1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (43 page)

The band had been singing about love for years, but this was a new kind of love, agape, the nonromantic form that embraced all humanity, the precursor to “All You Need Is Love” and Lennon’s peace anthems. In a few years, Lennon would determine that being an antiwar activist was the best use of his power, moving in the opposite trajectory of Dylan, who escaped into seclusion with his family.

For “The Word,” McCartney said, “we smoked a bit of pot, then we wrote out a multicolored lyric sheet, the first time we’d ever done that. We normally didn’t smoke when we were working. It got in the way of songwriting, because it would just cloud your mind up—‘Oh, shit, what are we doing?’ It’s better to be straight. But we did this multicolor thing.”
23

A year later, Yoko Ono came by McCartney’s house asking for song lyrics she could give to avant-garde composer John Cage, who collected manuscripts. McCartney didn’t have any, but he sent her on to Lennon, who gave her the colorful lyric sheet of the “The Word.” In a few years, she would become his partner in his antiwar efforts.

*   *   *

When interviewers asked Lennon
about LSD in August, he said he didn’t know much about it. But by October he was trumpeting it in the title of “Day Tripper,” which he wanted to be the next single. The title was a pun on day-trippers who journey somewhere but come home the same night, in the sense both of a girl who wouldn’t commit full time to him in a relationship and of “weekend hippies,” people who maybe partied with psychedelics a little on the weekend but then went back to their conventional lives. Ten months after Dylan sang about the drug-centric counterculture in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the lifestyle was now established enough for Lennon to critique a woman’s commitment to it.

But the other band members believed “We Can Work It Out” was a more commercial choice for the single. That song would stand as one of the last Beatles compositions to feature different parts written by each member of the songwriting team. It was predominantly McCartney’s piece, but Lennon wrote the bridge about life being too short to waste time fighting. Recording the piece took eleven hours, the longest time spent on a track to date. Harrison had the idea to do it like a German waltz. Lennon used a Salvation Army harmonium in his endless quest for new colors.

Still, Lennon argued vehemently that “Day Tripper” be the A side. They compromised with a double-A-side single, though, as the others predicted, McCartney’s effort was more popular, making it to No. 1 in the United States while “Day Tripper” made No. 5. “We Can Work It Out” turned out to be the group’s fastest-selling hit since McCartney’s previous A side, “Can’t Buy Me Love.” It was also the last of the Beatles’ streak of six U.S. No. 1 singles in a row.

“We Can Work It Out” was inspired by McCartney’s fights with Asher, with the singer imploring a woman to see it his way (though not offering to compromise), and it resonated with troubled couples everywhere. But the song was broad enough to hold numerous meanings. Some listeners applied it to the U.S. racial divide, some to the hope that the war in Vietnam could be averted.

Now the band just needed an album cover. Robert Freedman photographed them at Lennon’s house in brown suede jackets, then later regrouped with the band so they could pick which shot to use. McCartney recalled, “Whilst projecting the slides on to an album-sized piece of white cardboard, Bob inadvertently tilted the card backwards. The effect was to stretch the perspective and elongate the faces. We excitedly asked him if it was possible to print the photo in this way.”
24
Like the fish-eye lens cover of June’s
Mr. Tambourine Man
, the photo, stretching as it does like The Ad Lib’s table during Lennon and Harrison’s first acid trip, announced the onset of psychedelia, adding another layer to the pun of the album’s title.

25

Christmas Time Is Here

A Charlie Brown Christmas
brings a new honesty about psychotherapy while decrying consumerism; the Byrds hit No. 1 with words from
Ecclesiastes
;
Rubber Soul
inspires Brian Wilson to create the greatest rock album ever; Johnny Cash tangles with the Klan; and Stevie Wonder comes of age.

As the cultural
shifts in race relations, sexual mores, drug use, and patriotism shook the windows and rattled the walls, a heightened sense of mass anxiety was only natural. And as a new candor began to unfold, neurosis became the common denominator in everything from John Lennon’s angst-ridden confessionals such as “I’m a Loser” and “Help!” to the troubled superheroes of Marvel Comics.

In the April 1 edition of the
Village Voice
, Sally Kempton wrote that the “maladjusted adolescent Spider-Man” was “the only overtly neurotic superhero I have ever come across. Spider-Man has a terrible identity problem, a marked inferiority complex, and a fear of women. He is antisocial, castration-ridden, racked with Oedipal guilt, and accident-prone.”
1
Spider-Man went to a psychiatrist—though, unfortunately, the shrink turned out to be the villain Mysterio in disguise.

Freudian theories, such as subliminal effects on the subconscious, the Oedipus complex, and compensation, began making their way into the culture in the 1920s, through intellectuals and artists. By 1957, up to 14 percent of Americans had undergone some form of psychotherapy, particularly as it was used to try to help soldiers integrate back into civilian life.
2
Many still feared that going to a “head shrinker” implied that one was crazy, but between 1950 and 1975, the number of psychologists increased eightfold.
3

Eternal patient Woody Allen made his screenwriting and acting debut in
What’s New Pussycat?
It was the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year, featuring Peter Sellers as a psychotic psychiatrist who boasts, “My father was Vienna’s most renowned gynecologist. He was a brilliant pervert … I use all kinds of unorthodox therapies. For example, I’ve had the greatest success shutting people in dark closets.”
4

Like Allen, Charlie Brown was also a frequent visitor to his psychiatrist, Lucy, as he was plagued by pantophobia, “the fear of everything.” In the 1960s, half the United States read Charles Schulz’s
Peanuts
newspaper comic strip every morning, and on April 9, 1965, the characters appeared on
Time
’s cover.

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.