel Holiff, worried that the racist southern market would cancel shows, and felt they needed to address the accusation. Holiff sent the Thunderbolt documentation of Vivian’s genealogy, stating that she was Italian, Dutch, and English.21
“How long? Not long!” Martin Luther King Jr. had roared nine months earlier, but the Thunderbolt brouhaha was just one of countless examples showing how far the country still had to go to achieve his dream of racial harmony. The Christmas before, when President Johnson lit the White House tree, he had declared the times to be the most hopeful since Christ was born. For a moment, when King gave his victory speech in Montgomery in March, maybe it was—until Johnson increased the draft call to thirty-five thousand a month in July, and Watts rioted in August. From then on, war and riots cast their pall over the rest of the decade. As the calendar flipped to January 1, 1966, the song at the top of the charts began with an eerie greeting to Darkness, the singer’s old friend.
But in the next spot below Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence,” the Beatles sang that we could work it out. At No. 3, James Brown yowled that he felt good. At No. 4, the Byrds sang that it was not too late for peace.
And there was a new song making its way toward the Top 20, from the fifteen-year-old kid at Motown, Stevie Wonder. They’d told him at the school for the blind that all he’d be able to do in life was make potholders, but he got signed for his harmonica playing, even though Berry
Gordy wasn’t too sold on him.22 The live chart-topper “Fingertips (Part 1 and II)” had him touring nonstop for two years. “How are we supposed to follow him?” everyone else on the Motown Revue cursed. The young Wonder was the mascot at the Motown house, fooling people with his perfect imitation of Gordy over the intercom, getting away with pinching butts, joking he was going to take a car out for a drive.23 He was a permanent fixture in the Snake Pit, where the Funk Brothers recorded. Sometimes he’d burst in while they were taping because he couldn’t see that the red “Recording” light was on, but they wouldn’t have the heart to tell him. He picked up everything he could learn from them, and gave drummer Benny Benjamin the nickname Papa Zita.
But Wonder’s voice had begun to change, and Gordy was thinking it might be time to let him go. He hadn’t had a hit since “Fingertips,” two and a half years before.
Wonder had an idea for a song, something with a beat like “Satisfaction” (in which drummer Charlie Watts imitates Benjamin). Maybe Wonder got the phrase “Uptight” from the line in Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Writer/producers Sylvia Moy and Henry Cosby helped Wonder with the lyrics—about a poor kid who is “Uptight” because his girlfriend is rich; but “Everything’s Alright” because she loves him anyway. When they recorded it, they didn’t have the lyrics in Braille, so Moy whispered each line into Wonder’s ear a beat before he sang it.24
James Jamerson plucked with his right index finger, a.k.a. the Hook, infusing the bass with the same attitude he had when a mugger tried to rob him—Jamerson yanked out his gun from his waistband, pistol-whipped the thief, and took his money.25 Benjamin brought it home for the kid like he was beating “on a bloody tree,” as Lennon had it.26 Things would get a lot more uptight in the next couple of years, but with artists such as Wonder and the Stones trading beats back and forth, there would also be moments that were pure outta sight.
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 33