Think It Was A Summer Song? OK, Then It Was

Music is the love of my life. As I get older, that love deepens and deepens. There’s nothing in the world like a song or an album to instantly transport you to another time and place.

And isn’t it amazing that the time it mostly beams you back to is summertimes of the past. Oh, there are albums that immediately make me think of the holidays because they were released at that time, but mostly it’s summer.

And I get it. Summers are magical, particularly in your teen and college years. The bonds you make with friends that you go in with on summer rentals are friendships that most of us hang on to for the rest of our lives.

And the music that provided the soundtracks of those summers is as unforgettable as the season itself. Who reading this doesn’t have a song that immediately transports you back to, as the song goes, the “Summer of ’69?”

Sure, there are movies and TV shows that immediately bring you back to a particular time and place, but generally speaking most of us go to a flick as a couple, with maybe occasionally another couple or two. Now, back when you were single, sometimes a group of six or so would go and generally annoy the hell out of the older couple sitting in front of you. But that was about as high as the number got.

But music? On any given Friday or Saturday night back in the day, it was extremely common for us to throw a party with 40 revelers as a routine number. You remember how you used to acquire a summer rental, right? Two or three young women would go to the real estate office and tell the agent they were looking to rent a quiet place to sleep when they would come home from their double shifts of waitressing – when in reality they were representing a group of 20 lunatics who would be lucky to make it to the July 4th weekend without being evicted.

In essence, what I’m saying is I can’t hear Bruce Springsteen’s “Rosalita” today without immediately being shipped back to any summer rental from the ’70s where I’m air guitaring on top of a coffee table surrounded by a screaming cast of thousands singing every lyric at the top of the lungs. The floor would literally bounce. You’d be covered in sweat. If there were cops at the door, it didn’t matter because you would never hear them anyway. What a party!

And I didn’t pick “Rosalita” by accident. First of all, the album it was on, “The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle,” got released Nov. 11, 1973. It actually was a Christmas release. So it actually ended up being the summer album of ’74.

Secondly, there’s not one summertime lyric in the entire song. Not one. Yet, it’s the Springsteen song I associate with summer more than any other Bruce ditty.

Ironically, the one album that I would pick as the representative of the summer of 1975 would be “Born To Run,” yet that LP didn’t get released till Aug. 25. Aug. 25!

I cannot tell you how many people I’ve hipped to that tiny factoid over the years who refuse to believe me.

“No way! We played that record the entire summer”

Well, thank God for iPhones, because all I have to tell someone arguing with me to do is “look it up.” (Which you might be doing right now.)

But that’s how summer memories trick us. Let me give you a non-musical example.

When I was a little kid, Wildwood was where my mother and I used to “summer.” In reality, here’s how it worked. My mother would rent what was known a boarding-house room at The Poplar on Poplar Avenue. It was a room with a bed, no TV, no air-conditioning, with a bathroom down the hall that the rest of the floor would share. There was a screened-in “parlor” on the second floor with a couple of couches and a black-and-white television on which I watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon.

My mother would rent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights because the “during the week” rates were cheaper than the weekend rates. Often, she would let me bring one buddy down with us.

There was maybe a summer or two where we actually did this three-day thing twice. But today when I’m having discussions with friends about where we used to “summer,” I always say Wildwood when discussing my very early Jersey shore days before I made the move to Avalon and Sea Isle.

But just like “Born to Run,” which feels like was around the entire summer of 1975 instead of just a few weeks, those three to six nights a summer I spent in Wildwood felt like three to six weeks. Summer plays tricks on you in that way.

Seriously, how many times have you been sitting on the beach on Aug. 1 when some official timekeeper just can’t wait to say, “Can you believe it’s August already?!”

Well, as a matter of fact, I can. It’s the month that generally comes after July.

Some other examples? “Who’s Next” featuring “Baba O’Reilly” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” didn’t come out till August of 1971, yet feels like it was played the entire summer.

That same summer, you could not go into one “girls” rental apartment without hearing Carole King’s “Tapestry,” yet that classic was released in January, and Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung,” which was released in early March.

Leave it to the Rolling Stones, who invented making money out of rock ‘n’ roll, to do it the right way. They release their 1971 summer classic, “Sticky Fingers,” in late April, taking advantage of all those fans looking for something to spend their graduation money on.

The point of all this? If you have a summer memory, leave it alone. You might find out that the movie you swear you saw in July didn’t even come out till Thanksgiving weekend. If it’s a summer memory, don’t mess with it!