95 Songs of Summer, #67 - "She Drives Me Crazy"

From the ashes of The English Beat rose two bands - General Public, and Fine Young Cannibals.  Simply by looking at which members of the Beat joined the two offspring, one would have expected the former to become the better band, because that was the band formed by the two frontmen - Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger.

However, the opposite was true.  The two albums by General Public were OK but nothing more than that, while both albums from Fine Young Cannibals were outstanding.  FYC featured Andy Cox (guitarist) and David Steele (bass), along with a secret weapon - Roland Gift, who at his best evoked nothing less than the memory of Otis Redding.

This was the biggest hit from FYC, and you still hear it today - probably because it's a great song.

Fine Young Cannibals, "She Drives Me Crazy," from the summer of 1988.

 

95 Songs of Summer, #66 - "Ride Captain Ride" (1970)

I guess you could call this one of the great one-hit wonders, because I don't recall ever having heard another song from this band.  Having one hit hardly qualifies an artist for Hall of Fame consideration, but this song still gets played a lot, so it obviously had some staying power.  What I know for sure is that I'd turn up the radio every time it came on, or at least as loud as my dad would let me.

Blues Image, "Ride Captain Ride," from the summer of 1970.

 

Neil Armstrong

When I was in the sixth grade, a couple of years after the Apollo 11 mission, my teacher told us one day that he really admired Neil Armstrong, because Armstrong had never taken advantage of his historic feat to cash in and trade in his name for the sake of fame and fortune.  And mind you, that was in 1972.

Given forty more years to take advantage of his amazing feat, Armstrong simply went back to his life, and from all accounts enjoyed it - never for a moment thinking that he was missing out on something.  And that above all else is probably the best testament to his greatness.

The astronauts who captured the nation's imagination were a rare breed - and so were the technicians and the rocket scientists who guided them to their destinations.  And Armstrong may have been unique in that he held both qualities.

All I know is that anyone who was alive and old enough to know what was happening on the evening of July 20, 1969 is never going to forget the name Neil Armstrong.

R.I.P.

95 Songs of Summer, #65 - "Harvey Haddix"

Since I have a lot of catching up to do, this one will kill two birds with one stone.  "Harvey Haddix" is a song that belongs to summer.  In it, The Baseball Project pays tribute to the man who probably pitched the greatest game in the history of major league baseball - 12 perfect innings, only to lose the perfecto and the game in the unlucky 13th.

I post a video of the song every time someone pitches a perfect game, but I'm a little late this time.  But better late than never, so congratulations Felix Hernandez for becoming the third player to pull off the feat this season.

The Baseball Project, "Harvey Haddix."

95 Songs of Summer, #64 - "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (1970)

It's a testament to the greatness of this song that there were two equally great, but stylistically diverse, versions to assault the charts.  This is the first one I heard - Diana Ross turns the tight Marvin & Tammi version into a 6-minute epic.  This kind of thing doesn't always work, but it does here.

"Ain't No Mountain High Enough," Diana Ross & the Supremes, from the summer of 1970.

95 Songs of Summer, #63 - "Margaritaville" (1977)

I said earlier I wasn't going to do this, but let's pretend for just a minute that summer has just begun...pretend that the glow from the end of the school year is still burning hot, and that the next school year is nothing but a distant memory...and pretend that we're all looking forward to that spectacular fireworks show on the 4th of July.

Are you there yet?

Maybe what you need is a margarita...or two.

 

"Margaritaville," Jimmy Buffett, from the summer of 1977.

Sports Trivia

In my office, I have an ESPN Sports Trivia daily calendar - one of those with a different question for each day.

For Thursday, August 23 the question read:

"The USA women won bronze at the 2000 Olympics.  Which country earned the gold?"

Hmm...was this the medal for best looking female athletes?  Best dressed female athletes?  Best behaved?

I guess we'll never know.  But whatever it was, Norway won the gold.

