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Questions? Email: tim@fatmanvinyl.com

Fat Records, Vol. I | FROM YOUR HEAD TO YOUR FEET: THE JAZZ MUSIC OF PAJAMA SAM

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE SIGNED RECORDS IS PRESSED ON UNIQUE, MULTICOLORED VINYL, NEVER to be repressed!

Extremely limited edition 12" LP featuring a specially curated selection of Pajama Sam 3 jazz cues. The original studio sessions have been professionally remixed and dramatically remastered specifically for the turntable and pressed on "Moptop Sunset" vinyl, a random assortment of gorgeous colors chosen to be complimentary and blended accordingly.


TRACKLIST:

A1. I R Sam
A2. Loungy One Suite
A3. One-Four Carnival 3
A4. The Mighty Fairground 2
A5. Jungle Minnie 1

B1. Intro 1
B2. Jungle Minnie 2
B3. More Out
B4. Top Banana 2
B5. Top Banana 3

Includes unlimited streaming of Pajama Sam 3 (Remastered Soundtrack: Super Deluxe Edition) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.

**Previously unreleased before the Super Deluxe Edition.

This album, The Fat Man and Team Fat are in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Humongous Entertainment, Tommo Inc. or Billionsoft Ltd.

Buy the game from Humongous! https://www.humongous.com/pajama-sam

--

Sometimes the general of whatever it is declares war on something else, and somehow you are in your pajamas and your stomach and it's about being brave. And there's a detective who is a vegetable. And you bring in pro jazz players, you play the blues in jail, your buddy learns to play sax to help, and you re-learn trumpet after decades of not playing, and you mix everything together and it is Glorious. And so for the days when you get to work on that project, you feel very very good about what you came to this planet to do.

–George "The Fat Man" Sanger


LINER NOTES FOR THE SUPER DELUXE EDITION:

Hi guys, Tim the Curator here.

I think these are the world's first soundtrack releases that have been handled much like games themselves, with continuing patches, updates, and what's essentially free DLC. It's fun. I just wish I'd been maintaining a changelog somewhere.

George and I are friends. I'm very lucky to get to say that. So we stay in touch and collaborate on things here and there. Sometimes he has new ideas for the Humongous albums, and sometimes I do, so we chat. It's music that's very close to his heart, and after over a decade of working on it, he knows I know his Humongous archives like the back of my Pajama Man lunchbox. (I don't actually have one of those. But it would be cool.)

The Super Deluxe Edition arose when he asked me if we had "Dangerous When Shaken" with its burp sounds intact. In the game, you can hear some burps and belches in the background—but not so in our previous album release. I believe DWS is George's favorite single from all of PJS3, it's his pajama-clad baby, and apparently it's bugged him for a number of years that the burps weren't being heard by you, the fans!

I dug through the vaults and informed him that sadly, no, the versions on the album were all we had—to which he replied, “well, what about THIS?”

He sent me an MP3 of a track ripped from a CD. The track was exactly what we were looking for, burps and all.

Whaaaaa? Apparently, George had a disc in his office that represented an earlier, circa 1999, attempt to create a soundtrack release. Here's a photo: https://imgur.com/a/Mnse4Df

George and I have been working together on releasing his Humongous music for over twelve years now. That's a long time for him to be sitting on a piece of treasure like this. He knew this as well as you or I do, and he even sheepishly asked my forgiveness for withholding it for so long. It wasn't on purpose—there's a TON of Humongous music, hours and hours of it, and it was all produced decades ago, and a lot of it is fractured across different locations. It would be easy for anybody to lose track of it all. I told him he needed no forgiveness and he had only my excitement. What else was on the CD besides burps??

By sheer miracle, there were two more tracks on that disc by Joe that we'd been missing for years, as well as a sweet spoken word intro George recorded in '99. I decided to go back to the vault and plumb the original tapes to see what else I could find with which to beef up the stew, and surprise, I wound up finding quite a lot.

This Super Deluxe Edition is inspired by the amazing, vault-clearing releases of the music of The Beatles; the 2022 Super Deluxe Edition of Vince Guaraldi's score for A Charlie Brown Christmas; and the absolutely singular, ingenious work of Mike Matessino, a legendary figure in the world of soundtrack release production and preservation who has been perhaps the single most prominent inspiration for The Curator Project in general. It's also dedicated to the memory of the incredibly unique talent J.W. Rinzler, another pioneer and hero to so many in the art archival space. Shoulders of giants.

Read below for track-specific notes.

1. INTRODUCTION — This absolutely charming spoken word introduction is from the aforementioned 1999 draft of a Pajama Sam 3 soundtrack album that George authored on a CD. I saw no reason that it shouldn’t be the opening track on this, his best-selling, most beloved album of the Humongous catalog.

2. DEN GROOVE — It wasn’t clear what this was on the tapes originally, and we thought it was redundant between “Den Mother” and “Big Den Groove.” Turns out it’s unique material, and a Super Deluxe release is the perfect opportunity to include it.

3. BLOOOOZ — This is an early session by George on his own that would eventually become the jailhouse music, “Down the Disposal.” George originally planned to cut it into seven sections. I LOVE this track, especially after George (in the modern day) put some mixing polish on it. I love getting to spend time with the musician “in the studio,” hearing his process. Some of you might, too.

