Summer Songs Week

JUN 20th 2022

A little history of this song… Hot Fun In The Summertime Sly & the Family Stone

Seeing as this will be the first official week of Summer, I thought I'd devote the entire week to "Summer" songs. The first song on the Summer list is Sly & the Family Stone's 'Hot Fun in the Summertime'. Written and produced by Sly Stone, the song celebrates the balmy days when school is out and the sun is shining. The song is a showcase for the entire band; all seven members sing on the chorus and along with vocalists Sly and Rose Stone, guitarist Freddie Stone and bass player Larry Graham each get lines. Their horn players, sax man Jerry Martini and trumpet player Cynthia Robinson (a rare female horn player in a hit-making band) also get their due. Sly Stone was never known for punctuality, and he didn't deliver 'Hot Fun in the Summertime' until August 1969. Although the song was late in arriving to his record Company, Epic Records rush released it, but by then the Summer was almost over. What really help chart the song was Sly's outstanding performance at Woodstock (well worth watching!), which had occurred in the middle of August 1969, and propelled both the song and the album to Gold sales numbers. It reached its US chart peak of #2 (behind 'I Can't Get Next To You' by The Temptations) on October 18.The song was released as a standalone single but has shown up on many compilations. It came at a time when Sly & the Family Stone were at their peak, shortly before Sly Stone slid into a drug-induced abyss, taking the band down with him. Sly became very unreliable and their music suffered. In 1972, key members Larry Graham and Gregg Errico left, and in 1975 the band broke up. Over the next 30 years, Stone made sporadic appearances but never staged a full-fledged comeback.

Enjoy!!

JUN 21st 2022

A little history of this song… Girls in Their Summer Clothes Bruce Springsteen

The Song of the Day today is 'Girls in Their Summer Clothes' and comes from the 2007 Album by Bruce Springsteen entitled "Magic". At a concert recently Springsteen said of the song "This is one of the absolutely best songs I have written in my life. And unfortunately it is one of the least requested. " I agree whole heartedly. This is one of those sublimely beautiful songs, one completely different than he usually writes. The song has a totally different theme and ethos to it than 90% of his catalogue. A wonderful song about loneliness, desperation, and coming to terms with the fact that youth does not last forever. The narrator of the song is trying to hopelessly to cling on to the nice things of his past and describes how he is reaching out in desperation for something or someone to bring it all back. Don't we all have that feeling at some point in our lives? For my money it is one of his most under-rated songs in his catalogue. Here's a link to the lyrics (with a short independent interpretation) of 'Girls in Their Summer Clothes' I thought since we're just a few days away from the beginning of Summer it was fitting to think about what the Summer means to all of us. And, as usual, since this is the last song of the week, I'll provide the video to the song as well.

Enjoy!

JUN 23rd 2022

A little history of this song… The Boys of Summer Don Henley

I don't normally like to go with Songs that you've already heard thousands of times or go "Old School" too often, but this is such a good song that it belongs in my Summer Songs Week. 'The Boys of Summer' from the Album "Building the Perfect Beast" reached #5 on the charts back in 1984. 'The Boys of Summer' presents a portrait of a man clinging to a lover who has left him in the cold as the season changes. Henley borrowed the title from Roger Kahn’s famous book about the Brooklyn Dodgers and used it to represent everything youthful and vibrant with which the narrator can no longer compete. There is something undoubtedly touching about the devotion of this guy; even as he knows that this girl probably isn’t ever returning, he holds tight to the memories of their time together. Henley got an unlikely writing assist on the song from Heartbreaker Mike Campbell (co-incidentally Lindsay Buckingham's current replacement in Fleetwood Mac ). Campbell often wrote the music for Tom Petty songs and then let Petty add in the lyrics and melody. He demoed the track that would become 'The Boys of Summer', but Petty, ever the rock traditionalist, balked at the heavy use of synthesizers. As for the lyrics, the most memorable line in the song is the narrator’s observation in the final verse: “Out on the road today I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.” For those who were wondering, yes, it actually happened to Henley, as he recounted in a 1985 interview with NME: “I was driving down the San Diego freeway and just got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the Right-wing upper-middle class…and there was this Grateful Dead ‘Deadhead’ bumper sticker on it!’ The scene is even replayed in the video for 'The Boys of Summer'. A great Summer song to drive down the road with your top down.

Enjoy!

JUN 25th 2022

A little history of these song(s)… Theme from "A Summer Place", A Summer Song

Summer Wind

To close out Summer Song week, I'm going to give you 3 classic Summer Songs 'Theme from A Summer Place', 'A Summer Song' , 'Summer Wind '. But in oder to do this we're going to have to ask Mr. Peabody and Sherman if we can borrow the "Wayback Machine" cause these puppies are old and a we're going to be skipping years quickly. The first song 'Theme from A Summer Place' was first recorded in 1953 by Percy Faith but didn't become a hit song until it was used as the Soundtrack for the 1959 movie "A Summer Place" with Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee. For the 50's, this movie had adult themes that were not in vogue at the time, maybe a little ahead of its time. Percy Faith's score however is what people remember. "OK Mr. Peabody where to next?" "Sherman... Set the Wayback machine, we're going to travel to 1965 to listen to Chad & Jeremy's 'A Summer Song.' Chad & Jeremy were a British musical duo consisting of Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde, who began working in 1962 and then came to United States in the following year as part of the British Invasion. However if you're a MeTV watcher or a baby boomer, you might remember them from their appearance on the The Dick Van Dyke Show They portrayed a fictional singing duo called "The Redcoats" (Freddy and Ernie) on the February 10 1965 episode of the sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show that satirized the British Invasion. It was hilarious and boosted the duo's popularity immensely. "Are we done yet Mr. Peabody?" "No, Sherman, we have one more stop to make, set the wayback machine to 1966 to visit the arguably the most popular singer of the 20th Century... Frank Sinatra." From his 1966 album "Strangers in the Night" comes our last Summer Song... Summer Wind ' . This was one of Sinatra's signature songs and the last one done with composer/arranger Nelson Riddle. In this classic love song, Frank Sinatra recalls a love affair that came and went with the summer wind. The title refers to the sirocco breeze that sweeps into Southern Europe from the Sahara desert at the end of summer. As the chill of autumn and winter creeps in, he still remembers the girl he lost to the summer wind. " OK, Sherman we're done. Let's go back home to 2022". "Whew, Mr. Peabody, I thought that was never gonna end." And that friend's ends our Summer Songs week. Hope you enjoyed them, and

HAVE A GREAT SUMMER!!

“Smell the sea, and feel the sky. Let your soul and spirit fly." —Van Morrison