June | 2024 | Hack's Back Pages

Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

“Schoooooool’s out for summer!!…” Alice Cooper, 1972

The summer solstice, the date when we experience the year’s longest day and shortest night, was yesterday, marking the official beginning of summer. Woo hoo!!

It’s the season when the kids go off to camp, when families pack up and head out on vacation, when couples take leisurely bike rides, when everybody heads to the beach for the day, or goes waterskiing at the lake, or enjoys fireworks at a baseball game. It’s the dog days. The lazy hazy crazy days of summer!

Popular music lyrics have done a marvelous job over the years of describing the events, emotions and nuances of the different seasons. Summer, the time for fun in the sun, is no exception.

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Indeed, there may be more songs celebrating summer than any other season. It was a challenge, but I’ve assembled a “Sweet Sixteen” setlist of songs of summer (plus another 20 honorable mentions) that might be a great companion as you head to the beach, to the river, to the mountains, or just to the backyard hammock to chill for a while. Put on your flip-flops and enjoy the season!

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“Summer’s Here,” James Taylor, 1981

It may have been because he always used to release albums in May or June, but Taylor’s music invariably makes me think of summer — cheerful melodies, whimsical lyrics, days at the beach, outdoor concerts. On his “Dad Loves His Work” LP in 1981, he captured all that in “Summer’s Here,” which celebrates the season’s hotly anticipated arrival: “Summer’s here, that suits me fine, it may rain today, ’cause I don’t mind, it’s my favorite time of the year, and I’m glad that it’s here… Yeah, the water’s cold but I’ve been in, baby lose the laundry and jump on in, I mean, all God’s children got skin, and it’s summer again…”

“Summertime,” Sam Cooke, 1957

George Gershwin took a DuBose Heyward poem and set it to music as a hybrid of jazz, blues and gospel in 1934, when it was used prominently in the modern opera “Porgy and Bess.” “Summertime” went on to become one of the most covered compositions of all time (5,000 versions and counting). It first hit the charts in Billie Holiday’s rendition in 1936, and I’ve always been partial to Sam Cooke’s 1957 version, but it was Billy Stewart’s more gimmicky arrangement that reached the Top Ten in 1966. Janis Joplin served up a fabulous treatment on the #1 album “Cheap Thrills” in 1968…and don’t miss Peter Gabriel’s knockout version on 1994’s “The Glory of Gershwin” collection, and Annie Lennox’s cover in 2014: “Summertime and the living is easy, catfish are jumping and the cotton is high…”

“Summer Breeze,” Seals and Crofts, 1972

This euphoric tune has appeared on almost every “Best Songs of Summer” list you can find. Jimmy Seals and Dash Crofts had been working in several bands throughout the ’60s before they finally hit it big as a duo with this #6 hit, released in August 1972. (Why didn’t they release it in June? It might’ve made #1…). The Isley Brothers had some success with a funkier version in 1974. Crofts said he wrote it one day when he was feeling particularly happy about his new life with his new wife: “Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind, sweet days of summer, the jasmine’s in bloom, July is dressed up and playing her tune…”

“Summer in the City,” The Lovin’ Spoonful, 1966

You can almost feel the sweat dripping from John Sebastian’s brow as he sang this timeless #1 anthem that alternately bemoans and celebrates summer days and summer nights when the thermometer is in the 90s. Make it through the hot days, it said, and the warm nights would bring rewards: “Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck gettin’ dirty and gritty, been down, isn’t it a pity, doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city… But at night, it’s a different world, go out and find a girl… And babe, don’t you know it’s a pity that the days can’t be like the nights in the summer in the city, in the summer in the city…”

“One Summer Dream,” Electric Light Orchestra, 1975

ELO leader Jeff Lynne has always been an unabashed Beatles fan, and his band’s music has often shown the Fab Four’s influence. On their first of four Top Ten albums, 1975’s “Face the Music,” several tracks resembled latter-day Beatles music, most notably the ethereal album closer, “One Summer Dream,” full of wistful emotion, vocals that sound eerily like John Lennon, and a melody that seems to float by: “Warm summer breeze blows endlessly, touching the hearts of those who feel, one summer dream, one summer dream…”

“Someone Somewhere (in Summertime),” Simple Minds, 1982

This Scottish band was far more successful in England and Europe with a half-dozen Top Five LPs in the 1980s, but their fame in the US was more limited. Too bad — this is an extraordinary band worth exploring further. On its “New Gold Dreams” LP in 1982 is this lush, almost erotic song that British critics gushed about — “It starts 100 feet above the ground and never comes to earth,” said one; “It’s a magisterial waltz through a mythical August haze,” said another. A beautiful piece, without question: “Somewhere there is some place that one million eyes can’t see, and somewhere there is someone who can see what I can see, someone, somewhere, in summertime…”

