The Grateful Dead - American Beauty: The Angel's Share

 

Since I did this during last year's Day Of The Dead, I suppose I'll try to make this an annual thing now, and continue posting some hard-to-find Grateful Dead here on this date. 

To commemorate the day, her for your listening pleasure is American Beauty: The Angel's Share, like all of the other "Angel's Share" discs, a digital-only release of alt mixes, outtakes and demos from The Grateful Dead's classic album.  I'm a lazy man, so for a more detailed description of this release, I'm taking the liberty of utilizing the Discogs.com write-up, rather than my own words; all credit for the following goes to them and that site:

American Beauty: The Angel's Share brings together never-before-heard studio recordings compiled from dozens of recently discovered 16-track reels. It includes multiple outtakes for several album tracks along with demos for every song on the album (except “Box Of Rain”) plus one for “To Lay Me Down,” which was later included on Jerry Garcia’s first solo album, Garcia. All 10 demos are available today for streaming and digital download with the full 56-track American Beauty: The Angel's Share to be released as a digital exclusive on October 15, shortly before the 50th anniversary of the album’s original release date: November 1, 1970.

Like its predecessor, the latest incarnation of The Angel’s Share was made possible by the tireless work of engineer Brian Kehew and archivist Mike Johnson who – operating under the supervision of Grateful Dead legacy manager David Lemieux – spent countless hours compiling and piecing the reels together to create this revelatory experience.

American Beauty: The Angel's Share opens with 10 demos that were recorded in August 1970 at Pacific High Recording Studio, the same place the band recorded Workingman’s Dead just a few months earlier. While fans are accustomed to hearing songs evolve through the band’s live recordings, this installment of The Angel’s Share offers them a rare opportunity to hear songs like “Ripple” (then titled “Hand Me Down”) grow from its first demo into the final version.

The vast remainder of The Angel’s Share features a mix of partial and complete takes from these sessions including multiple takes of “Friend Of The Devil,” “Ripple” and Pigpen’s “Operator,” an alternate mix of “Truckin’” and a different version of “Candyman.” These intimate in-studio performances are interspersed with conversations that make it feel like you’re in the studio with the band (Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Bob Weir) along with producer Stephen Barncard and engineer Phil Sawyer.

The Angel’s Share is rounded out with an acoustic mix of “Box Of Rain” and a version of “Attics Of My Life” that spotlights Garcia alone on electric guitar, both newly mixed from the band’s recording sessions for the album later that summer at Wally Heider Recording

That's that - here you go.  Enjoy the day, have a listen, and as always, let me know what you think.  Happy November 2nd!!

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Disney - Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House (1964 & 1979)

 

 

A few memories and vignettes from past Halloweens in my life:

*********

...When I was ten, my younger sister and I were walking back home through the wooded area between our home, a townhouse in Arundel Estates, the Navy officer housing across the street from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and the officer's apartment housing in nearby Perry Circle.  It

was late afternoon on Halloween with dusk and the time for trick-or-treats rapidly approaching, with an orange glow from the setting sun brightening the sky, and the air was full of anticipation for the activities to come that night. The residents in Perry Circle used to deck out each apartment foyer with fun, spooky regalia, and we could already hear the recorded "scary" sounds of cackling witches and moaning ghosts floating through the air as we stomped through the leaves, eager to get home so we could get our costumes on. As we walked, I turned to my sister and said, "Hey Syd - guess what?"

"What?", she answered.

"It's HALLOWEEN!!!", I screamed joyously, and we laughed and screamed together as we ran down the hill.

While innocuous as that passing remark was at the time, we always remembered it... and every Halloween since then over the past fifty years, the holiday hasn't passed where one of us, either in person, over the phone or via text, will greet the day by contacting each other and repeating that phrase - "It's HALLOWEEN!!!" It's a silly "tradition" between us, I know - but we've never forgotten it. It's a reminder to us of just how great and thrilling this date was when we were kids.

