Summer Song(s)

First of all, a brief update since I'll be writing about music today -- my "Unplayed Archive" iTunes playlist currently sits at 3,910 songs. Will I be able to successfully reach my New Year's resolution of playing each song in the library at least once? Really not sure. It's getting harder to do as I realize how much mediocre crap is taking up space in my library. And yet I can't bring myself to delete it. Go figure.

But today we're going to talk about the music that does get played; in fact, music that gets overplayed in such a small concentration of time that it becomes symbiotic with a particular period of time. These are the kinds of songs that you can't hear without remembering something in specific detail from the part of your life when those songs were important, and you can't think about that part of your life without hearing those songs. For example, I have a very clear memory of my high school best friend Todd and I painting the walls in the drugstore that my father managed during one June overnight in 1985. I remember this because we had the radio on the whole time, and the station we were listening to played two brand new songs they were very excited about no less than four times throughout the night: "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams, and "All You Zombies" by The Hooters. We liked Bryan Adams well enough back then and liked hearing his new song. "All You Zombies" left us nothing but perplexed.

But for me, summer isn't so much about particular songs as it is about albums. Since I'm essentially laid off from my job for some 70-80 days each summer, I get a lot more time to listen to music, and it seems like every year there are one or two albums that become definitive for that year. A few even get so much play time that the whole album will be locked on to that summer for me. The same could really be said for the other seasons as well, but somehow summer is different.

To prove my point, here is a short list of some of those albums, and a sampling of the memories they recall for me.

**"Busted" by Cheap Trick. Summer of 1990. The ugly little brown 1983 Dodge Colt I drove and how I had a small boom box riding shotgun all the time because the cassette player in the dashboard went out every time I made a left turn; driving across the Division St. bridge into downtown St. Cloud; the academic whiplash of taking a philosophy class and my Phy. Ed. content course within an hour of each other; the way the living room window frame in my apartment swelled in the humidity to the point I couldn't close it; driving up to Sauk Rapids to work at the Boys and Girls club summer program; Paxton, the kid who threw nothing but granny shots all summer; how awesome Laura looked in that dress she wore to our staff meeting, and how I hated her boyfriend for the month that followed.

**"For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge" by Van Halen. Summer of 1991. Playing side 2 of the cassette in my Walkman while I ran up and down Variolite to train for the Turtle Trot; driving all over rural Minnesota pursuing fruitless job interviews and staying overnight in a few motels to make sure I'd be at the interview on time; seeing the video for "Poundcake" more than once since it was all over MTV during what may have been one of the last years they actual played music videos more than anything else.

**"Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen. Summer of 1984. Seeing the first concert of the tour at the St. Paul Civic Center, and then listening to a Kansas City version of the same tour on a bootleg tape in Todd's Pinto, and naively hoping we wouldn't get pulled over for speeding and found in possession of a Springsteen bootleg; dropping my sister off at the grocery store where her summer soccer team met to leave for away games, and hoping to see a girl I had a crush on (and now 26 years later I don't even remember who she was); singing along to "Darlington County" in my cousin Paul's Pinto (I know, Pinto summer, right?) on the way to a wedding in South Dakota -- some girl in a passing car saw me rocking out and laughed and pointed me out to the rest of the car and I was so into the song I didn't even care.

**"Hot House" by Bruce Hornsby. Summer of 1995. Driving back and forth between my memorably awful Coon Rapids apartment and Elk River to help my dad close down his drug store; staying up until midnight consistently to watch "Mystery Science Theater 3000" on Comedy Central; foolishly driving headlong into what had to be the ugliest, ominous, multi-colored storm front I have ever seen with my own eyes; summer afternoons at the Moore Lake Athletic Club, and killing time at Northtown on the way home, back when Northtown wasn't as post-apocalyptic as it is now; spending most of August playing games and signing on to eWorld with my very first computer, a Macintosh Performa 5200 CD, which still stands today as the most expensive computer I've bought. But man, was Dark Forces an awesome game. Totally worth the headaches and blurred vision.

I don't have one solid album on track for the summer of 2010 yet, though I do have a favorite playlist I've developed that gets a lot of car time. There's some older Better Than Ezra there, some OneRepublic and Train from last year, old Glen Burtnik, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, even this year's Ozzy release, which doesn't completely suck. I guess with the advent of digital music, it's easier to put together a playlist that is strong in great songs and low on filler, which is a claim that very few albums by any artist can make. But even with that advantage, I still love having that imprinted relationship with one particular piece of music, awesome songs, filler and all. But with the ADD nature of music today, it just doesn't seem to happen as much anymore.