Conventional wisdom is difficult to alter, but here goes: contrary to what has been widely written, Jesus Christ Superstar was not the first concept recording of a musical to spawn a wildly successful hit show. Sorry Andrew, sorry Tim.

It may well be that JCS was the first concept album to be the basis for a hit Broadway show, but the songs that formed the core of a hugely popular international success were first heard on vinyl in 1966 and landed on stage in New York in March 1967, for a run that would last for 1,597 performances, more than four years before the biblically-based musical. That show – and feel free to start singing the title tune now – was You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Composer Clark Gesner, who had previously written songs for television’s Captain Kangaroo children’s program, wrote the songs for YAGMCB with permission from Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz. According to Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis, Gesner’s first songs, the title track and “Suppertime,” kicked off conversations about a televised animated musical revue. Those plans were superseded by what became A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, the first animated Peanuts special, with memorable musical soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi, but not a musical under any conventional definition.

Consequently, Gesner’s songs first reached the ears of listeners, predominantly young listeners and their parents, in the autumn of 1966 when the 10-track, 25-minute concept recording of You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown was released on King Leo, the children’s division of MGM Records, a major label at the time Records (later issues were on Metro Records). It was billed as “an original MGM album musical” on the cover. The cast was Gesner as Linus, Barbara Minkus as Lucy, Bill Hinnant as Snoopy, and as Charlie Brown, actor-comedian-raconteur Orson Bean. Bean was had already appeared in eight Broadway shows, his most recent credit at the time being The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd.

Part of the reason the King Leo release has likely been lost to time was how quickly it was supplanted by the original cast recording – there was less than six months between the two – and as they were both released by MGM, no doubt marketing focused on the latter as soon as it was on record store shelves. Yet the 1966 concept recording is a fascinating document for fans of the musical, because it reveals how fully formed much of the score was before a stage incarnation was actually in the works. As a note for those who own the CD reissue cast recording on Decca Broadway dating to 2000 with tracks featuring Gesner and Minkus, those are from the demo entitled Peanuts in Song, which were the recordings Gesner sent to Schulz to secure his permission.

All ten of the songs on the King Leo album, including “Happiness,” “Snoopy” and “Little Known Facts” were in the show, some renamed, with the most prominent additions being “The Book Report” and “The Red Baron.” What’s most unexpected about the 1966 recording is its more varied orchestration: horns, strings and a most insistent clarinet are in evidence, no doubt replaced by the simpler piano and percussion mix of the show for financial reasons. Not unlike The Fantasticks, which kept TAGMCB from ever breaking records despite its notably long run, the show’s success was in part due to its small and economical scale.

To be fair to Rice and Lloyd Webber, their JCS concept album was for all practical purposes the complete score and libretto of their show. The YAGMCB album did not have an accompanying book and it was not through-sung, although some of the material which toggled between speech and singing were in place, as were some the introductory dialogue to the songs. The musical itself was largely written during the show’s four-week rehearsal, or, more accurately, assembled using the songs and Schulz’s strips to date, which at that point, with daily and Sunday counted, would have numbered roughly 5,875 through the end of 1966.

When Charlie Brown opened at Off-Broadway’s Theatre 80 St. Marks on March 7, 1967, only Hinnant remained from the concept recording, joined by his brother Skip as Schreoder, Bob Balaban as Linus, Karen Johnson as Patty, Reva Rose as Lucy and Gary Burghoff as Charlie Brown. The director was Joseph Hardy and the choreographer was Patricia Birch. The shift from Bean to Burghoff may have been simply a case of a successful Broadway and TV actor not wanting to commit to a small Off-Broadway show, but it also made sense because Burghoff was 15 years younger than the 37-year-old Bean; the role launched Burghoff into a  career defining role as Radar O’Reilly in the film and TV versions of M*A*S*H. Minkus could have easily played Lucy on stage, but it appears she was otherwise committed when the show opened, as one of the standbys for the role of Fanny Brice in the Broadway production of Funny Girl.

Were there other concept albums that preceded YAGMCB? Perhaps. This post isn’t meant to be the final word on the subject. But it should lay to rest the idea that Lloyd Webber and Rice were somehow the first to bring a show to the stage in this way, and certainly not the first to have enormous success as a result. After all, per David Michaelis’s book, the original production yielded 13 touring companies in the US (though more likely some of those were sit-down productions) and 15 international companies. It has been a staple of the musical theatre repertoire ever since, notably revived on Broadway, with new musical contributions by Andrew Lippa, in 1999.

So step aside, Jesus Christ (Superstar). Just as he was anointed in the Schulz drawing that introduced the 1966 album, the musical theatre concept album crown belongs to Charlie Brown.

The complete 1966 recording can be heard here:

For those unfamiliar with my lifelong affection for the Peanuts comics, you can read about it in my post, A Man Named Charlie Brown, from 2013.

Volume 1 of Fantagraphics’
The Complete Peanuts

In one of his best known stories, “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W,” the science fiction and fantasy author Harlan Ellison tells of a man who has lost his soul and who embarks on a metaphysical journey inside himself to find it again. At the end of his adventure he finds (partial spoiler alert) a bit of long forgotten pop culture ephemera.

I never need to go on the journey taken by Ellison’s protagonist, because while I know my soul is more complex than any single touchstone, I am certain of what looms largest inside the innermost me. That’s because it also happens to sit, at 18 volumes and counting, on the shelves across from where I write. I refer to “The Complete Peanuts,” an ongoing series of hardcover reprints from Fantagraphics of every “Peanuts” cartoon drawn by Charles M. Schulz, which still has several years to go before it is fully complete. Between those covers are perhaps the single greatest influence on me from age five to 15, and in many ways both the formation and reflection of my psyche.