*********

...When I first moved to New Zealand in the early '90s, Halloween was still an all-but unknown holiday, celebrated chiefly by American expats and their families. At that time, it was almost unthinkable for Kiwi kids to go door-to-door that night, looking for treats. But I held out hope and kept with the ritual, buying candy my first year there and having it ready by the door in case someone came knocking (like every other American military family in Christchurch, I lived out in town like a local, renting a place in Casebrook).  But my first Halloween there, I had no visitors.  It was somewhat disappointing, but I hoped that the activity would eventually catch on.

During my second October 31st there, I once again purchased candy, and again had it ready to pass out, should someone stop by. A hour or some passed by that night, and again I had no nighttime visitors.  However, at around 6:30 pm, just as I was about to give up, there was a ringing at my door. I opened it to find a little Kiwi boy and girl, no more than seven or eight years old, standing shyly and somewhat shame-facedly on my stoop.  Neither of them were wearing any sort of costume; they stood there in street clothes.

"Hello, sir," the boy began. "We're awfully sorry to bother you... but, you see, in America, they have a thing on this night called -"

I cut him off instantly, happily shouting "TRICK-OR-TREATERS!  FINALLY!  WOO-HOO!!!" I'm sure my yelling initially scared the living bejesus out of them... but they quickly recovered, glad that they had come to the house of someone who knew why they were there!  We all laughed together, and I piled candy into their waiting sacks and sent them merrily on their way. Thus ended my first real Halloween in New Zealand... Nowadays, the holiday is well-established in the country, and on this night the crowds of kids roaming neighborhoods seeking candy in many ways resembles the same activity back in the States... thank goodness.

*********

...Halloweens in my early/middle teens in Massachusetts were always interesting times. After the candy was gathered and deposited safely at home, the later evenings of October 31st were unofficially the times when scores got settled, power struggles culminated and lines and alliances were redrawn between the kids in our suburban neighborhoods on the South Shore.  In many ways, it was open adolescent "warfare", a toned-down version of the Castellammarese War, but without casualties and between youngsters.  

Guys would prepare for Halloween weeks in advance, burying cartons of eggs in the woods to rot and use as projectiles... hoarding firecrackers and cherry bombs... and filling old Christmas tree lights with paint to throw at opposing parties.  During that post-trick-or-treat period, the sequence of events was that your respective group/gang would meet up, load up with these things, then start roaming the area, seeking out opposing groups to battle in the streets and in the woods.  I know that, in some ways, it sounds sort of mean-spirited, street thuggy and semi-deliquent-y... but believe me when I say it was all done for fun, by suburban teens/pre-teens with time on their hands.  I distinctly recall standing on a low hill overlooking the town near the end of one of those nights, and in all directions hearing the bang/pop and occasional flash of fireworks in every direction, and the distant roars of gangs of kids "battling" all over the place.  For me at that time, that was the definitive sound of Halloween.

*********

I don't have any long-winded story in relation to these album offerings.  I dug both of these up a few years ago while searching for Halloween-related music and sound effects.  Disney released these records under the exact same name fifteen years apart. The first half of the 1964 release is clearly geared to a younger audience (ages three through eight), with the tracks presented in a Disneyesque storybook manner by a narrator, Ms. Laura Olsher (whose other claim to fame was participating in voice work for Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, one of the first animated holiday specials, playing Mrs. Cratchit).  The second half dispenses with that story-time tone, and just provides the expected "spooky" holiday sounds (thunder, explosions, space alien sounds, etc.).  The original liner notes and insert for this release (initially issued on vinyl) included notes and suggestions on how to host a "scary" holiday party; it was all very wholesome and of-its-time.

The 1979 version of this record is simply straight-ahead 'haunted house" sound effects - shrieks, groans, wind and torture devices.  Here's the reverse side of the album with track details:

So, here you are - two superb holiday releases, both on Disneyland Records put out in their respective years, that I hope will set the tone for your Halloween festivities tonight and in the future, and help you and yours create the sort of lasting memories of this date that I still cherish and hold.

Have a happy and delightfully frightening Halloween!

