SUMMER SONGS 08: JAMES CAVICCHIA

Editor's Note: James Cavicchia is not a writer...not professionally but when I first started hearing him muse on music, films and books on Soulstrut, I was struck by his remarkable command of prose that combined insight and economy. For purely selfish reasons, I wanted to read more of his stuff so I invited James to write a summer songs post for us. I was not disappointed; nor will you. --O.W.

Written by James Cavicchia:

Gerry Rafferty: Baker Street
From City to City (UA, 1977)

Al Stewart: Year of the Cat
From Year of the Cat (Janus, 1976)

Brenton Wood: Gimme Little Sign
From The Oogum Boogum Song (Double Shot, 1967)

Barbara Lewis: Hello Stranger
From Hello Stranger (Atlantic, 1963)

J-Dilla: Time: The Donut of the Heart
From Donuts (Stonesthrow, 2006)

Talk Talk: New Grass
From Laughing Stock (Verve, 1991)


Remember, that’s the way it used to be…
Seems like a mighty long time…
--Barbara Lewis

Summer is when the promise looms largest. When doing something more, something greater, seems most possible, and when it seems most conceivable that the time to do it might be revealed. Summer promises difference. And I will always think of summer in terms of this promise, even in the constant erosion of my belief that it will ever be able to make good on it.

Because of this, most of the music that I consider to truly sound like summer has an open, optimistic quality, beneath which creeps some air of hunger, threat, or dissatisfaction. It’s like drinking water from a garden hose: Mostly you taste the water itself—cool and sparkling, free and freeing. But just a half step behind that, you can also taste that same water’s dark underground, vast and metallic—its vehicle. The promise is the water, but summer is what’s underneath.

. . . .

My earliest conception of summer music was rooted in the what came shining out of my parents’ radio on our endless and numerous afternoons at the public pool: Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”; Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”; Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street,” Al Stewart’s “Year Of The Cat,” and the rest of that drift. In the few early grade-school years before I was awakened to the fact that all this stuff was already years out of fashion, I had a general awed sense that despite their catchiness and shimmer all of these songs on this radio were part of some very adult tapestry of desire and absence and loss. The songs all sounded really pleasing to me, but none of the people in or around them seemed actually happy. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but I kept picking up these notes of yearning that made me a little scared of growing up. Looking back, there’s a strain of suburban saudade that’s hard to miss: “I keep my visions to myself.” “Wheel going ‘round and ‘round.” “You’ve thrown away your choice and lost your ticket, so you’ll have to stay on.” “Just one more year and then we’ll be happy.”

. . . .

A little later, after we had moved to South Carolina when I was nine, my parents’ radio stations became dominated in the months before Labor Day by beach music. Beach music is basically a Carolina-based repurposing of a particular kind of old r&b, done in the service of a liquid, shuffling dance, and all about projecting a certain coastal ease. It was The Music That Multigenerational Crowds Around Here Dance To When They’re Gathered Outside (I’m sure your town has/had its own), the audio shorthand for a deeply and specifically held conception of The Good Life.

“Under The Boardwalk” by The Coasters, “Love Makes The World Go Round” by Deon Jackson, “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells, “(What Does It Take) To Win Your Love” by Junior Walker, “Give Me Just A Little More Time” by The Chairmen of the Board, “What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am)” by The Tams. As a whole, beach music’s truest moments are of the most sublime, ephemeral stuff imaginable: avian flutes, virtually invisible right-handed piano sprinkle, acoustic guitar that’s a quarter shade brighter than anything else in the room, inexpert rises and falls of human breath. At the same time, it’s dance music, so it has to do its work within limits. What’s left is a feeling of perpetual near-ascension, with these expansive swells reined in time and time again by a tidal, recursive rhythm that seems to be forever leaving in the very moment of its coming.

Summer was still mostly good to me, but was beginning to reveal its potential as a fractured roundhouse, with no guarantee that what went in one side would necessarily come out the other. Plans, friendships, whatever—I might miss a phone call, she might go on vacation, and come September, everything’s different. My feeling that anything could happen—that it could all happen—stayed hounded by the creeping doubt that anything actually would, or at least anything good. Brenton Wood’s “Gimme Little Sign,” with all its cocky teasing and ultimatums, bisected by a whirlpool of worried Farfisa that could swallow the years whole. Barbara Lewis’s “Hello Stranger,” with its gently questing organ and breathtakingly limitless vocal, both shadowboxed at every turn by three sharp guitar notes that spend the whole song not forgetting what happened last time. The hope can never entirely escape the belief.

. . . .

My stock in this idea that the true body of summer can be carried within some music, can be communicated by it, given independent form, has been in pretty steady decline since I started really buying records about fifteen years ago. I find myself exposed less and less to music that’s not of my choosing, which makes it tougher to feel any real serendipity or coincidental grace. So often these days, when I begin to feel that maybe some particular music is shaping my conception of the season, it isn’t long before I realize that of course this music feels like summer—I pulled it off the shelf this morning precisely because I knew it would, because I felt like hearing some shit that would feel like summer.

Two summers ago, there was a span of about a week and a half when the only music I listened to—I mean the only music I listened to—was “Time (Donut of the Heart)” and Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, over and over and over again. It was deep July and I was feeling pretty damaged, and that one song and that one album were all I wanted to hear, so that’s all I listened to. Does that count as “summer music”? Because it doesn’t feel like it should count. It feels like I’m just satisfying my appetites. I think my hope, though, is that even this indulgence—just listening to the music that I need—might clear the way for…something. Something to free me from so much need, I guess. If I follow the hunger long enough, follow the underneath far enough, maybe I will eventually get back to the water, back to the version of myself that believes in the promise within summer as much as the thirst behind it.

Hello, stranger.