A relatively early “cast” of Peanuts

Since I was born in the early 60s, “Peanuts” was already established by the time I began reading the comics page of the local newspaper. Thanks to tag sales and paperback reprints, I was able to work my way back to the strip’s earliest years without any difficulty.

Remarkably for a comic so steeped in Schulz’s own Midwestern childhood decades earlier, the Peanuts were a late 60s-early 70s phenomenon, as TV specials, a long-running musical and theatrical films spread the gospel of Charlie Brown and company (there was even a book called The Gospel According to Peanuts). Both the establishment and the bourgeoning counterculture found something they could share in Peanuts, and while there was surely a massive marketing campaign run by The Man, resulting in Happiness is a Warm Puppy taking  up permanent residence at cash registers everywhere, you could also find Peanuts-emblazoned merchandise in progressive record stores too, with Snoopy posters (maybe even some in blacklight-sensitive colors) on the walls behind the bong display cases.

I’ve only read the first volume or two of the collected works, even though I buy them as they’re published; they seem to call for a certain kind of lazy Sunday afternoon, perhaps in a hammock, that one rarely finds in Manhattan life. Even those earliest strips remain familiar; they don’t trigger a forgotten memory like a random madeleine, but merely jog my brain where snapshots of the strips reside barely out of reach, filed, not faded. While the digital transition continues apace, I’m putting these books aside to be read by me in two or three decades, though youthful visitors with clean hands will be welcome to page through them in the meantime.

Here’s the World War I
Flying Ace, high over
France…

While a biography has already emerged which links, in some cases unfavorably, Schulz’s own life with that of his characters, I have no particular interest in the artist’s role as a man, a husband, or father. As much as possible, I want to retain that childhood innocence where the work simply exists, that time before we fully realize that an actual person has created these things we read.

Then, as now, Peanuts is a marvel. The main characters are archetypes: the ever aspiring but never succeeding Charlie Brown, the take-no-prisoners Lucy, the contemplative Linus, the artistically single-minded Schroeder, the free-spirited and soulful Snoopy. It’s worth noting that for all of the other characters Schultz created, these five were the core of the strip; Violet, Patty, Shermy, Frieda, Franklin, Pig Pen, Woodstock, Spike and so many others were always supporting players. Schroeder even ran out of steam after a while, ceding his lead position to both Sally and Peppermint Patty.

But for me, Peanuts was all about Charlie Brown and Snoopy – the former being the person I saw myself as, the latter being the personification of who I hoped to be. I never could kick a football, even if it wasn’t snatched away from me; I couldn’t throw or hit a baseball; the little red headed girl (or blonde or brunette) would barely notice me, let alone return my affection. I couldn’t let go of that enough to enjoy the simple pleasures of a good meal (suppertime!) or an imaginative foray into dark territory. No Red Barons for me – too scary.  Even as I achieved academically, even as I began to gather a group of friends with whom I am close four decades later, I always felt like the kid who got a rock in his Halloween candy, the kid laying flat on his back, staring at the sky, wondering why he’d fallen for the same ridicule yet again.

Flyer for Amity Junior High School’s 1977
You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown

Peanuts even provided my entryway into theatre. The first time I can recall performing publicly, I played the title role in a significantly truncated and surely unauthorized presentation of You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown at my day camp at age six or seven; in ninth grade, in the first musical ever produced at my junior high, I played Snoopy in the complete show, taking on the persona to which I aspired. I can’t remember auditioning for either engagement, but perhaps there’s something to be gleaned from the fact that while in my single digits, others saw me as I saw myself, while perhaps seven years later I could assume (or had assumed) a more exuberant façade.

I muse on my one-time obsession and future comfort because after decades of ever-less-inspired television specials, I read last week that the Peanuts characters will soon return to the big screen…in 3D rendered images and 3D projection. I will stop short of calling this sacrilege, because, as I say, the original work remains intact. But I worry about Peanuts going the way of Alvin and the Chipmunks, Underdog or Rocky and Bullwinkle, other childhood treats who proved to have less dimension when a third was added. Peanuts, like The Simpsons, have always looked vaguely creepy when fully modeled; they are best suited for the two-dimensions of the page precisely because they function in an isolated world wholly their own and their distinctive features can seem monstrous when extrapolated into something resembling reality. The makers of the stage musical intuited that immediately, which is why there are no oversized heads or dog costumes in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

I am not a die-hard collector of memorabilia; there is no “Peanuts room” filled with collectibles in my apartment. But my bookshelves belie my interests. Those Peanuts volumes share space with the complete works of Berkeley Breathed (“Bloom County” and its successors), I’m working out a justification for buying the multi-volume hardcover compendium of “Calvin and Hobbes,” and I should probably start squirreling away funds for the as yet unannounced but hopefully forthcoming complete “Doonesbury.”

I will spend hundred of dollars on these books because I want to hold them in my hands the way I did when I first read them, not scroll through them on a screen. “Doonesbury” is and will be the chronicle of American life in my era (conveniently beginning in New Haven when I was growing up there). But Peanuts – which ended just before Schultz died in 2000 – will be the constant reminder of my childhood, and in some ways the record of it as well, the philosophy, the psychology and the often rueful humor that gave birth to me as I am today, burrowed deep inside my brain and my heart.