Trivia / Vince Guaraldi

• Breakthrough Hit: "Cast Your Fate to the Wind", inspired by the film Black Orpheus, became a massive hit in the early '60s. The jazz scene at large, not entirely enamored with the concept of jazz becoming "hit music", didn't like that at all, leading some to refuse to take him seriously as an artist. Some jazz critics maintain this opinion even today, though to much lesser extent than in Guaraldi's day.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Among his Peanuts compositions, he was clearly fond of "Peppermint Patty", which was his most frequently used non-"Linus & Lucy" cue, appearing in 8 of the 12 specials he scored after it was written (it didn't debut until Peppermint Patty herself made her animated debut in You're in Love, Charlie Brown, the fourth Peanuts special), as well as on Oh, Good Grief! and in the orchestrated Charlie Brown Suite he performed live in 1968.
• Development Hell:
  • The biographical documentary The Anatomy of Vince Guaraldi has been screened at various festivals a good few times, but has still not been released to home video.
  • A full music-only soundtrack album for the 1969 Peanuts movie A Boy Named Charlie Brown, featuring Guaraldi's music, other incidental cues by arranger John Scott Trotter and Rod McKuen's songs, was assembled in the early 2000s and very nearly got released, but rights issues wound up scuttling it. Read more about it here.^note It finally achieved a release in 2017—a 1,000 copy limited edition that quickly sold out.
• Died During Production: He died hours after he finished recording the score to It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown. The special aired six weeks after his death.
• Fatal Method Acting: Vince died during an intermission at a gig. Reports vary on whether it was from a heart attack or an aortic aneurysm
• He Also Did:
  • Guaraldi did the music for Bicycles Are Beautiful, an educational short film hosted and narrated by Bill Cosby about bicycle^note Or "BYE-CYE-cle" as he constantly pronounces it in the film. safety.
  • He played guitar on some of his work, notably on the funky theme for It's a Mystery..., as well as on a few cues from It's the Easter Beagle.... "Uno y Uno" on Alma-Ville is also a showcase for his guitar playing.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Considering how much he actually composed for Peanuts, a lamentably small part of his body of work has actually seen release. This leaves fans little choice but to rip and circulate recordings from the specials themselves.
  • His Fantasy Records material is readily available, but the only album released between his 1967 departure from Fantasy and his death that's constantly remained in print is Oh, Good Grief!. San Francisco Boys' Chorus, The Eclectic Vince Guaraldi and Alma-Ville all had CD reissues in the 2000s, but copies have become scarce and have been known to command triple-digit figures online. The last two of those finally got reissued in 2018 along with Oh, Good Grief! and a few bonus tracks as part of the Complete Warner Bros.-Seven Arts Recordings set.
  • The 2006 remix of A Charlie Brown Christmas featured alternate takes of "Greensleeves", "Christmas Time Is Here (Vocal)", "Christmas Is Coming" and "The Christmas Song" as bonus tracks, and "O Tannenbaum", "Christmas Time Is Here (Instrumental)" and "Skating" were presented in full, unedited takes for the first time. Initial pressings also had an alternate take of "Linus and Lucy" (which happened to be the exact version used in the TV special) and a second alternate take of "Christmas Is Coming" instead of the correct master takes. All of them went out of circulation when the 2006 remix was superceded by the 2012 remaster (whose bonus tracks were already available on Charlie Brown's Holiday Hits since 1998), so getting them now means hunting for a used 2006 CD (and telling whether it's the "defective" version or the corrected version is impossible without checking the matrix on the CD itself or listening to it — the "wrong" take of "Linus and Lucy" starts with piano only, the correct take starts with piano and drums).
  • An ultimate collectors edition of the album was released in 2022 featuring the original mix, a 2022 mix, and 2 CD discs worth of numerous takes, many of which are the versions used in the actual TV special. The “wrong” takes from the 2006 release are included amongst the many others which include gems like “Jingle Bells” and the slow melancholy version of “O Tannenbaum”. Of note however is the fact that the original tapes for the recording sessions of “My Little Drum”, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, and the TV version of “Christmas Time is Here (vocal)” have not been found yet.
  • A series of performances Guaraldi taped at KQED-TV in San Francisco in 1964^note intended as filler at the end of episodes of an imported British TV series of anthologized Guy de Maupassant stories that KQED was distributing to NET, the forerunner of PBS., highlighted by two originals he never recorded anywhere else ("Twilight of Youth", "Water Street") and the first known version of "Linus and Lucy", are available for viewing at the Library of Congress, but haven't been released to the public as of yet.