95 Songs of Summer, #62 - "Ode to Billie Joe" (1967)

I was only seven years old when this song was released, but even at that young age I knew enough to know that it was an amazing song - almost like a hard-boiled detective novel, compressed into one four-minute song.  And no, that doesn't mean that I knew at age seven what a hard-boiled detective novel was.  But I did know that this was one hell of a mysterious song.

Bobbie Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe," from the summer of 1967.

95 Songs of Summer, #61 - "Cruisin" (1979)

I have a sneaking suspicion that I might be altering the calendar a bit with this one, but even if it wasn't strictly speaking a song released during the summer, it is (as far as I'm concerned) a classic "summer song."

Smokey Robinson's stature was long settled by the time this song was released, but it did kick off a mini-renaissance for the man who was responsible for a prodigious amount of great work in the 1960s and early 1960s.  No question that Smokey can rest on his laurels for the rest of his life, but one gets the feeling that he might just decide on a whim to head back to the studio at some point, and create even more great work.

So while this song really belongs to all summers, we'll assign it to the summer of 1979.  Mr. Smokey Robinson, with "Cruisin'." 

95 Songs of Summer, #60 - "Magic Man" (1976)

In August 1976, I began my first job - working at McDonalds, where I would stay for the next four years, until I left Sacramento for UC Berkeley.  At the time, the Golden Arches workforce was comprised almost entirely of high school and community college students, with the exception of one or two managers.

For about three months, I absolutely hated every moment of the job - to the point where I would actually hope when I went to bed at night that the place would burn down overnight, so I wouldn't have to endure another shift the following day.  That's a little extreme, I know - but hey, that's what it felt like at the time.

It was hard work, with a ton of rules - but once I had gotten a little experience under my belt and figured it all out, I began to enjoy it (and I still make use today of the lessons that I learned then).  By March of the following year, I felt like I had everything down pat, and I must have, because a couple of months later I was named the store's Training Coordinator for the grillmen, meaning that I was responsible for training all new employees (at that time there was a pretty solid demarcation across gender lines - girls worked the window, and boys worked the grill).  I stayed in that position for the next three years, not really wanting to move up to manager because with that move came an enormous loss of flexibility in terms of scheduling.

By now you're probably wondering where this is all going.  Well, there are a handful of songs that are so inextricably linked to that time that when I hear them today, it is as if I'm transported back to those first few days on the job, wondering what the heck I was doing, and wishing that I could be just about anyplace else.

"Magic Man" by Heart is one of those songs.  From the summer of 1976.

95 Songs of Summer, #59 - "Games Without Frontiers" (1980)

Today we're going to stick with the weekend theme of Summer 1980, and feature Peter Gabriel's great song "Games Without Frontiers" from his brilliant third album.

I wrote about the album earlier this year as part of my Top 50 of all time - as I said then, even though "So" (also great) was more popular, I think this represents his best work - edgy, even frightening in a way that "So" was not (although to be fair, it came close).

If looks could kill
They probably will 
In games without frontiers
War without tears

Peter Gabriel, "Games Without Frontiers," from the summer of 1980.

Grading the Summer Soderberghs

Traffic - A+

Out of Sight - A
The Limey - A

Erin Brockovich - A-
Contagion - A-
Haywire - A-
Solaris - A-

The Informant! - B

The Good German - C

Surprise! A Soderbergh Double Feature

And the only thing we forgot was the popcorn.

How the hell I went so many years without seeing "Out of Sight" is beyond me, because this kind of movie is right up my alley - an exceedingly well-made crime thriller, based on a book written by one of the masters of the genre, Elmore Leonard.  Maybe I just couldn't believe that Jennifer Lopez had the chops to pull it off.

Well, she did, and J-Lo, I apologize for doubting you.  Lopez' performance in "Out of Sight" is so good that it makes me wonder what might have happened if she had decided to focus her efforts on high quality motion pictures instead of fairly pedestrian cinematic fare and a decidedly pedestrian musical career.  But hey, it's not too late - now that she's off of "Idol," maybe it's time to refocus on what she does best.

