Debt On

In 1964, Charles Schulz had been drawing Peanuts for 15 years. The strip had grown beyond its rudimentary situations and characters, when the children still acted like children and Snoopy acted like a real dog. Now the children were still children, they ate candy bars and went to the movies and played baseball, but while they were doing it they would contextualize their activities by discoursing on philosophy, mental health, and the nuances of religion. Instead of selling mud pies on the side of the road they were selling psychiatry.

Schulz had already been approached several times by Hollywood producers seeking to make an animated Peanuts film or television series, but he had turned them all down. Peanuts was on a rollercoaster of popularity at that point and merchandise was being produced as quickly as it could be approved. And for every item that was produced there were at least ten being turned down: Schulz insisted on personally approving every way his characters were merchandised.

But that year Schulz was approached by producer Lee Mendelson about creating a documentary about Schulz and the creation of his strip. Schulz had enjoyed Mendelson’s previous documentary on one of his heroes, Willie Mays, and agreed to meet with Mendelson. The following year Mendelson produced a short documentary on Schulz, notable for two reasons: short cartoons created by Schulz’s friend Bill Melendez, who had already created several animated commercials for Ford Motors, and the score composed by rising jazz star Vince Guaraldi.

The documentary never aired. The soundtrack was collected onto an album titled A Boy Named Charlie Brown by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, and was a modest success. The animations were noticed by Coca-Cola, but rather than sponsor the documentary they were more interested in producing a Peanuts Christmas special. It was that show that established the Peanuts television specials as a television institution; a second soundtrack album by Guaraldi expanded on many of the same themes as Charlie Brown and permanently grafted his music to the animated Peanuts.

But it was A Boy Named Charlie Brown that introduced the themes that were to recur during the next decade of Peanuts animated specials, mostly character themes for the principal characters: Charlie Brown has two themes himself, and another for his constant utterance, Good Grief. There is a theme for Baseball, for Schroeder, even for Freida, the girl with the naturally curly hair. The Freida theme was almost never used in conjunction with her character, and instead popped up during a bit of mischief or humor, including one scene where Linus, lollipop in hand, destroys a pile of dry leaves freshly raked by Charlie Brown. His lollipop covered by leaves, he advises Charlie Brown: “never jump into a pile of leaves with a wet sucker.”

By far the most famous tune to emerge from the album is the one most closely associated with the Peanuts specials: the theme of the siblings, Linus and Lucy. It’s a rambunctious and rowdy piano tune, threatening yet funny, that thoroughly explored the dynamism in their relationship. It is commonly referred to today as the “Peanuts Theme,” perhaps because its the catchiest, or perhaps because by encompassing two of the four strongest personalities, (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and Lucy) much of the group dynamic was already captured. Regardless, it remains the most recognized and covered tune Guaraldi ever comitted to tape, a jazz standard.

Its effectiveness in musically portraying the two characters can be seen in the beginning of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, where Linus and Lucy set out to find a jack o’lantern. After Lucy finds the largest pumpkin poor Linus could possibly carry, they head for home. When Linus comes to a hole in the fence the pumpkin couldn’t possibly pass through, he decides to roll it home, happily pushing the pumpkin along until he realizes it’s out of control, and desperately tries to stop it. When he hurts himself in the process, Lucy shows only irritation, and takes the pumpkin into the house herself. Once inside she pulls out a giant knife and starts scooping the pumpkin guts out. Linus wails to Lucy, “you didn’t tell me you were gonna kill it!” All to the beat of that irresistibly catchy tune.

Compared to the bustle of Linus and Lucy Charlie Brown’s themes are very plain and quiet. It’s no wonder the former tune took off to become the most recognizable theme, Charlie Brown’s theme is best suited to epilogues and fadeouts, not to kick off the ride. Charlie Brown’s success in real life has always been similar to his role in his cartoon life: his plain personality relegates him to the background, despite that he is a superstar.

There are all-encompassing tracks as well, like the appropriately solemn and introspective track Happiness Is, named for the recurring Peanuts theme that spawned a short book, Happiness is a Warm Puppy. In Peanuts, happiness wasn’t so much felt as it was sought and analyzed.

