By SCOTT SAALMAN
Scaramouch
“ ’Cause it’s summer / Summertime is here / Yes, it’s summer / My time of year.” – War
My favorite summer songs are those that are soundtracks to a specific memory or simply conjure a general sense of the season.
My auditory recollections remain as indelible as the scent of roadside honeysuckle and sweet cotton-candied air at the Fourth of July fair; the feel of a first baseball mitt fitted over my left hand; dusk-time firefly light shows lingering over my rural route boyhood backyard.
“Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” played anytime my parents’ car rolled. Jim Croce’s Life and Times was our only 8-track. To finally have a “modern” car with an 8-track tape player represented, for me, the birth of music. The plastic 8-track cartridge was powder blue. The label, showing a pensive-looking Croce, all mustachioed and denim, bubbled from the Southern Indiana summer heat. A burnt smell emitted when the magnetic tape made its squeaky loops. I was 10 when I first heard the song’s boogie-woogie beat – and here I am, 47 years later, still remembering it.
Photo provided
I remember, too, the song playing on the tin-canny sounding AM radio station while being driven to the city pool by my uncle and aunt. My backseat-chorus cousins and I shamelessly sang, more so we shouted, the “the baddest man in the whole DAMN town” part with a devilish vivacity. The adults sang too, laughed too. After the song, a deejay mentioned that Croce had died in a plane crash the previous fall. The news’ heaviness attached to me like an anchor as I sunk to the city pool’s bottom where I sat holding my breath and tried to fathom Croce’s fate. I’m still that sinking boy, at times, still grappling with the loss of a legend who created Leroy Brown.
At 19, I was illegally served beer in a small river town dive bar. I fed the jukebox incessantly, queuing replays of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” while dancing with local, tough-as-nails, river rat girls; their horrible Eighties hair was frizzed by August humidity; the day became a blur of drunken feet on old-timey wooden, worn, warped floorboards, each shoe’s shuffle and scuff sounding like a match strike, warning us, perhaps, about the fine line existing between a party and a powder keg. “ . . . Badder than old King Kong / Meaner than a junkyard dog.”
The Steve Miller Band’s “Jungle Love” time-machines me to the sawdust grounds of Tell City’s Fourth of July Picnic. There was the Pirate Ship funhouse with its hall of mirrors that transformed my body into various grotesqueries. I entered a narrow, pitch-black passageway where unseen carny hands reached through wall holes to molest us. Outside, I passed games of chance – ring toss; paddle wheel; grumbling, cutthroat biddies playing bingo – and gravitated to the terrifying Tempest. The ride’s four pastel-colored cages moved in synchronized tilted revolutions while the cloudy-eyed, bored ride operator ignored loosened screws and nuts and throttled the noisy engine. The speaker blared, “Jungle love, it’s driving me mad, it’s making me crazy . . .”
Boston’s “Foreplay / Long Time” finds me seatbelt-free in Uncle Rick’s cherry red Pontiac LeMans rocketing down a roller-coaster-like, two-lane, corkscrew highway. I am in back, snugly wedged between two high-school girls – a good gig for a middle-school boy. The girls sang out the tally of each car we passed (no-passing zones be damned). “Six . . . seven . . . ” “Time doesn’t wait for me / It keeps on rollin’ . . .” The hell car attempted liftoff at each hill’s crest. “ . . . Sail on / A distant highway, yeah . . .” I imagined adjacent cornfields ablaze from the sparks created by the impact of creaking undercarriage on concrete. Up front, Rick and his buddy (he called “shotgun” earlier) laughed maniacally while the screaming girls dug their sharp fingernails into my scrawny kneecaps. “ . . . eight . . . nine . . . ”
At two minutes and five seconds, The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?” is summer tune perfection. It never fails to deliver jolts of pure, positive, summery energy, erasing my worries like an Etch-A-Sketch being shaken. Even though the song never mentions summer, and even though I was a baby when it first hit the radio in the summer of 1965, “Do You Believe in Magic?” became the sun of my summer song universe. Why? Maybe the 45 RPM record played on Mom’s turntable and soothed me during fitful, fistful bouts at breast-feeding, the song forever singed in my subconscious, a reminder of a patient mother’s magical touch, her warmth.
“The Swimming Song,” by Loudon Wainwright III, brings to mind the carefree, springboard sounds of summer’s past and the feeling of being a child momentarily aloft, shouting “Cannonball!” just before splashdown, sending tiny tsunamis toward unwary, poolside sunbathers. This under-three-minute banjo song demonstrates how the best songwriters know how to say so much in so little time: “This summer I did swan dives / And jack knives for you all / And once when you weren’t looking / I did a cannonball.” I feel the need to dry off after each Loudon listen, yet I remain compelled to, once again, warn the world, “Cannonball!”
(Editor’s note: Scott doesn’t endorse underaged drinking or swearing; he’s merely recalling it. Kids, never mistake a writer for a role model.)
Contact: scottsaalman@gmail.com. Buy Scott’s books on Amazon.