“Summer Rain,” Johnny Rivers, 1967

John Ramistella, better known by his stage name Johnny Rivers, grew up in Louisiana but found fame as a singer in Nashville, often recording covers like Chuck Berry’s “Memphis” and The Four Tops’ “Baby I Need Your Lovin’.” He reached #3 on US pop charts in 1966 with “Secret Agent Man” and wrote his only #1 hit, “Poor Side of Town,” the same year. In the fall of 1967, he scored with “Summer Rain,” a joyously wistful song that looked back on the so-called “Summer of Love” that year, even referencing The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” album, the #1 LP of the summer.

“Cruel Summer,” Bananarama, 1983

Three British ladies formed the pop vocal group Bananarama in 1981, scoring nine Top Ten hits in England throughout the 1980s. One of their earliest hits was “Cruel Summer,” written by group member Sara Dallin. “It played on the darker side of summer songs, talking about the oppressive heat, and the misery of longing to be with someone as the summer ticked by,” she said. “We’ve all been there.” A year later in 1984, the song was featured on the soundtrack of the film “The Karate Kid,” and reached #9 on US charts. Two years later, Bananarama’s cover of the 1970 hit “Venus” became an international #1 single.

“Summertime Blues,” Eddie Cochran, 1958

In 1958, Cochran wrote this rockabilly classic that shares a teen’s lament about having to work a summer job instead of play, and it not only reached #8 upon release, it ranked #73 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Rock Songs of All Time.” Blue Cheer’s distorted version is credited with being the first heavy metal song to make the charts (#14 in 1967), and The Who’s fierce rendition on their 1970 live album “Live at Leeds” reached #27. Country artist Alan Jackson reached the top of the country charts in 1994 with his spirited recording: “Every time I call my baby to try to get a date, my boss says, ‘No dice, son, you gotta work late,’ sometimes I wonder what I’m gonna do, there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues…”

“Suddenly Last Summer,” The Motels, 1983

In the music video for “Suddenly Last Summer,” an ice-cream truck appears periodically, which New Wave singer Martha Davis said was meant to remind us that summer’s nearing an end and “it’s going by for the last time and won’t be back for a while.” Perhaps that’s a key reason the song peaked at #9 well into the autumn of 1983, when memories of summer had mostly faded for the year. Except perhaps for “Only the Lonely” from the previous year, this track was The Motels’ finest moment: “It happened one summer, it happened one time, it happened forever for a short time, a place for a moment, an end to a dream, forever I loved you, forever it seemed…”

“The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” Joni Mitchell, 1975

Mitchell’s commercial high-water mark, 1974’s “Court and Spark,” showed the first inklings of her interest in jazz, and her follow-up LP took a deeper dive into jazz pop and more experimental material. While it contained no hit single, “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” still reached #4 in the US and is widely praised today. The title track is a fascinating exploration of the traps and frustrations of suburban life: “He bought her a diamond for her throat, he put her in a ranch house on a hill, /She could see the valley barbecues from her window sill, /See the blue pools in the squinting sun, hear the hissing of summer lawns…”

“Hot Fun in the Summertime,” Sly & The Family Stone, 1969

For a couple of years, before drug use did major damage to this band’s momentum, Sly Stone and his integrated group were commercial and critical favorites (“Dance to the Music,” “Everyday People,” “Family Affair,” “Stand!” “I Want to Take You Higher”), and this exuberant song was probably one of the main reasons why. It simply reeks of the joys of summer: “End of the spring and here she comes back, hi hi hi hi, there, them summer days, those summer days, that’s when I had most of my fun back, high high high there, them summer days, those summer days…”

“Hot Summer Day,” It’s a Beautiful Day, 1969

Violin prodigy David LaFlamme, a founding member of the San Francisco-based band known as It’s a Beautiful Day, was also an accomplished songwriter and singer, and his group should’ve been on par with Jefferson Airplane and other Bay Area bands, but their manager packed them off to Seattle for a lengthy residency at a club he owned there. The group thus missed their opportunity, but had one fleeting moment with their self-titled debut LP and the single “White Bird,” which was an FM radio favorite nationwide. That song and the following track, the dreamy “Hot Summer Day,” were co-written and co-sung by LaFlamme’s wife Linda.