The other encompassing theme, Baseball, seems more at task to capture the game itself, certainly a worthy endeavor, but unfortunately unconcerned with Schulz’s conception of baseball and how he used it narratively. For Schulz, the baseball diamond was a place of discussion, of philosophy, religion and ideas, and also a place of deep, persistent loss. The tune comes off as more “take me out to the ballgame” than really capturing what a consistent disappointment the baseball games were to the children. In Guaraldi’s defense, Schulz was still developing the baseball device at the time. Regardless, this tune was probably a bit too complex to ever catch on as the main theme, despite its inclusion of all the characters.

The most noticeable absence from this collection is Snoopy, who has no music of his own. The album was recorded in 1965 when the strip was more driven by the group dynamics of the children than Snoopy’s fantasy life. That side of the strip was only beginning to emerge, and it would be a year before Snoopy donned his flight cap in pursuit of the Red Baron. But in subsequent years more music would be written for Snoopy than any other character, and many that were suited for him alone, including the second most famous tune of the specials: Joe Cool.

The album features several other tracks that work better as stand-alone jazz compositions than accompaniment for the Peanuts cartoons. This isn’t particularly surprising considering that Guaraldi’s Peanuts work was reminiscent of a sound he had already developed over the first half of his career, most notably in his biggest hit, Cast Your Fate Into the Wind, which could easily have appeared in any number of Peanuts specials.

Following the completion of A Charlie Brown Christmas, Guaraldi’s work was dominated by producing for the subsequent Peanuts specials, and he contributed the music for the next fifteen specials before his untimely death at 47. The final Peanuts special he contributed to was It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, which aired on March 16, 1976.

So where’s the rest of the music? Only two albums for fifteen specials, and they were for the first two shows? Well, actually there were three. Until recently. I’ll dive into all that next time.

References:
The Peanuts Animation Page
Vince Guaraldi Biography from the Peanuts Collectors Club
Peanuts Timeline
The Official Vince Guaraldi Site

Part I | Part III

Well, the only guy who really responds to my articles is my dad, but since he had some interesting points I thought I’d take a minute to answer some of them here.

I am always amazed at how inept the democrats are at attacking Bush. On TV talk shows there is usually a representative from each side. The left says Bush lied about WMD and the right says he didn’t lie, everybody thought the same thing, which is not true, but the left says nothing. The fact is everybody thinks we know because we have a large network of spies and satellites, so they believe us. Powell went to the UN to convince the doubters with pictures from space which he claimed to be WMD but which could have been anything. If you keep saying the same thing over and over, eventually people believe you. Congress should have known, but even they may have thought that Bush had info they didn’t have. However, they should have demanded to see it instead of giving up their authority. Only Hans Blix knew the truth. He kept asking them to tell him where to look, and everywhere he went he found nothing. But his voice was too small.

Damn straight. Colin Powell’s been getting off too easy lately. He’s the one that went to the UN to present the evidence, so clearly he had access to it, why didn’t he realize it was shoddy? Or is he accusing the CIA of tampering with it? Either way, he should be up to a little more than whining “I didn’t know” on the talk shows. Dude, how do you get WMD out of this???

And on the Charlie Brown tip he had this to say:

I found your musical epiphany very interesting. I think there is something about music or sounds which can spiritually transport people back to their early years. I think psychologists are even studying this phenomenon. When I was very young I watched very primitive Felix the Cat cartoons, probably from the twenties since there was no talking, on a very primitive TV. The cartoons were accompanied by music which was nothing more than background noise to me and there was no explanation of what it was. It wasn’t until almost 50 years later that I realized as I listened to certain pieces of music that something long forgotten awakened in me. It took me a while to make the connection to Felix the Cat, but once I did I was sure it was correct. The music was Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bizet’s Children’s Games. Even now whenever I run across route 9 with Melonie, my feet beat out a rhythm which is translated in my mind into Bizet’s music.

According to this site about Vince Guaraldi, using classic themes in animation is commonplace and musicians working on classic animation were often incredibly creative in their choices of themes and arrangements:

Just in passing, staunch fans of quality animation music should seek these three CDs: two volumes of “The Carl Stallings Project,” which feature themes, variations, and a few complete Warner Brothers cartoon soundtracks; and “Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights,” which showcases the wildly original Raymond Scott compositions excerpted by Stallings. Scott was decades ahead of his time; you’ve truly never heard anything like this stuff before…except in just about every Warner Brothers cartoon ever made.