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

• Various Artists - Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House (1964): Send Email
• Various Artists - Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House (1979): Send Email

More Mary Hansen (Stereolab) Obscurities

I was in the casino last weekend to play a little poker and make a couple of bets on the NFL playoff games scheduled for that weekend. The place I go has a huge sports book, with multiple giant screens covering a vast back wall, showing every current game (football, college and pro basketball, hockey, etc.) being played at that particular time on various broadcast networks.

As I was walking in to the space to place my bet at one of the automated machines (go Kansas City!), I was jolted when I suddenly heard Stereolab's "Lo Boob Oscillator" blasting at top volume all around me. Now, Stereolab isn't generally what you'd expect to hear coming out of a casino's music system... so needless to say, I was momentarily confused, as I couldn't immediately place the source. Then I looked up and one of the display screens, and saw it was running the following commercial for Hotels.com:

I couldn't believe it - a huge corporation choosing to set their ad to a tune by a band that I'll wager the vast majority of Middle American viewers had never heard of, and one of my favorite songs of all time, as I've related in a previous posting here! Now, I'm not overly superstitious... but I took that out-of-the-blue Stereolab encounter as a good omen... as it turned out to be. I not only won my football bet that night, but also came away with a solid win at the hold 'em tables.

As I've detailed time and again here, I adore Stereolab, and over the years have managed to gather up pretty much all of their recorded output as a group (or "Groop", if you will), both albums and singles, along with many of the band collaborations and individual member side projects. In the past, I've posted a couple of these harder-to-find releases here earlier, including the Rose, My Rocket-Brain! tour EP from 2004 and the Eaten Horizons Or The Electrocution Of Rock art-house release from 2007.

I was ecstatic when they reformed in 2019 after a ten-year hiatus, and went running like a bastard to their show at Boston's Royale back in September of that year, a couple of months before COVID hit (damn, hard to believe that show was THAT long ago...). The concert was superb, and even with the long break, they didn't seem to have missed a beat (and yes, they played "Lo Boob Oscillator"). But seeing the group up on stage that night once again made me wistful for the presence of Mary Hansen, their late percussionist, keyboardist and background vocalist, who died in 2002. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Mary brought an ineffable quality to Stereolab's music:

Hansen's voice was the perfect complement to Sadier's; their singing styles and vocal range were very similar . . . but different enough to add nuance and color to many of the band's songs.

So, in the wake of a previous request for these items from an intrepid blog visitor, I thought I'd post a few more releases I have that feature Mary's work.

• Europa 51 - Abstractions

Over the years, Stereolab's drummer Andy Ramsay has been the catalyst behind an number of the band's experimental singles/EPs, offshoots and collaborations, Either with his bandmates or working independently, Ramsay has appeared on, written for or arranged releases with artists as diverse as The High Llamas, Ui, Wire, The Charlatans, Add N to (X), and many, many more. In the past, I've featured some of his work here on this blog. But this release was probably his most eclectic.

Named after Roberto Rossellini's early '50s Italian film starring Ingrid Bergman, Europa 51’s lone album, Abstractions, is the work of Ramsay and fellow Stereolab member Simon Johns, also featuring Mary Hansen, High Llamas members Dominic Murcott and John Bennett, jazz bass player Simon Thorpe and classical harpist Celine Saout. The album was a hybrid project that combined styles like lounge, jazz, bluegrass, and folk. While this album sounds somewhat like Stereolab from time to time, in many ways it goes far beyond anything The Groop had ever done - unfortunately, with somewhat uneven results. Mary's vocals are featured on tracks 4 through 7 ("Voyeurism", "Three Steps In The Sun", "Golden Age Of Gameshows" and "Free Range Corona"), and are lovely as always. But be sure to check out the entire album - it may not all be to your taste, but you will definitely find sounds that pique your interest.

• Splitting the Atom - Splitting The Atom EP:

Another Ramsay one-off, a short-lived project with Stereolab's sound engineer Simon Holliday and Peter Kember, a.k.a. Sonic Boom (Spaceman 3, Spectrum, etc.). Only 2,500 copies of this EP were pressed for release on black vinyl, making it one of the rarest Stereolab-related discs. Mary Hansen added vocals to one track here.

