Julius Comes Again

Julius Caesar's month arrives.




With apologies to Glen Frey, "the heat is on" throughout the days and nights. This time of year the Beach Boys always came to mind when I was younger. I was never a huge fan of the brothers and cousin from Hawthorne, CA and their many additions/subtractions over the years, but always thought many of their seminal hits catchy, and now find several other tunes of  Brian Wilson's evoking a sadness nostalgia wrings from an old sentimental brain when tweaked by a riff.  Surprising staying power for a band trapped in a regional location tied firmly to one decade, the 1960s.

It's not that the Beach Boys didn't make good music after the Sixties, but no one knows or remembers those songs much, if at all. Everyone remembers all the lyrical names of the California Girls from Help Me Rhonda and Wendy to Barbara Ann and an old lady from Pasadena, but after the Seventies crossed the big dial in the space time universe the band had a tough time selling records. Cameron Crowe found a nugget from the under appreciated album, Surf's Up, which Carl Wilson wrote with Jack Rieley titled Feel Flows. He included it on his rock nostalgia masterpiece film, Almost Famous.  The song is so unlike the usual Beach Boy offering in theme and instrumentation, but when you hear the harmonies you have a real good idea of who you're listening to while it takes you on a transcendental groove that was already out of time by its original release but has remained timeless due to its great production values with an exquisite layered mix of vocals and instrumentation .

Certainly, over my listening years a lot of artists (huge, obscure and everywhere in between) have mined the hot season with some great songs. Lovin' Spoonful's Summer In The City,  Sly Stone's Hot Fun In The Summertime, Alice Cooper's School's Out, Don Henley's  The Boys of Summer, Diesel's Sausalito Summer Nights, Janis Joplin's or Miles Davis' versions of Cole Porter's Summertime, Jimi Hendrix's Long Hot Summer Night, Meatloaf's Paradise By The Dashboard Lights with inspired baseball commentary by Phil Rizutto,  and Green Day's Wake Me When September Ends all pop into my skull as good sun-season melody fodder. I'm sure you have  some other tunes that come to mind that wring out beach towels of of memory-dripping summer madness.

Maybe this month's heat fried some of my circuitry, but I can't think of one British rock act circa 1960s onward that owns a good tune that really means summer. I know there have been plenty of tunes about sunshine from many a Brit band, or artist, but the feeling is that a day of sunshine is one of those rare and sparkling events to be celebrated as a gift, certainly not the American styled season of sweat. The Beatles could pop out Good Day Sunshine and Here Comes the Sun, but those certainly in no way evoke a summer spirit.  The Rolling Stones have a great tune, Winter, but no song of summer. The Kinks coined  the title, Autumn, but never for the season preceding it.  I guess it makes sense when the nation's latitude falls where Southern Canada's rests that odes to warm months would be sparse, much like summer itself in those climates. But, that curious Canadian, Bryan Adams, had a modest hit with The Summer of '69 back in the early 1980s. Of course, Bryan had his eye on the American market back in those days and summer has been  a somewhat topical treatment here in the states.

I say somewhat topical, because only two major rock era acts post the Beach Boy's 1960s moment in the pop sun truly make summer, and what the season really stands for in this country, their stock and trade.  Just my little opinion here on the blogosphere, but only Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger have owned summer in the rock world.  

When you listen to these two great artists, and especially their defining work from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, the themes and energy surrounding so many of their songs just screams high temperatures and perspiration born of  passionate desperation for youth on the cusp.


Bob Seger's best material exudes a sexual heat, a longing and an elusiveness of the all-too-brief moments of long days and short nights that quickly were over. His usual persona for many of his memorable songs always looks back in Night Moves, Roll Me Away, Main Street, Brave Strangers and Against the Wind. Other songs like Fire Down Below, Come to Poppa, Sunspot Baby and Her Strut all have beat and thermometer set to sauna levels. "Like a wildfire out of control" ... "young and restless running against the wind." Lines define the time.


Bruce Springsteen means summer in a completely different way for me, although he and Bob share the motorcycle as a metaphor on more than one occasion. The three major album releases- Born to Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town and The River all deal with summer's promise and agony for youth looking to escape the inexorable determination of their forged fates. Years ago the sameness of some arrangements and beat on several of the Darkness on the Edge of Town's songs bothered me, but as time passed and gave my ears some distance I began to greatly appreciate the force of those slow hammer blows that marked these songs and the everyday intense repetitive drudgery causing the drive to escape they evoked. For Bruce, summer is/was no vacation time, nor a sexual metaphor in the great body of his work. Summer is the grind, it begets work-sweat and meets desperate encounters trying to outrun the inevitable. The earlier songs more defiant, but by The River a resignation has emerged in the author's voice. Later albums channel many of these themes with differing colors. The mixes get better while the July driven eloquence of his youth dims, as it must with age and vantage point, but Bruce Springsteen will always define summer's sound for me. 


As Prove it All Night goes into the seventh minute of a long ago live recording, and Wrecking Ball  awaits its third run the through all the tracks I can hear an M-80 explode nearby in the neighborhood. The dog now frets and pants, his anxiety at a very high level. The cats look about, in better shape than the dog, but they're old and probably don't hear as well. I turn up the music a bit, like I am forced to do every July 4th holiday to ease the critter nerves. Good speakers with summer melodies help.


Thanks for stopping by.