Now that they mention it, I do remember that Warner Brother’s music being pretty cool. But this made me curious about Felix the Cat, a cartoon not exactly in reruns on Saturday mornings, and I found this site, and man is that stuff cool. They even have a collection of music and videos so maybe you can track down that lost theme, or at least enjoy some hillarious silent cartoons with top-notch music.

Bush accuses Democrats of trying to rewrite the history of how the war began.

Poor Harriet Miers. I really wanted to see her appointed to the Supreme Court. Sure she was an inexperienced, unqualified, political, campaign-employed crony, with deep roots in the Bush Administration’s seemingly boundless corruption, but she was harmless. She would have stepped into the position with her head down, intimidated by the authoritative legal voices all around her, quietly enjoying the cushiest job a lawyer ever could, a fringe benefit of befriending George W. Bush.

But conservatives cried, rightly, that she was a crony, picked because of loyalty and not because of credentials, that she had no experience in matters of judicial law, and her job these past few years involved mostly damage control for the President’s political campaign. Liberals were so astonished that the President’s own party turned on him so decisively that they mostly watched as Harriet Miers was taken down so rapidly that by the time this Boondocks cartoon strip hit the stands, it was out of date.

It would seem lately that Bush has had trouble making decisions, and the shrewd political manipulation of Karl Rove is becoming ineffective.

It leads one to wonder how all this time he’s known just the right thing to say, and now he seems to always know the wrong thing. Maybe his lust for war really always was about a tap on the shoulder from his father’s old friends. Perhaps Bush isn’t as socially conscious as he lets on sometimes, (he seemed to lose interest in gay marriage pretty quickly) and that’s to please the leaders of his party in the south and midwest. Maybe comedians and cartoonists everywhere have been right all along and the President really is, well, just stupid.

Recent developments suggest that the corruption of the Bush administration will be dealt with. His poor leadership has finally been realized, and years-long investigations into misconduct are finally bearing fruit.

President Bush’s popularity may sink lower. He may become a liability for the Republicans.
As his polls slip from hurricanes and his cabinet is cleaned by independent investigators, to save face many Republicans may distance themselves from the Presidency and even participate in removing the President or his people. Even his closest allies may abandon him, denounce him, and let him go down with the ship. A trumped up rich boy that screwed it all up just like everything else in his life.

It would seem that liberals have cause to celebrate now that Bush has been discredited as a President and the Republican Party is fractured. But beneath all the political tricks and rhetoric, the real problem plaguing this country is not George Bush, nor his administration. We see now whom the President must ultimately answer to: the movement of social conservatives that he helped cultivate.

Even without George Bush, the dogmatic morality of modern conservatism will continue to appeal to Christians. It has grown far stronger in recent years as war has been declared against us on Religious grounds. To respond on those same grounds has proven incredibly inflammatory, yet our country has reveled in it. How long will the influence of this philosophy be felt? How strong will it survive the problems plaguing Bush?

The Bush Administration is going to try and accomplish one last thing before it loses all the credibility and power it’s built up these past four years: it has one last opportunity to keep this country on the track it set it on, so perhaps the Republicans can find a way to pick up where they left off.

The nomination of Judge Samuel Alito, Jr., is the Bush Administration’s parting insurance policy: an extremely conservative judge that will solidify a right-wing court through the next administration. For five years now, the most dreaded moment of the Bush presidency for liberals has been the Supreme Court nominations, that this deeply conservative administration would have an impact on legal philosophy for a generation. It is even reasonable to imagine that Rove planned this development since the moment the Miers nomination was announced: the democrats wouldn’t dare oppose a second nominee.

The danger of this appointment is not about overturning Roe v. Wade, that would be a foolish political endeavor which would accomplish nothing but unleashing a fury of angry citizens. It is about the shaping of the United States over the next several decades. It is about the behavior of the court and its regard to people and their guaranteed rights.

For example, perhaps abortion would not be outlawed, but legislation that would require women to notify their husbands before having an abortion would be allowed to stand. And the scope of this administration has been much larger than the social issues like abortion and gay marriage that many Christians seem to find so appealing.

Consider the erosion of civil liberties since September 11, 2001. Much of the offensive legislation has yet to be dealt with in the courts, and may not be until after the confirmation of Alito. In a court led by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Stevens and Alito, would these laws necessarily be viewed as unconstitutional?