Trivia: "Monkey Brain" (vinyl pops and all) was later used as the soundtrack to a short film/digital video called "four" by Man and Martin, described as "four whole minutes of pulsating thought muesli, ultra-violet and ultra-compact bulletproof adventures for ages four years and above" (Man and Martin is graphic designer, sculptor and AppleMacintosh convert Andy Martin). "four" premiered at the onedotzero2 digital film festival at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in May 1998. Here it is, if you'd like to see it:

• Various Artists - Spooky Sounds Of Now:

An ostensibly Halloween-themed compilation CD - plus a very cool comic collection in book form ("Spooky Tales", subtitled 'Spirit Summoning Stories', edited by Mark Baines) - all housed in a lidded box. In addition to inclusions from alternative heavy hitters such as Jad Fair, Yo La Tengo and The High Llamas, this release also includes a short track by Blips, "Blip^/Blip~", featuring Stereolab's Tim Gane and Mary along with Sonic Boom once again. It sounds a lot like what was released on the Turn On side project, also released that year - hard to tell if it was an outtake from that session or not. No matter - it's a pretty good tune.

Here's the full track list:

1. Dymaxion - The Haunted Radio
2. Blips - Blip^/Blip~
3. Jad Fair & Jason Willett - Werewolf of London Town
4. Two Dollar Guitar - The Lonliest Monk
5. Herald - It's Under The Waltzers
6. Kooljerk - Mailor Jeune
7. Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Scooby Don't
8. Cylinder - Red Moss
9. Pink Kross - Spooky Dooky
10. Mystery Dick - Screambirds
11. Amplifier - Cat Whisker
12. The Yummy Fur - Saturday Night Mo-Mo
13. Dick Johnson - Vertigo
14. Angel Corpus Christi - Clown Sex
15. Project Dark - Full Length Mirror
16. G. Mack - Red Moss [Frame Trigger]
17. the Dramatics - Hallucination of a Deranged Mind [Inspired by Coffin Joe]
18. Yo La Tengo - 3D
19. Supermalprodelica - L'etat De Grace
20. High Llamas - Spool to Spool
21. Will Prentice - Singing Floorboards

• Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording:

In June of 1977, England's Anglia Television aired a documentary called 'Alternative 3' on its weekly Science Report program. The episode was presented as a factual expose, in that the show's investigators had found evidence that life on Earth was soon to be doomed to extinction from global warming, and the two superpowers of that time (Russia and the United States) had been secretly working together for decades to terraform and eventually

colonize the Moon and Mars with selected superior humans - leaving the rest of us here on this planet to die off when the inevitable end came. The show detailed what appeared to be a global 'brain drain', with scientists, engineers and other highly skilled technicians and thinkers from all over the world seemingly disappearing or dying - but, in the course of the program's investigation, finding that they all had been recruited for the interplanetary program, and sequestered at a secret base to work on it. 'Alternative 3' was filled with interviews with authoritative personnel and film footage showing the level and scope of work on this secret plan up to the present day.

Within minutes of its airing, network and government phone lines were inundated with thousands of calls from jolted viewers, demanding more information on this all-too-real effort. Needless to say, 'Alternative 3' was all just a big hoax, a spoof of similarly styled conspiracy documentaries from that period. It was originally planned to air on April 1st (April Fool's Day) of that year, in order to drive that point home, but due to production issues was not broadcast until June 20.

Needless to say, it freaked a whole lot of people out, in the same manner that Orson Welles' radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds caused mass hysteria almost forty years earlier. Although Anglia Television and the show's producers freely and readily admitted that it was fake, the basic points and premises of 'Alternative 3' live on to this day in various forms in other global cabal/UFO/extraterrestrial conspiracy theories.

The score for the 1977 broadcast was composed by no less than Brian Eno, who subsequently released a portion of it on his 1978 album Music For Films. And in 2001, a collective of musicians (including Stereolab, Add N to (X), Richard Thomas and others, all recording under the Alternative 3 moniker) recorded and released an 'alternative' version of the film score, allegedly for a feature film on the hoax that was scheduled for release that same year (I didn't find any evidence that this movie was ever produced or released, however).