“All Summer Long,” The Beach Boys, 1964

No summer song playlist is complete without a selection from California’s worshipers of sun and fun, The Beach Boys. Brian Wilson and Mike Love collaborated on this track, the title song of their fourth Top Ten album, and the first following the arrival of The Beatles and British Invasion bands in the summer of 1964. It was to be their last album that focused on beach culture, and this song condensed everything they’d done so far into one succinct party tune: “Miniature golf and Hondas in the hills, when we rode the horse, we got some thrills, every now and then, we hear our song, we’ve been having fun all summer long…”

“In the Summertime,” Mungo Jerry, 1970

A classic one-hit wonder on the US charts (#3 in the summer of ’70), Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” went on to sell 25 million copies worldwide. Singer-songwriter Ray Dorset took the band to significant success in their native UK, with several #1 albums and various hit singles. Here’s a fun bit of trivia: The name “Mungo Jerry” comes from the T.S. Eliot poem “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser.” Whatever. To me, the song is an infectious earworm that is still catchy today: “In the summertime when the weather is hot, you can stretch right up and touch the sky, when the weather’s fine, you got women, you got women on your mind…”

“The Boys of Summer,” Don Henley, 1984

I vascillated about this song, trying to decide if it really belonged on this list or if it was more appropriate for a setlist of songs of autumn (“after the boys of summer have gone”). The images it brings up — “Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach, I can feel it in the air, summer’s out of reach…” — undeniably describe the end of summer. But still, it sounds like a summer song, and well, here it is, for better or worse: “I can see you, your brown skin shining in the sun, you got that top pulled down and that radio on, baby, I can tell you my love for you will still be strong after the boys of summer have gone…”

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Honorable mentions:

“Summer Lady,” Santana, 1979; “Long Hot Summer Night,” Jimi Hendrix Experience, 1968; “Summer Nights,” Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta, 1978; “Summer Soft,” Stevie Wonder, 1976; “Summerday Sands,” Jethro Tull, 1975; “A Summer Song,” Chad and Jeremy, 1964; “Summer Days,” Bob Dylan, 2001; “Summer of ’69,” Bryan Adams, 1985; “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” Bruce Springsteen, 2007; “Summer of Love,” Jefferson Airplane, 1989; “Summertime Dream,” Gordon Lightfoot, 1975; “Summer Wind,” Lyle Lovett, 2003; “Youth of 1,000 Summers,” Van Morrison, 1990; “Summer Day,” Blodwyn Pig, 1969; “Black Summer Rain,” Eric Clapton, 1976; “Summer Holiday,” Chris Isaak, 2009; “Long Hot Summer,” The Style Council, 1983; “Endless Summer Nights,” Richard Marx, 1987; “Summerfling,” k.d. lang, 2000; “Lonely Summer Nights,” Stray Cats, 1982.

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We’re jammin’ in the name of the Lord

Posted on 10 Days Ago by brucehhackett

“This is my message to you: Don’t worry about a thing, ’cause every little thing gonna be all right…” — Bob Marley

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Insistent yet gentle offbeat rhythms. Lyrics of overwhelming positivity and confident pursuit of justice. Fiercely defiant, yet warmly exhilarating.

That, in a nutshell, is the essence of reggae music. Or, as any Jamaican bus driver will tell you: “It’s island music, mon.”

Reggae, born in Jamaica in the ’60s, blends a tantalizing hybrid of ska, mento and calypso musical strains with a powerful lyrical message that focuses on social criticism and political consciousness, and the need for positive vibes, eternal love, joy and peace. It’s most readily distinguished by its rhythmic emphasis on the offbeat, or backbeat (the second and fourth beat), instead of the downbeat (first and third beat), which characterizes most pop music styles.

Much more than many musical genres, reggae also has strong ties to religion, specifically Rastafarianism, a religious and social movement (they prefer “a way of life”) founded by Afro-Jamaicans in 1930s Jamaica primarily as a rejection of British colonialism. Its beliefs include the healing powers of copious cannabis use and hypnotic, rhythmic music “to achieve the spiritual balance necessary for a satisfying existence.”

Hmmm. Not exactly mainstream thinking in America at that time, although fringe audiences in isolated regions around the world took to it enthusiastically — both the music and the message.

Reggae first found favor outside Jamaica in the early 1970s in England, where West Indian communities in and around London helped expose music lovers to the genre there. Indeed, major British pop stars like Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton developed an interest in the island rhythms from hearing it performed by Jamaican musicians in the clubs of London.