And then of course, there is this guy named George Clooney, who is at his best in roles like this, a likeable but flawed character.  It sounds a bit pandering to say that he oozes charm, but it is what it is, folks.  Given that the movie was made in 1998, you can almost see the machinations going on in his head, figuring out exactly what it is that was about to make him the closest thing that this generation has to a Cary Grant.

The screenplay crackles with wit, and the supporting cast is stellar - Ving Rhames as Clooney's buddy from prison, Dennis Farina as the loving dad of Lopez whose idea of a great birthday present is a new gun, Don Cheadle in scary mode as an ex-boxer, ex-con who doesn't shy away from doing whatever he needs to do to make the next score, Steve Zahn doing what Steve Zahn does best, and even Albert Brooks as a millionaire ex-con, showing that "Drive" wasn't a fluke.

And yes, the seduction scene is as good as everyone says.  And notable, because of the way it treats both characters with respect.

And then we moved on to "Contagion," another example of how Soderbergh can crossover between genres with ease.  The premise of the movie is very simple - a killer virus is spreading, faster than our best scientists can figure out how to stop it (or even figure out exactly what it is), and leaving few untouched as it travels across the globe and infects the good, the bad and everything in between.

In the wrong hands this could have been a ridiculous enterprise, but an incredible A-list cast of thousands (Matt Damon! Gwyneth Paltrow! Lawrence Fishburne! Kate Winslet! Marion Cottilard! Jude Law! Jennifer Ehle! Elliot Gould! Demetri Martin!  Hundreds of other recognizable faces!) makes an investment in the proceedings, and never leaves the viewer thinking that they wished, just maybe, that they hadn't signed up for this one.

Soderbergh and his scenarist Scott Burns made an inspired decision when they began the outbreak on Day 2 - this amplifies the mystery aspect of the story, and creates a situation where the viewer is no smarter than the scientists who are struggling to come up with answers.  This eliminates the possibility of an "idiot plot," because we have no way of knowing whether the characters are making the right choices.  It was also wise to kill off one of the major potential saviors of the story, because this just raises the stakes that much higher.  And it was also wise to focus as much on the societal impacts of the outbreak, so we can see that there really isn't as much of a gap between "normal" and "chaos" as we might imagine.

Two more excellent films in a career notable for its accomplishment and its output.  Well done.

95 Songs of Summer, #58 - "Mirror in the Bathroom" (1980)

The English Beat didn't have a long career, but they made the most of it.  All three of their albums were outstanding, and included enough classic songs to ensure that they'd remain a presence on the radio for three decades.  Music as good as theirs is truly timeless, and there's no question that songs like "Twist and Crawl," "Save It For Later," and "Doors of My Heart" (to pick just three) sound as new and fresh today as they did when they were released.

If forced to pick just one of the albums, I'd go with the debut, "I Just Can't Stop It," probably because it was those songs that I heard the band play during a memorable October 1980 concert, opening for Talking Heads.  The album is a winner from start to finish, and I'd be happy picking any of its songs, but I'll go with one of the most famous.

The English Beat, "Mirror in the Bathroom," from the summer of 1980.

95 Songs of Summer, #57 - "Let My Love Open the Door" (1980)

"Hit single" and "Pete Townshend" are not words that you often see together in the same sentence.  Hitting the top of the Top 40 has never seemed to be a goal for Townshend; both his solo work and work with The Who has aimed for deeper accomplishment and meaning.  At the risk of offending rabid Who fans (and boy, there sure are a lot of those) I'd argue that approach has sometimes been to his detriment - if he'd just lighten up a bit now and then, the deep stuff would become all the more meaningful.

"Empty Glass," Townshend's outstanding 1980 solo album, is a case in point.  For the most part, Pete is making a typically heavy statement; however, smack dab in the middle we've got what at first listen might seem to be a mindless ditty but over time proves itself to be an enduring classic.  And the lightness of the song brings the entire album into focus.

"Let My Love Open the Door," Pete Townshend, from the summer of 1980.

The King

Elvis Presley
January 9, 1935 - August 16, 1977

“If love is truly going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.”

- Lester Bangs