June 6 - June 13, 1 9 9 6

Summer soundtracks

What sounds push our critics' seasonal pleasure buttons?

Maybe it's the damn Beach Boys' fault. If it hadn't been for all their lyrics of fun in the sun, maybe our summers wouldn't need soundtracks. But they do. Certainly our radio-raised generations have for most of our lives. There are special moments when music and memories bond in our brains, and special songs that just seem to feel right for a season of warm breezes and hot nights, of trips to the shore and strolls down steamy city sidewalks.

I remember being on a Connecticut beach with the blazing sun over my head and a beer half-buried in the sand, fresh out of my last class in my junior year of high school, hearing Alice Cooper yelp "School's Out" over WPOP and really feeling the juice of that song for the first time. Maybe it was because I'd also started my first job that year. Maybe it was all the girls in bathing suits. Or the beer.

Then there was the summer when we were trapped on the side of a cliff during a mountain climb gone awry and my partner started belting out "Wildfire" -- you know, "She came down the yellow mountain" -- and I started laughing so hard that hanging on a sheer rock cliff by my heels and fingertips a couple hundred feet over a rocky riverbed didn't seem so scary any more. Just a pain in the ass. But I'll never forget that tune, or my friend, for being such an untamable wise-ass.

I've compared notes on summer music with plenty of my friends. One can't separate the season from Deep Purple; another, a car nut, cleans out every tape and stocks his auto deck with only Chuck Berry, who invokes for him an era when summer meant cruising with the top down and feeling so goddamn optimistic because we had the Russkies on the run, the economy was booming, and JFK was sure a swell president.

Now, all of us music writers here at the Phoenix would like to compare notes with you. We'll start first. Below you'll find lists of what our journalists think they'll be listening to this summer, with a little explanation as well. Check to see whether you have any similar musical memories or associations, or simply compare notes with what our music scribes listen to for fun compared to your own tastes. If you're so moved, drop a line to my attention (you can write, fax, or e-mail -- tdrozdowski[a]phx.com) at the Phoenix, listing your own five-item summer soundtrack, and we'll see whether we can't share some of your lists with our other readers. Think of it as a chance to share some musical memories of summer with some new friends -- or a way to punch some new buttons on your own seasonal jukebox.

-- Ted Drozdowski
Associate Arts Editor

THE LISTS

Jon Garelick

Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations," (Capitol single, 1966). I was 14. Carol Lightman (not her real name) was 16, blonde, and from Oklahoma. We drove to Provincetown for the weekend -- Carol, her 29-year-old cousin (our legal guardian in this case), and Carol's snotty younger brother, also 14, who was my friend and gave me access to Carol. The Big Moment of the weekend came when I asked Carol to go to a Jimi Hendrix concert with me at the Rhode Island Auditorium. The Beach Boys tune was playing when Carol, Budweiser in hand, attempted a U-turn on Route 6 and drove up on the median strip. No damage, no injuries, no arrests. Carol later turned me down for the Hendrix date and I went with Moe Allard instead -- and Hendrix didn't show.

Blue Cheer, "Summertime Blues," Vincebus Eruptum (Philips, 1968). I listened to this over and over again indoors on an eight-track one summer with the headphones on and the lakefront only yards away. This was, I think, before the invention of the term psychedelic, and probably before Lester Bangs invented the term "heavy metal." I did not smoke pot or drink. This was the stuff! I later mentioned the album in passing to my first college girlfriend; she made a face and I got my first lesson in bad taste.

Butthole Surfers, live at the Channel, 1986. A blazing hot summer Sunday afternoon, and hundreds of pale kids standing in an asphalt parking lot waiting for the doors to this now defunct Fort Point Channel club to open. And inside: two drummers, wailing Coltrane electric guitars, strobe lights, a topless dancer, movie footage of car wrecks and mutilation, Gibby Haynes howling through a megaphone, and unrelenting heat. Another out-of-body experience without recourse to chemicals.

Jazz, the summer of 1973. It was the summer of my junior year of college. I lived with a girlfriend, then by myself, while working in a CVS store. I discovered Coltrane's "Giant Steps" while smoking pot in a friend's apartment, then pounded my head against my girlfriend's copy of Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (Candid, 1960 -- quartet with Eric Dolphy). This was music? I listened to jazz radio, read Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death. The following summer I would be a college graduate looking for a job.

The Heavyweight Champion: The Complete Atlantic Recordings of John Coltrane (Rhino, 1995). Sitting on the beach in Provincetown with my friend (not Carol Lightman), I watched the waves roll in as I popped one tape after another of this boxed set into the Walkman. Summer never felt freer.

Brett Milano

Squeeze, "Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)," Argybargy (A&M, 1980). For me this summer officially began at 5:38 p.m. on May 22, because that's when I heard this song on the radio. I still haven't figured out half the obscure English references -- where's "Cambra Sands," anyway? -- but this is as dependable a sign of the season as, say, "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" is in December.

Fuzzy, Electric Juices (Atlantic, 1996). It took a local band to make this year's first quintessential summer album, though they blew it by releasing it in February. The hooks and harmonies on this one were waiting for this season to be uncorked.