This album is promoted on the label's website as "Super fried electronic madness. Long lost sessions mostly recorded at the Centre of Sound in London plus some dubs done at the ‘labs studio, stretched and twisted into dense and filmic slices of electronica." Can't really argue with any of that description!

 

So here for your listening pleasure is a smorgasbord of Stereolab's Mary Hansen-related ephemera:

• Europa 51 - Abstractions, released by London-based experimental music label Lo Recordings in 2003;
• Splitting the Atom - Splitting The Atom EP, put out on Stereolab's own Duophonic Super 45s label in 1997;
• The Spooky Sounds Of Now compilation, launched by Scottish independent label Vesuvius Records, also in 1997; and
• Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording, another Lo Recordings release, put out on April 30th, 2001

Have a listen and once again contemplate and revel in the artistry of the late, lamented vocalist, who left this world way too soon - you are still missed, Mary, by multitudes of music fans.

And as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

• Europa 51 - Abstractions: Send Email
• Splitting The Atom - Spiltting The Atom EP: Send Email
• Various Artists - Spooky Sounds Of Now: Send Email
• Alternative 3 - Original Soundtrack Recording: Send Email

Vince Guaraldi - A Charlie Brown Christmas (Super Deluxe Edition)

A Charlie Brown Christmas - what else need be said about this beloved perennial holiday favorite?  I mentioned in an earlier post what an unexpected smash hit the initial airing of this program was in 1965, and how the soundtrack is not only one of the top ten best-selling Christmas albums of all time, but also the second-best selling jazz album of all time (behind Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue) (It was also voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007, and in 2012 added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant").  Any other superlatives I can present here will do little to convey the near-universal adoration of this program and its music, with many of its original Vince Guaraldi compositions (including "Christmas Time Is Here"and "Skating") becoming popular holiday standards.

The soundtrack album was originally released on Fantasy Records in December 1965.  In 2022, Craft Recordings, which now owns the legacy Fantasy label, issued a four-disc deluxe edition of this album, featuring a new stereo mix (remastered from the original 3-track and 2-track sources), the original 1965 stereo mix, and up to 50 previously unreleased outtakes from five separate recording sessions conducted by Guaraldi and his group at various locations in California in the fall of 1965. Here's the song lineup by disc:

 Disc 1 - New and Original Stereo Mix

1     O Tannenbaum (2022 Stereo Mix)
2     What Child Is This (2022 Stereo Mix)
3     My Little Drum (2022 Stereo Mix)
4     Linus and Lucy (2022 Stereo Mix)
5     Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental / 2022 Stereo Mix)
6     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal / 2022 Stereo Mix)
7     Skating (2022 Stereo Mix)
8     Hark, the Herald Angels Sing (2022 Stereo Mix)
9     Christmas Is Coming (2022 Stereo Mix)
10     Fur Elise (2022 Stereo Mix)
11     The Christmas Song (2022 Stereo Mix)
12     A Charlie Brown Christmas (Original Stereo Mix)
13     O Tannenbaum (Original Stereo Mix)
14     What Child Is This (Original Stereo Mix)
15     My Little Drum (Original Stereo Mix)
16     Linus and Lucy (Original Stereo Mix)
17     Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental / Original Stereo Mix)
18     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal / Original Stereo Mix)
19     Skating (Original Stereo Mix)
20     Hark, the Herald Angels Sing (Original Stereo Mix)
21     Christmas Is Coming (Original Stereo Mix)
22     Fur Elise (Original Stereo Mix)
23     The Christmas Song (Original Stereo Mix)

 Disc 2 - The Recording Sessions (September 17, 1965)

