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. 

Columbine: The Nation Did Go Bowling

It's been seven years since the release of Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine. I have had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Mr. Moore a few times in my previous life, and know him to be a stickler for getting the facts straight. On IMDB.com a small point is made that Eric and Dylan did not go bowling the morning before marching into madness on their high school campus. That could be true, but Michael Moore did get corroborating reports from eyewitness who had been interviewed by the police, the FBI and the local District Attorney's office. He also framed his argument on the image of bowling by asking a question:

"So did Dylan and Eric show up that morning and bowl two games before moving on to shoot up the school? And did they just chuck the balls down the lane? Did this mean something?"

But, the small point entirely misses the bullet hole of accuracy.

Sunday April 20, 2009 marked the 10th Anniversary for the Columbine High School tragedy. Twelve students and a teacher shot dead. The two killers shot themselves as well. Total body count fifteen people dead. A lot of people on April 20, 1999 were horrified at the violence on the high school campus, just not that horrified to change anything in the ten years that have elapsed.

In 1965 with race riots across America, Junior Walker and the All-Stars rang on radios "Shotgun, shoot 'em fore he run." Shotgun, big hit.

1968 was a big year for America in terms of gun violence. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both assassinated that year. The same year The Beatles released their White Album, which contained Happiness is a Warm Gun and Bungalow Bill. The two songs contain two very radical and opposing looks at the American preoccupation with guns. The Rolling Stones had Street Fighting Man come out in 1968 with "I'll kill the king and rail at all his servants." Jimi Hendrix took off on Hey, Joe and Machine Gun for audiences that year.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse came with Down by the River in 1969, and a few years later would pen Ohio with his other group of friends Crosby, Stills and Nash. Even Southern rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd with Saturday Night Special implored in song some sanity regarding the gun. Nothing changed.

Over the years thousands of songs have been recorded about guns and gun violence. Violence, and our fascination with the ultimate period maker, sells.

Even though gun violence is highly marketable, it is tough making sense out of the continual carnage, tougher still finding a way of reducing the arms race in America. Barack Obama gets elected as an agent of change for America. Americans flood gun stores to stock up thinking one change might be limits on guns.

Remember the crazy girl who didn't like Mondays? Big hit for the Boomtown Rats and Bob Geldoff.

That incident would barely register today. It barely registered in 1993 when Colin Ferguson, deranged but armed boarded a Long Island Rail car at Penn Station and decided some people had to die. Six people died and nineteen were injured that December evening. The wife of one of the dead victims, Carolyn McCarthy, ran and was elected to Congress due in part to her son's amazing recovery from the wounds suffered and her tenacity in putting together a campaign to stop senseless gun violence. After twelve years on the job Representative Carolyn McCarthy has learned guns are a much larger third rail than even Social Security. The only legislation of note Representative McCarthy can show for twelve years in Congress was a fairly watered down background check bill passed last year. In fairness this was the first gun reform legislation passed in Congress in over fourteen years. It came on the heels of the Virginia Tech slaughter that claimed thirty-two lives. We still remember that one, but the memory has softened over the two year fade of time.

How could it not? After all, in this era of the gun let us just recount the brutality of American existence from the growing list of death. In September of 2008 on the roads of Skagit County, Washington six people shot and killed before the shooter turns himself in to authorities. For celebrity sake, we have in Chicago, Illinois Jennifer Hudson's mother and brother shot and killed in their home in late October of 2008. In Arkansas, two days after the Hudson killings two people are killed and another wounded on the campus at the University of Central Arkansas. November 2008 saw an eight year old in Arizona shoot and kill his father and a family friend with a rifle at close range. Right after Christmas in Covina, California Santa Claus shot and killed nine people (family members and friends) before killing himself. Outrage? Not in 2008.

Thus far 2009 we have witnessed a real ramp up of gun carnage. An eleven year old boy shot his father's pregnant fiancee in the head while she slept and then took the bus for school. Seven people were shot, but amazingly no one died at a Mardi Gras parade in February this year. March in Samson, Alabama saw a man shoot and kill nine people before killing himself. According to reports there were ten crime scenes for the Alabama rampage. Also in March, bullets flew into a nursing home where eight people were killed by a middle aged man. And in Oakland four police officers were slain along with their killer in a shootout. This April we have already gotten thirteen dead innocents at an immigration help center in New York state plus the shooter dead from a fatal suicide shot. And two more dead college students at a community college just west of Detroit. Three police officers died this month in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It's hard to get press in Iraq and Afghanistan these days when we're in the middle of bowling people down with carbines.

"Have A Nice Day."