The recent decision Hamdi v. Rumsfled granted rights to U.S. citizens held as enemy combatants. But three dissented, finding little or no fault with the administration: Scalia, Stevens and Thomas. If Roberts and Alito were inclined to vote with them, three could easily become five.

And perhaps that would only be the first step. In the last four years this country has become a very different place very quickly. While the shift toward the right may slow down now, it has not halted. Everyone concerned about civil liberties and the political future of this country needs to stay on their guard, because we’re not out of the woods yet.

Your eyes do not decieve you. Any sharp observers among you will surely notice that this is a repeat, and somehow has become more topical a year after I drew it. Just puts me one closer to Nostradamus. But, of course, this comic brings up the question, “why doesn’t this mildly interesting blog live up to its namesake more often and actually post COMICS!?!??” This certainly is a valid question.

I realized the other day that it’s been nearly a year since I stopped producing daily comics, and that only lasted three months in the first place. It’s not that I don’t want to be making comics, it’s just… well, there’s two reasons.

The first is that I can’t seem to get myself into a good working situation. When I started Debt On, I was completely penniless. I had crazily moved to South Carolina on a prayer and fled the state with my last 100 dollars. I wasn’t homeless, I did what most 22-year-old guys just out of college would do when they fall flat-on-their-face broke: I moved in with my parents.

But I didn’t have a bedroom anymore. My sister and brother had juggled things around so that my brother lived in a room too small to share, and I just couldn’t live with my sister. So I was stuck in the guest bedroom. Which my parents had renovated into a hallway.

Debt On was drawn on my parents’ kitchen table either before everyone came home from work, or after everyone went to bed. The other times were entirely too noisy to get any work done. The computer work was done on the family computer, in the aforementioned hallway, over a dial-up Internet connection, fighting with my sister for screen time. While it was theoretically possible to produce the strip that way, it was an unsustainable model, and my month buffer eventually dwindled to nothing. And I know Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for years on his parents’ kitchen table, and to that I say that Mr. Schulz was an only child and did not own four dogs.

Anyway, while I retouched and tweaked some of the dialog for this strip I realized how much fun I really did have making the strips. But that brings me to the other part of the problem. In all my moving I very infrequently have the room to set up any kind of inking workspace. Just three weeks ago I finally got a bedroom where I could set up a desk, chair and bookcase.

But these things take time, and money. So far my time has been been occupied with finding some kind of employement, and my mind has been keeping a lock on my money for fear of a repeat of my last moving disaster. Worse, my computer keeps going down, this last time it was completely useless for almost two days. So I don’t dare do any serious comics projects for fear that all my work will be suddenly lost.

But know that getting back to some serious production is in the back of my brain. And that I have worked on some strips but embarrassingly never finished. When I first started taking cartooning seriously, I read a column of advice by Matt Groening for aspiring cartoonists. FINISH YOUR WORK! he said, that cartoons were uselss if they’re half-cooked ideas or half-drawn conversations. When I look over any of that unfinished work, I know that he was soooo right. And it really kills me when I realize that stuff was some of my best work and nobody has seen it at all.

But in the meantime, I’ve been keeping up here so long as my computer’s holding up. You might have noticed a few cosmetic changes recently as well. I also changed the essays page a little, making it kind of a best-of-blog in addition to its usual functions. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Charlie Brown jazz, and you can be certain I’ll be coming back to that very shortly. Other than that, I’m playing the guitar, loading my iPod and starting my new job tomorrow. (what!)

At the moment one of my favorite things in the world is jazz music. While I still consider myself a jazz novice, I’ve had a passing interest in it for a while now. But learning about something as enormous and diverse as jazz is challenging and progress takes time.

But I was delighted to learn early on in my search for jazz that several excellent jazz recordings were inspired by another great passion of mine: comic strips. From the moment they stepped into the animated realm, Charlie Brown and the Peanuts characters were captured in first-rate jazz tracks that showcased both their youthful energy and their somber meditation. Jazz themes completely dominated the musical landscape of the animated Peanuts, despite that the vast majority of musical references in the strip were classical.