1     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 1)
2     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 2)
3     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 3)
4     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Takes 4-5)
5     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 6)
6     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 7)
7     Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental) (#2, Takes 1-2)
8     Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental) (#2, Take 3)
9     Skating (Unnumbered)
10     Skating (#3, Takes 1-2)
11     Skating (#3, Take 3)
12     Skating (#3, Takes 4-6)
13     Skating (#3, Take 7)
14     Linus and Lucy (#4, Take 1)
15     Christmas Is Coming (#5, Take 1)
16     Christmas Is Coming (#5, Take 2)
17     Christmas Is Coming (#5, Take 3)
18     Christmas Is Coming (#5, Take 4)
19     Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental) (#6, Take 1)
20     Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental) (#6, Take 2)

 Disc 3 - The Recording Sessions (September 21-22, 1965_Unknown Session Date)

1     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 1)
2     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 2)
3     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 3)
4     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Takes 4-6)
5     Christmas Is Coming (#1, Take 7)
6     O Tannenbaum (#2, Take 1)
7     O Tannenbaum (#2, Take 2)
8     O Tannenbaum (#2, Takes 3-4)
9     O Tannenbaum (#2, Take 5)
10     Jingle Bells (#3, Takes 1-4)
11     Goin' Out of My Head (Unnumbered)
12     Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental) (#6, Take 3)
13     Skating (#7, Take 1)
14     Skating (#7, Take 2)
15     FÜR Elise (Takes 1-2)
16     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal) (#1, Take 1)
17     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal) (#1, Takes 2-3)
18     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal) (#1, Take 4)
19     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal) (#1, Take 5)
20     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal) (Rehearsal)
21     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal) (#1, Take 6)
22     Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal) (#1, Take 7)

 Disc 4 - The Recording Sessions (October 28, 1965)

1     Greensleeves (Take 1)
2     Greensleeves (Takes 2-4)
3     Greensleeves (Take 5)
4     Greensleeves (Take 6)
5     Greensleeves (Take 7)
6     Greensleeves (Take 8)
7     Greensleeves (Takes 9-10)
8     Greensleeves (Take 11)
9     Greensleeves (Take 12)
10     The Christmas Song (Take 1)
11     The Christmas Song (Takes 2-3)
12     The Christmas Song (Takes 4-7)
13     The Christmas Song (Take 8)
14     The Christmas Song (Take 9)
15     The Christmas Song (Take 10)
16     The Christmas Song (Take 11)

Hearing the session recordings, it's almost like you're there in the studio with Guaraldi & Co., as the musicians work through their arrangements.  For me, it's a fascinating view of the development of a classic work!

So here for your holiday pleasure is the expanded Deluxe edition of the A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack, originally released on Fantasy in late 1965, and rereleased on Craft Recordings on August 22nd, 2022.  Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.  Merry Christmas!

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

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The Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead: The Angel's Share

 

This being the Day Of The Dead, I figured why not commemorate the day by posting some Grateful Dead?  I don't have any especial love for GD... but that hasn't stopped me from collecting hundreds of hours of their recordings over the years.  They're an essential American band, and as such deserve honor and respect - even from an obsessive music collector like myself!

Here's Workingman's Dead: The Angel's Share, a digital-only 2020 release of studio rehearsals and outtakes from The Grateful Dead's classic and celebrated 1970 album.  I don't have much else to say about it here, but Rolling Stone magazine had plenty to comment upon regarding it when this album was put out three years ago; here's their write-up, if you're interested.  

This is for all the Deadheads out there, and music fans in general.  Have a listen, and let me know what you think.  Happy November 2nd!

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Various Artists - No Alternative

 

Holy smokes - this seminal compilation is THIRTY YEARS OLD this week!

To understand why this disc is so essential, and so celebrated, I direct you to Stereogum's writeup on it from ten years ago, on No Alternative's twentieth anniversary - can't add a word to this superb summation.

I'll just save my breath, and instead provide you all with possibly the best and timeliest collection of then-rarities and unreleased songs by some of the giants of alternative music of that period.  Here's No Alternative, released on Arista Records on October 26th, 1993.  Enjoy this great throwback to an interesting and exciting era in modern music, and, as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

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Vince Guaraldi - It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Music From The Soundtrack

In the early 1960s, Charles Schulz's comic strip Peanuts was entering into a long period of enormous international popularity, which others in the entertainment industry were eager to capitalize on.  Television producer Lee Mendelson was keen to produce a documentary featuring Schulz and the success of his strip, and by 1964 had established a good working relationship with the cartoonist which also morphed into a fast friendship.  The documentary Mendelson envisioned would be mostly live action, with only a couple of minutes of animation included.  For that, Schulz recommended an animator named Bill Melendez, who he had earlier worked with for several years on a series of commercials for Ford vehicles featuring the characters.  

