Summer's here, time is right — for music

Summer’s here and the time is right for taking a big fat break, and boy do we deserve it. When the weather finally warms and the pace finally slows, nothing goes better with heat, water, a cold glass, exposed skin, and some time to call your own than summer music, a special category of very personal tunes each of us holds near to our heart for the season when the sun is the only clock we really need and nothing is more important than pleasure.

These are some of my favorites:

“Margaritaville,” Jimmy Buffett (1977)
“Margaritaville” represents Buffett at his most appealing and insightful. The song’s story takes place in Mexico — where summer never ends — often a refuge for Americans seeking escape from responsibility. Where would you rather be? Basking in the perpetual summer of a snow white playa sipping margaritas and chuckling at the tourists, or huddled around a short-circuiting space heater in Buffalo?

The song’s Caribbean/mariachi/country melody is cheerful yet reflective, its lilt tempered with an aftertaste of regret. Its power lies in Buffett’s acknowledgment that the life of dissipation must be the shadow against which real life shines, not the screen that real life is shown upon. Clearly, the character’s lifestyle here doesn’t coincide with his values. Rather than living a life of ease, he is living a life of intense internal conflict — a life he can only perpetuate with liberal applications of alcohol. Buffett doesn’t even want to face up to the fact that he is drinking alcohol, which he disguises with mixes and elaborate rituals — rituals that are wearing thin.

Buffett’s character’s acceptance of the possibility that he bears culpability (“Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame/Now I think, hell, it could be my fault”) for his actions is the great turning point. This reckoning requires such an effort that Buffet needs an instrumental break to contemplate it, where we are again reminded by the music’s languid splendor how pleasant this dissipation can be; and we are reminded why an army of weekend sailors, beach bums and pleasure seekers have retreated into Buffett’s world for over 30 years.

“Surfin’ Safari” (1962), “Kokomo,” (1988) The Beach Boys
The New World was sold as an earthly paradise from the outset, a land of vast natural resources and uncountable acres of bountiful land free for the homesteading. Prior to that, America was the presumed home of Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth (instead of Eternal Youth, Ponce de Leon found Florida, future home of the Eternal Old, but that’s another story).

Hopes of eternal youth and earthly paradise persist in America, just below the surface, to this day, and the Beach Boys have tapped into that hope better than anyone. Interestingly, the Beach Boys’ success with these themes has precluded them from ever growing up, lest the nation be forced to do so as well.

“Surfin Safari” was the Beach Boys first national hit, released in the fall of 1962. Mike Love was the tour guide with a broken-nosed twang that millions of flatlanders interpreted as a “California accent.” The very first verse evokes California as a paradise, the kind of place where guys get up early in the morning and are so happy they sing. Beautiful girls accompany them to their “job,” which is surfing. They love this job so much that they do it for free. Also, in the Beach Boys’ version of surfing, the occupation is open to everyone: “Let’s go surfin’ now/Everyone is learning how/Come on a safari with me.”

Vince Bucci / Getty Images file Singer Mike Love, left, teamed up with Terry Melcher, John Phillips and Scott McKenzie to write the song "Kokomo" for the movie "Cocktail."

Even on the Boys’ first hit, symbolism and metaphor superceded reality. Surfing wasn’t a reality for the vast majority of Americans or even Californians: it was a symbol of a magical ever-youthful place. Surfing brought good health through exercise and sea air. It brought popularity through its mastery. It brought success with members of the fair sex, who were driven to hormonal overdrive by surfing-toned bodies revealed amongst the sand, sea and sun.

These were things that anyone would wish for, and anyone could partake of these delights through the music of the Beach Boys and through the attitudes and dress of the beach. No real surfers would have spread the gospel with the evangelical zeal of the Beach Boys. No real surfer would want the competition for precious wave space.

The rest of “Surfin’ Safari” is a travelogue of choice surf locations and techniques — “They’re anglin’ in Laguna,” “They’re kicking out in Doheney too” — a map to paradise and the techniques of eternal youth.

Demonstrating that the Beach Boys’ summer truly is endless, 26 years after “Surfin’ Safari,” in 1988, they had a No. 1 single with “Kokomo,” which explicitly revived the notion that paradise is a place that can be reached on earth. By that time, Brian Wilson had lost his ability to write toward that paradise — he had lost his willingness to explore a myth in which he no longer believed — so “Kokomo” was written by the unlikely tetrad of Mike Love, Terry Melcher (producer of the Turtles, and Doris Day’s son), John Phillips (Mamas and the Papas) and Scott McKenzie (“San Francisco”). And yet this oddity, written for the numbskull movie “Cocktail,” evoked the essence of “The Beach Boys” much more successfully than did the first Brian Wilson solo album, also released in ‘88.

First, “Kokomo” had Mike Love on lead vocals; second, it had Carl Wilson coming in with his sweet falsetto, “Ooh I wanna take you down to Kokomo/We’ll get there fast and then we’ll take it slow/That’s where we wanna go/Way down in Kokomo.” Third, it had a nonsensical but great-sounding chorus — “Aruba, Jamaica/Ooh, I wanna take you/To Bermuda, Bahama/Come on pretty momma” — which is chronically adolescent but endlessly appealing, just like the Beach Boys.

There is also conceptual brilliance at work in “Kokomo”: it transplants the notion of earthly paradise from the now-crowded, busy, expensive Southern California to the Caribbean, a repository of many of the same original pleasures as Southern California and a place to pick up new and enticing rhythms.

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