I remember the moment it clicked for me – in mid-December several years ago. I was having breakfast in a bagel shop near my house in Massachusetts; things weren’t going great – I was moving out of my house because I couldn’t afford it any more, in fact I was planning on leaving town for good. The preceding months were full of financial setbacks, arguments and betrayals, and many of my remaining friends planned on moving shortly. So as I sat sipping my coffee and chewing my bagel, I listened to the Christmas Carols about how “comfort and joy” were supposed to be the only things I was feeling at that moment.

But one song didn’t assume my mood. One song very literally broke with tradition, it lulled you in with a quite standard piano rendition of O Tannenbaum, suddenly adding the sharp syncopation of a snare drum and the snazzy rhythm of a walking bass. My mind filled with glittering Christmas trees, reaching twenty, thirty feet overhead, covered in baubles, shining, shimmering, maybe painted pink, as spotlights crisscrossed in front, and shone into the heavens. And in the center of it all stood a sad little boy and a tiny, dying tree.

I thought back to my childhood, when I spent many nights under my covers with a flashlight and a copy of an old and ragged Peanuts paperback. I’d developed such an obsessive fascination with the characters that they adorned most of my possessions: lunch boxes, blankets, backpack, sneakers. There was also a soundtrack cassette of the special I was certain to sit down for every Christmas: A Charlie Brown Christmas.

This particular item never really held that much appeal for me – I couldn’t see the characters, couldn’t hear them, the album was almost completely unrelated. However it did quickly become my father’s favorite Christmas music, and while he seldom felt compelled to offer an opinion on many subjects, he was frequently vocal about his choice of Christmas carols, and so he kept the album alive in my mind for many years.

Until that day in the coffee shop, when I’d all but forgotten just how powerful some of those melodies were. I fled to the record store to try and find that album somehow, but I had no idea if it was hopelessly obscure or who the performers were. Lucky for me the clerk at a small hole-in-the-wall record store was not only aware of the album, he found it buried in a box of random insipid Christmas albums sung by everyone from Dolly Parton to Kenny G. The album was A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the composer was one Vince Guaraldi and his trio.

Part II | Part III

Now here’s a good birthday present. Cartoon Network started running Boondocks promos yesterday.

That’s right, today makes twenty-four years. It probably won’t be a particularly significant day, but with all the changes I’ve been making lately, it’s significant to start out my year like this.

Edit: I had to edit this because the weird non-sequiter I put here was driving me crazy. Anyway, if anyone’s interested in all this leak scandal and Judith Miller goodness, there’s a whole bunch of links to her story, the Times’ story, and some other stories, right here, clarifying that this investigation makes absolutely no sense. And I don’t really trust the Times anymore.

I’d just like to go on record as saying just how much I’m enjoying Kanye West’s new album, Late Registration. In so many ways it’s better than his first. It’s more mature, more lyrically and musically sophisticated, and I thought his first album was great.

The thing is, this guy does hip-hop like nobody else seems to, and he’s astoundingly commercially successful. It finally seems that hip-hop with some emotion besides belligerence is hitting the mainstream.

This album is so refreshing in this age of over-produced club beats. Sometimes Kanye becomes minimalist in his production, even using nothing but a rolling bass line and a siren soul singer to complement his poems.

My favorite track on the piece may be Roses, a song in the vein of Family Business on his last record, a truly heartfelt poem about AIDS and death. Kanye lays his lyrics early on over a very simple bass line, letting the beats take over halfway through as he throws on layer upon layer of chorused samples. The underproduction of the rap sections and the over-produced crescendo of the hook work masterfully together.

My second favorite track is Drive Slow, a kind of down and dirty gangster track with just a touch of a jazz saxophone to give it a really retro-soul flavor. It’s a beat to bounce to in your car worthy of Dr. Dre at his peak.

And then there’s Diamonds From Sierra Leone, a track with such a strong message told with such ferocity it’s nearly impossible to ignore it while it’s on. Kanye throws out track after track on this record with a diverse set of influences and an all-star guest list. And unlike Mos Def who seemed to throw every musical style he liked into every track on The New Danger, Kanye decides on a sound before he opens his toolbox.

That’s not to say this album doesn’t have some missteps, I know “Crack Music” has no real appeal to me, but when it works it really works. To me, Kanye West is the best producer working in hip-hop today and a formidable rapper, and it doesn’t look like that’s changing anytime soon.