But despite his efforts, and the acclaim for the strip, Mendelson couldn't interest any of the then-existing networks in funding and airing a Charlie Brown & Charles Schulz documentary of the type he had in mind.

However, Peanuts-mania continued unabated; in the spring of 1965, the Peanuts gang was featured on the cover of Time magazine.  Shortly after the release of that issue, Mendelson was contacted by representatives of McCann Erickson, a New York-based ad agency whose biggest client was the Coca-Cola Company.  He was told that Coca-Cola was looking for a Christmas holiday special to sponsor, envisioning a half-hour animated program to air on the CBS Television network, and wanted to know if he and Charles Schulz were interested.  The two completed and forwarded to Coke executives a show outline from scratch in a single day, and after belated approval from the corporation, completed the production of that first special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, in just six months.  

Many of those involved in the making of A Charlie Brown Christmas and corporate and network executives were convinced that the program would be a disaster, due to its relatively slow pacing, flat animation, odd jazz-influenced music score, no laugh track and the inclusion of the reading of a Bible verse in the middle of it.  But for the fact that the special was completed only ten days before its air date, it might not have aired at all ("I really believed, if it hadn't been scheduled for the following week, there's no way they were gonna broadcast that show," Mendelson later said).  But CBS was left with practically no alternative but to show it.

Instead of being a disaster, the first showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, on the evening of Thursday, December 9th, 1965, was a smash hit, with almost half of the TVs on that night tuned in to the program.  The special ended up being the #2 show for the week (behind Bonanza), garnering considerable critical acclaim as well, and during the following year's awards season winning not only an Emmy but a Peabody award as well (the show is also credited with killing off the decade-long aluminum Christmas tree fad; within two years of its airing, the ornamental trees were no longer being regularly manufactured).  It also set the template for the subsequent tradition of half-hour animated television specials (Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer had begun airing in the years prior to the Schulz special, but both were full hour-long programs).

Eager to exploit what they saw as a winning formula, Coca-Cola immediately commissioned another Charlie Brown special, Charlie Brown's All Stars, to air during the summer of 1966.  That show was also a huge hit, the top-rated show for that week, with ratings and audience share rivaling that of the Christmas special.

With the added success of the second special, Mendelson, Schulz and Melendez figured they were in a pretty good place with the network.  But that impression soured with the very next meeting, held the week after All Stars aired.  From Mendelson's recollection of the conference:

Network Exec:  Congratulations.  The ratings [last week] were great - two in a row!  ...What do you have in mind for the NEXT one?

Mendelson:  Well, we really haven't discussed it...

Network Exec:  We want you to come up with a BLOCKBUSTER like Christmas... something we can run every year, sometime between October and February.  ...If we don't get a blockbuster, we may not pick up the option [for additional Peanuts shows}.  Can you do it? 

On the spot, Mendelson agreed to do it, although at that point he had no clue as to what sort of story idea and setting the production team could come up with in which to place this anticipated "blockbuster".  However, going back to Schulz and Melendez, within a week the trio had hashed out an outline focusing around the Halloween holiday, based upon a series of strips printed in October, 1959, where Linus, confusing the traditions of Halloween and Christmas, began believing in the Great Pumpkin, a magical being who was claimed to bring toys and gifts to deserving children every October 31st.  The "Great Pumpkin" stories became an annual theme in the comic strip for every October afterwards, so there was a wealth of input and gags for the team to mine.  Other now-iconic elements and scenes, such as Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, and Snoopy as a World War I flying ace, were added, along with scenes involving Schroeder and his piano so the team could once again engage the services of jazz musician Vince Guaraldi, whose score for the Christmas special was widely celebrated.