Here in the United States, the acceptance and assimilation of reggae into the popular music market seems to have had a peculiar off-and-on history throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Its first appearance here, it’s generally agreed, came when an American-born artist — Johnny Nash, a Houston-based pop singer-songwriter — took his version of Jamaica’s indigenous music to #5 on the U.S. charts in 1968 with the catchy “Hold Me Tight.” But if record companies were expecting to then cash in on a flood of reggae songs and bands, it didn’t happen. (At least not yet.)

True, The Beatles, always savvy and forward-looking in their musical development, took a shot at reggae during sessions that same summer for “The White Album.” McCartney explains: “I had a friend named Jimmy who was a Nigerian conga player, and he was a happy happy guy all the time, like a philosopher to me, because he had all these great expressions about life. One of them was ‘obladi, oblada, life goes on, bra…’ I told him I loved it and was going to use it in a fun little song I was writing that used a rhythmic approach I was starting to hear from Jamaican bands in the London clubs at the time. Wonderful vibe, this music called reggae. So that’s what ‘Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da’ was, our rudimentary attempt at reggae. I don’t know if we quite got it, but we had a blast trying.” But it wasn’t a single, just one of 30 album tracks, so it didn’t achieve widespread popularity until nearly a decade later.

So reggae went back into hiding for a few years until the great Paul Simon, always curious about “world music” and intriguing new rhythms, visited Kingston in 1971 to record his new song “Mother and Child Reunion.” He admired reggae artists like Jimmy Cliff and Desmond Dekker and wanted to explore the music further at its source, using Jamaican musicians who instinctively knew the way it should be played. He invited Cliff’s backing group to accompany him on the recording, and the result was also a #5 hit that put reggae back in the public eye.

The attention Cliff gained from that connection helped him later that year when he released “The Harder They Come,” the soundtrack album to the movie of the same name (in which he also starred). The film, a crudely made crime drama, was largely ignored but later became a favorite with the midnight-movie crowd.

Then, in the fall of 1972, a reggae song finally reached #1 on the charts here (and in Canada) when Nash returned with “I Can See Clearly Now,” the most popular song in the U.S. for four straight weeks. A year later, Clapton took the plunge that inadvertently brought reggae to an entirely new level in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Recalled the guitarist, “We were in Miami cutting the album that became ‘461 Ocean Boulevard.’ One day, guitarist George Terry came in with an album called ‘Burnin” by Bob Marley and the Wailers, a band I’d never heard of. When he played it, I was mesmerized. George especially liked the track ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ and kept saying to me, ‘You should cut this, we could make it sound great.’ But it was hard-core reggae and I wasn’t sure we could do it justice. We did a version of it anyway, and although I didn’t say so at the time, I wasn’t that enamored with it. Ska, bluebeat and reggae were familiar to me, but it was still quite new to American musicians, and they weren’t as finicky as I was about the way it should be played — not that I really knew myself how to play it. I just knew we weren’t doing it right.

“When we got to the end of the sessions, and started to collate the songs we had, I told them I didn’t think ‘Sheriff’ should be included, as it didn’t do the Wailers’ version justice. But everyone said, ‘No, no, honestly, this is a hit.’ And sure enough, when the album was released and the record company chose it as a single, to my utter astonishment, it went straight to Number One. Though I didn’t meet Bob Marley until much later, he did call me up when the single came out and seemed pretty happy with it. I tried to ask him what the song was about, but I couldn’t understand much of his reply. I was just relieved that he liked what we had done with it.”

Marley had been a tireless devotee and champion of reggae throughout its early years of development, when his fellow Wailers (including Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer), along with Toots and The Maytals, were the true pioneers of the genre. It was Marley, through his songwriting, singing and relentless performing, who caught the eye and ear of Chris Blackwell, founder of the seminal Island Records and a native Jamaican himself.

In Marley, Blackwell recognised the elements needed to snare the rock audience: “Rock music was always rebel music at heart, and so was reggae. I felt that demonstrating that similarity would really be the way to break Jamaican music in the U.S. But you needed someone who could be that image. When Bob walked in, it was clear to me that he really was that image.”

He signed Marley to a lucrative contract in 1973, let him loose in his studios in the Bahamas and England, and sat back and waited. The debut LP, “Catch a Fire,” marked the first time a reggae band had access to a state-of-the-art studio and were accorded the same care as their rock ‘n’ roll peers. Blackwell, hoping to create “more of a drifting, hypnotic-type feel than a rudimentary reggae rhythm,” restructured Marley’s arrangements and supervised the mixing and overdubbing.