  • The only recorded artifact of Guaraldi's collaborations with Van Morrison (mentioned in What Could Have Been), a February 1973 radio broadcast of a Morrison show at the Lion's Share nightclub in San Anselmo, California, has long circulated in bootleg circles and online (with Guaraldi backing Morrison on Fender Rhodes electric piano in the show's second set), but has never been given a proper release.
• One-Take Wonder:
  • The first take of "O Tannenbaum" ended up on A Charlie Brown Christmas (though they tried a few more takes that changed the arrangement up a little). All the more impressive when you listen to the complete take on the 2022 deluxe edition and hear them nail it on the first try based only on some quick, rather vague instructions from Guaraldi on how he wants to structure the performance.
  • The vocal version of "Christmas Time is Here" that ended up on the album was the first complete take and second one overall (the first take broke down when the kids messed up the start of the first bridge).
• Out of Order:
  • Guaraldi's final three projects for Fantasy Records were Live at El Matador (recorded sometime in the spring of 1965), At Grace Cathedral (recorded May 21 of that year) and A Charlie Brown Christmas (recorded in September and October), but Live at El Matador was the last one released, coming out in October of 1966.
  • It sure seems like the two sides of A Charlie Brown Christmas might've been flipped from their logical sequence before release; it makes a lot more sense to open the album with the vocal version of "Christmas Time is Here", the same way it starts off the special, then end it with the instrumental version, which would give the album Bookends and a Longest Song Goes Last finish. Also, opening the second side with "O Tannenbaum" reflects its position as the underscore for the Christmas tree shopping scene midway through the special. A look at the album's Discogs page reveals that the first several issues of the vinyl version lacked a track listing on the back cover. The original 1965 release had pictures and bios of the show's creative team on the back, then a 1972 reissue switched it to a short essay by critic Ralph Gleason, which stayed on through further reissues in 1978 and 1982, but still without a track listing. The 1986 CD version and the 1988 vinyl reissue finally put the familiar listing with "O Tannenbaum" starting the album on the back. The 1965 version, however, doesn't specify "side 1" or "side 2" on the album label, just alphanumerical notations—"F-2531" (mono) and "F-2533" (stereo) for the "O Tannenbaum" side and "F-2532"/"F-2534" for the "Christmas Time is Here (Vocal)" side. The 1972 issue does label them as "side 1" and "side 2".
• Post-Release Retitle: Vince Guaraldi's third album was Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus, featuring the song "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" which became Guaraldi's breakthrough hit single. Sometime after the song caught on, the label redesigned the album cover◊ to add the blurb, "Featuring: Cast Your Fate to the Wind". Even later, they outright swapped the position of the blurb and the actual album title,◊ later adding "the original hit" underneath "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" after the Sounds Orchestral Cover Version became a hit in 1965. As a result, a lot of people to refer to the album as Cast Your Fate to the Wind even though it wasn't ever officially retitled.
• Screwed by the Network: A constant theme in his career with record labels. An audit showed that Fantasy was only giving him around 5% of his royalties, so he sued them, eventually winning a higher percentage and a release from his contract. Then he moved to Warner (Bros.) Records, but after Oh, Good Grief! got some sales, they did absolutely nothing to promote his next two albums and unceremoniously dropped him after that. Even long after his death he kept being screwed: his children sued Fantasy in 2011 for underpaid royalties when they discovered a discrepancy of at least $2 million in 2005-2010 alone.
• Scully Box: The cover of The Latin Side... features Vince cozying up to his comparatively Statuesque Stunner girlfriend of the time, standing on nothing less than a box of Brazilian coffee to make up for the height difference.
• Throw It In!: The released vocal take of "Christmas Time is Here" has the singers a bit off-key. The choir director was annoyed by this, but Guaraldi liked it because he thought it sounded more innocent and childlike.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Guaraldi sat in with Van Morrison at a few of Morrison's shows in the winter of 1972-73 (they lived a few miles apart from each other in Marin County, north of San Francisco, at the time), and was tapped by Morrison to help out with the recording of his Hard Nose the Highway album. But when Morrison didn't show up for their first scheduled recording session together, Guaraldi refused to work with Morrison any further. Morrison would later recall their collaboration fondly, and gave Guaraldi a Shout-Out in his 2016 song "In Tiburon".
  • After hiring The Sherman Brothers to compose the music for Snoopy, Come Home, Charles Schulz hoped to bring Guaraldi back to work on the music for Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown. Unfortunately, Guaraldi died shortly before the movie went into production.

---