Guaraldi was enthusiastic about scoring another Peanuts-related project, his fourth after ...Christmas, ...All Stars and the unsold Schulz documentary.  In his excitement and interest regarding the many scene and mood changes in the Great Pumpkin script, he composed twenty original songs for the program in the basement of his San Francisco home, and expanded his regular recording trio to a sextet to include a flutist to accentuate the loneliness and isolation of scenes with Linus sitting in the pumpkin patch.  He also re-utilized the song "Linus and Lucy" from the Christmas show, establishing it as the signature tune for all subsequent Peanuts specials.

 

The time allotted for production of the Peanuts Halloween special was even shorter than that for A Charlie Brown Christmas - just four months this time, rather than the previous six.  But with a solid story and chops honed from the previous specials, the show was completed and ready to air far ahead of time. The initial broadcast of It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown occurred on Thursday, October 27th, 1966 on CBS.  It was an even huger hit than A Charlie Brown Christmas, scoring a 49 share in the Nielsen ratings (meaning almost half of all TVs on that night were tuned into the program) and tied for the #1 show of that week.  Although it was nominated for Emmys in the next year for "Outstanding Children's Program" and "Special Classifications of Individual Achievements", it did not win (in the former category, both Great Pumpkin and All Stars were nominees, which I think split the Peanuts votes, allowing some forgotten Jack & The Beanstalk cartoon from NBC to walk away with the award).

However, the show was immediately hailed as a classic, and celebrated for its artistic style; unlike the first special, It's The Great Pumpkin utilized much more camera movement.  And artist Dean Spille went the extra mile, and hand-painted the backgrounds of the French countryside during Snoopy's flying ace sequence, utilizing a linear perspective rather than the regular flat design of the earlier shows.  To this day, those scenes are recognized as a major achievement, and influenced several other animated specials for years to come.  The show was also the first Halloween-related special, establishing that holiday as a television genre.  And the execs got what they asked for: It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was rebroadcast annually on network TV (on CBS until 2001, then on ABC) for the next fifty-three years, until Apple TV+ purchased the rights in 2020.

I adore both A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown - but if I had to chose between the two, I'd go for the latter, every time.  The Great Pumpkin just hits me different...  And I'm not alone; the program is regarded to this day as the best of all the Peanuts specials.  When I was a kid, I couldn't WAIT until the night this program aired!  It was the perfect way to get into the anticipatory mood for upcoming trick-or-treating and other Halloween shenanigans.  It's sort of sad now that kids today don't really have the chance to see it as their parents and grandparents viewed the show, as a widely anticipated annual network event and tradition - somehow, watching it on Apple TV+ just doesn't feel the same to me.  Despite the program's now-wide availability and easy access, to this day I REFUSE to watch it at any time other than the Halloween season.

Although the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas was released immediately after the show's first airing (on Fantasy Records in December 1965 - it is still the second-best selling jazz record (behind Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue) and top-ten best selling Christmas album of all time), it took decades for the Great Pumpkin soundtrack to see the light of day.  Concord Music announced that it would be releasing the long-awaited soundtrack in 2018, but discovered that the original studio master recordings were missing.  So instead, the label released music culled directly from the special's audio track, removing any dialogue and most of (but not all) extraneous sound effects, a move that Concord Music was heavily criticized for.

After Lee Mendelson's death in 2019, his children combed through his basement archives, searching for any Peanuts-related music he might have retained.  In mid-2021 they finally found some of the original monaural analog session reels recorded for the show in 1966.  The tapes included nearly all of the music cues recorded by Guaraldi, along with several alternate takes.  Concord utilized these masters to rerecord and reissue the soundtrack album the following year, although some songs remained missing, forcing the label to one again use some selections from the audio track, albeit 'cleaner' versions.

So here for your perusal is the reissued It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Music From The Soundtrack, recorded by the Vince Guaraldi Sextet in Hollywood on October 4th, 1966, and released by Concord subsidiary Craft Recordings on August 26th, 2022.  I hope that this selection gets you and your family into the Halloween mood!  Have a happy October 31st... and as always, let me know what you think.

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