While the album and its immediate follow-up, “Burnin’,” didn’t do much on the charts, the songs were getting better, and the rock critics and savvy listeners (especially in the UK) caught on. When Marley made his debut live appearance in London in 1975 (and the concert was later released as the “Live!” LP), he had become a major sensation there, with his iconic “No Woman, No Cry” climbing to #8 on the UK charts.

Marley had been complimentary of the efforts of Nash and Simon to expose American audiences to the world of reggae, and he publicly endorsed Clapton’s version of “Sheriff,” but he remained determined in the belief that only Jamaicans could play reggae as intended.

He told Britain’s Uncut magazine in 1976, “The real reggae must come from Jamaica. Others can go anywhere and play funk and soul, but reggae — too hard. Must have a bond with it. Reggae has to be inside you.”

By the release of “Rastaman Vibration” later that year, Marley’s music had broken through to the U.S. market. While its single, “Roots, Rock, Reggae,” stalled at #51 on the pop charts, the album soared to #8 and the 1977 followup “Exodus” (with the FM hits “Jammin’,” “Waiting in Vain” and “Three Little Birds”) was a respectable #20.

In the UK, “Exodus” stayed on the charts for an astonishing 56 consecutive weeks. Reggae’s boom there existed concurrently with the burgeoning punk movement, which shared that same rebellious streak. But the message in reggae’s lyrics offered a more lasting form of rebellion — the one-two punch of hope and truth, which ultimately won out over punk’s dead-end nihilism. It’s why reggae’s popularity has grown exponentially in recent decades while punk, frankly, isn’t much more than a glorified footnote (even more so in the U.S.).

The Police evolved from their punk/New Wave beginnings in 1977 to become international superstars in 1983, but reggae definitely played a pivotal role in their repertoire, from hits like “Roxanne” to deeper tracks like “Walking on the Moon” and 1981’s mantra-like “One World (Is Enough For All of Us).” As drummer Stewart Copeland put it, “We plundered reggae mercilessly.”

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In America, Motown/funk superstar Stevie Wonder was so taken by reggae in general, and Marley in particular, that he wrote a tribute to him in 1980 called “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” which became a #5 hit in the US and #2 in England. Marley and Wonder even performed several shows together that summer.

While many of Marley’s most cherished songs preach love and serenity, his final efforts — 1979’s “Survival” and 1980’s “Uprising” — adopted far more militant tones, as he felt compelled to speak out more against the social injustices he saw on the rise as the ’80s began. Just glance at the changing mood in the song titles: Instead of “One Love” and “Positive Vibration,” we have “Africa Unite,” “So Much Trouble in the World,” “Zimbabwe,” “Ambush in the Night,” “Real Situation,” “Redemption Song.”

Jamaica was rocked to the core when Marley succumbed to cancer in 1981 at only 36 years old. Four decades later, Marley is still regarded as a figurehead and near-deity among the Jamaican people, and the spread of reggae worldwide is due in large part to his impact. Several of his 11 children have picked up the Marley mantle since then, most notably Ziggy in the late ’80s (particularly “Tomorrow People” in 1988) and Damien in the ’90s, perpetuating and growing the reach and influence of reggae music as their father intended.

In the Eighties, acts like Blondie kept reggae prominently in the picture with their #1 cover version of The Paragon’s “The Tide is High,” and Culture Club contributed reggae-flavored hits like “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” which was more an amalgam of multiple styles that included reggae. As Boy George remarked, “In the the ’70s, we had glam rock, but we also had reggae and ska happening at around the same time. I just took all those influences I had as a kid and threw them together, and somehow it worked.”

Some purists regarded these and other non-Jamaican acts like UB40 as “weaker, pastel versions” of true reggae — one critic called it “reggae that wouldn’t frighten white people” — and truth be told, they’re probably right on. And still others never liked reggae to begin with. Morrissey, the iconoclast who served as frontman for The Smiths, one of England’s most popular bands of the ’80s, summarized his feelings this way: “Reggae is vile.”

Me, I enjoy a little reggae now and then, but usually only if I’m sitting by the pool or on the beach. To my ears, it has a certain sameness to it that gets old after a short while. But damn, it’s fun, it’s soothing, it gently gets under your skin, in a good way. Take a listen to the Spotify playlist I’ve assembled below for a healthy cross-section of reggae’s earliest hits and timeless anthems. Or, if you prefer, you certainly can’t go wrong anytime you play Marley’s incredible “Legends” CD compilation, which has now sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.

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Hack's Back Pages

Ruminations on Musical Milestones, 1955-1990

Month: June 2024

Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer

We’re jammin’ in the name of the Lord

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