4. JAILHOUSE JAM — Now this is a gem. I was trying (believe it or not) to make our releases a tiny bit leaner when I designed the Pajama Sam 3 Remastered Soundtrack after the Putt-Putt Saves The Zoo Remastered Soundtrack, compared to the absolutely-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach I had with Zoo, which some people told me made it hard for them to find what they really liked. So this stayed on the cutting room floor. For the Super Deluxe, however, this kind of thing is a perfect fit. It’s just George and Joe jamming out some jail cell blues, and it is magical. What a time capsule. It’s almost 13 minutes long and I love every second of it.

5. SORBET STRUT 2 — The ultimate missing piece, literally. This cue by Joe plays in the Food Pyramid Grounds. Many of you might recognize it. But when you have two composers with different styles, collaborating on dozens of different tracks that need to be submitted for approval, tweaked and revised according to notes given by the developers, then resubmitted, then backed up on ADAT 8-tracks, then sometimes revised again...it's easy to leave something out of the archive. George is very rare in how attentive he was about maintaining an up-to-date archive of all the music he and his team were producing, and even with his efforts, unreliable technology would occasionally fail, dooming some work to oblivion. The most important thing at the time was, naturally, that the music made it successfully to the client so that they could fulfill their contract, do their job, and be paid. I've met Joe; he is a consummate artist and an absolutely wonderful human being, and in his own words, he was never as passionate about "maintaining the archive" as George was. Joe has the kind of creative genius where he'll come up with a new piece of music, hammer it out, send it off, and then...never think about it again. Music FLIES through his brain like I can't imagine. He doesn't hang onto the past. George always had his work cut out for him trying to root Joe to the earth long enough to get him to properly back up his work "according to procedure," and as best I can figure, despite Sorbet Strut 2 being a final mix that made it into the game, any archival of it simply slipped through the cracks. Finding it on the CD—the last piece of in-game music from Pajama Sam 3 that we were missing from these remasters—is a minor miracle for which I'm quite grateful.

6. BULL IN A CHOCOLATE SHOP 1 — This is the first draft of what would become Bull in a Chocolate Shop 3, which also plays in the Food Pyramid Grounds. It was cut from the first Remastered Soundtrack for being redundant—it's just a bit shorter than its successors, and otherwise very similar. But in the Super Deluxe Edition, it's pretty fun to listen to all three in a row and hear exactly how Joe developed the tune step-by-step.

7. CANDY MOUNTAIN SPRING — This was in the game, sort of. It's in the game's data, but along with Here They Come, Sweet Pete 2, He's So Horny, and Spanish Planes, it's not accessible during normal gameplay; it's never actually cued to play. Not only is it on the game disc but never heard, the master was also accidentally overwritten on the studio tapes! I thought it was lost forever. But because George decided to include it on his original soundtrack album draft, it was safely backed up on that CD, waiting to be discovered over 25 years later. Now it can be restored!

8. DANGEROUS (WITH BURPS) — We found it! According to George, someone at Humongous wasn't a big fan of the burps and requested they be removed at the last minute. George complied, though he always preferred the version that included them. Lots can be lost in communication between the composing team, the programmers, and the creative director, and unbeknownst to George, despite the revision request, the slightly earlier version with burps is what made it into the game—but the version without is what was treated as the "final" mix on his studio tapes, overwriting the burp mix. Thank goodness for the '99 soundtrack CD, as it's the only backup either of us knows to exist.

9-14. JAZZ — George and I talked a little when I was designing the PJS3 Remastered Soundtrack about putting the best stuff forward, and maybe leaving out some of the rest. When designing the Zoo soundtrack I'd gotten pretty obsessed with including EVERYTHING I could find, and neither of us were sure if that was the tact to take with Sam 3. So we tried to be mindful and conscious, and in many cases, select only the best takes to release. Time went by and in 2022, I was astonished to listen to "A Charlie Brown Christmas: Super Deluxe Edition," a four-hour version of the usually 35-minute soundtrack from the Peanuts Christmas special by Vince Guaraldi. That extra 3.5 hours of audio is entirely time spent in the studio with Vince and his band as they work through dozens upon dozens of takes, try out little experimental ideas, and chat with each other in the margins. I absolutely loved it. Fans of The Beatles are already familiar with this kind of content, hearing it in their own Super Deluxe album editions as well as seeing it in documentaries like Peter Jackson's "Get Back" and the Anthology series. So with these precedents, and being on the lookout for anything in the archive to include in our new edition of the Pajama Sam 3 album, I was delighted to include the first couple takes of One-Four Carnival (all takes are now included); the transitional Loungy One material in which you can hear it transform into More Out; "Drumrolls and Practice"; the Funnybone Stingers that never found use; and the first, prototypal take of Top Banana.

The jazz music of Pajama Sam 3 was all recorded over just about an hour on the afternoon of November 14, 1999, and now nearly every second of it is included on this album. I hope it's as much of a treat for you as it is for me to be able to sit in on that session, to hear the ideas being worked out, and to hear the chatter of some brilliant musicians as they come together to create the background music of our childhoods.

Thanks for your support and for joining us on this journey. It's a constant pleasure.

–Tim the Curator

Internationally known as The Fat Man, George Alistair Sanger’s influence is hard to overestimate. Through his work, his writings, the founding of think-tanks, organizations and communities—but mainly his music—this “legendary game audio guru’s” fingerprints are all over much of what it means today to create game audio or listen to a game.