The WODS Oldies Concerts at Government Center. It won't be the same this year with a smaller series at the Esplanade, but the past five summers have seen an amazing mix of people you thought were dead, ranging from the ridiculous (a wiped-out Jan & Dean) to the sublime (the Everly Brothers for the last two years). By booking these shows, WODS created a world where people line up at dawn for a space to see Frankie Valli. Now that's alternative.

Guerra, performing a live version of War's hit "It's Summer" at the Middle East last Monday. Always loved this song because it's the only well-known one (except the Bruce Springsteen song, which is depressing anyway) to mention Atlantic City, my summer-vacation spot as a kid. And it turned out that Guerra were War in disguise.

Obligatory Brian Wilson Reference. Because he wrote one of the best songs on Fuzzy's album, because I just got a good bootleg CD called 21 Little Ones, and because the Pet Sounds box is finally coming out, with an advance EP to be released on (of all places) Sub Pop. And I've still got a theory that Wilson does some voodoo spell in his sandbox every year to make summer come around.

Ted Drozdowski

R.L. Burnside, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey (Matador, 1996). Wild-ass blues and wild-ass rock collide like a pair of red planets knocked off their axis. Old Mississippi hill-country bad-ass R.L. Burnside and his slide-kick Kenny Brown team up with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. The result: drunken guitar jams spiked with lots of whoopin' and cursin'. For when I get lonesome for hot, liquor-fueled nights in Mississippi juke joints.

Patti Smith, Gone Again (Arista, 1996). There's plenty elegiac about this CD, which comes after the deaths of Patti Smith's husband and brother and includes a song inspired by Kurt Cobain. But as with all of her work, there's so much life here too. And summer's always ultimately been about life, about the healing of the sun and the elements. For me, Smith's music reminds me of a time when rock and roll and life both held plenty of promise. And it still gives me hope that promise hasn't forever slipped away.

Catherine Wheel, Ferment (Mercury, 1993). Pulling into Crane Beach one day, with a nice organic buzz just starting to come to harvest, I saw the sun sending rippling fingers of light over the ocean, felt the cool smell of the sea spray in my nostrils, felt the warm bake reflected from the dunes as the gulls and plovers glided overhead. This CD's "Black Metallic" was so perfect a soundtrack, it lifted my spirit nearly as high as the birds.

Mind Science of the Mind, Mind Science of the Mind (Epic, 1996). Knotty, untamed art rock from a bunch of rowdy post-punks. It's the kind of music that makes you feel like an utter alien -- but a cool one -- while strolling through Harvard Square under a Walkman.

[Big Brother]

Big Brother and the Holding Company, Cheap Thrills (Columbia, 1968). Hey man, it's the soundtrack for the original Summer of Love. Goddamn, I love this record. The way Janis belts is so soulful, the guitars are so dirty, it makes me want to drive around in a convertible all day and let the breeze and sun fuck up my already fucked-up hair as I listen to "Piece of My Heart" and "Summertime" at a totally punishing volume.

Franklin Soults

The Fugees, The Score (Ruffhouse/Columbia, 1996). With the windows wide open and everyone hanging outside, summer soundtracks are often unwanted gifts from the outside world -- songs and albums that you catch again and again as they drift across the crowded beach or into your steaming apartment. Sometimes, though, your obsessions are in synch with the masses' and Everything Is Beautiful. The Fugees album was the runaway hit of early spring, and heading into the heat waves it remains for me the freshest, most inspiring popular music of the year. These three rappers walk across the hip-hop minefield as if it weren't there, with the nonchalant grace of your significant other crossing the room to plant you a kiss. The world can give me this music all summer long; I'll certainly be giving it right back.

Pulp, "Common People," Different Class (Island, 1995). Combining sweeping passion and blasé cynicism as only the English can, this brilliant glam pop is half a beat from swishy disco, half a snarl from the Sex Pistols. Radical populism is rarely this cogent, this brash, this warm and breezy.

Cachao, Master Sessions Volume 1 (Crescent Moon/Epic, 1994) and Cumbia Cumbia (World Circuit, 1989). The simple but infinitely mutable rhythm of Latin music -- the triplet-based clave -- is the very definition of sultry. The first of these perfect primers serves up a variety of Latin styles as remembered from pre-revolutionary Cuba by a nimble 76-year-old contrabassist. The other explores in depth a single clave permutation with three decades of Colombian cumbia. For a second year in a row, they'll both provide a refreshing dose of tropical heat for my cool Maine vacation.

Seals and Croft, "Summer Breeze" (Warner Bros. single, 1972). The tune's not bad, but the words paint a bland male hippie fantasy about domestic life that demonstrates why it's good the '70s are gone. Like I said, we don't always choose our summer soundtracks: Billboard chart chronicler Joel Whitburn says this peaked in October, but I remember hearing it on the way to Snook's Pond swim class on warm July mornings, sitting in the back of the car with a towel around my neck. I never consciously think about it, but like hundreds of other songs it's there anyway, blowin' through the jasmine of my mind -- whatever the fuck that means.