“Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August. Winters are simply a time to count the weeks until the next summer.”
― Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

Every Friday night we smooth our way into the weekend with music, the universal language. These selections demonstrate that despite what is being passed off as art today, there is plenty of really good music available. Come along and enjoy!

Monday was Memorial Day when America honored its fallen soldiers. Unofficially the day is also considered to be the start of summer. 

It’s not. In 2024 the summer solstice will be on Thursday, June 20 at 4:50 PM EST. But because winter can be so long and painful there’s nothing wrong with getting in a summer mood ASAP.

These selections should help.

We begin in the 1960’s.  Trumpeter Hugh Masekela did the original recording, an instrumental in 1968.

The same year “The Friends of Distinction” was performing throughout Los Angeles. Their manager was football legend Jim Brown who helped them sign a contract with RCA Records.

The group’s first single was released in 1969. Lead singer Harry Elston took Masekela’s instrumental and wrote lyrics.

“We’d be on the road, touring, and that meant riding the bus for hours at a time. We’d drive past pastures, cotton fields, cornfields. I’d always see these cows, just grazing, so peaceful, and I’d think to myself, ‘You know, they have it made. They just graze and shit!”

“Well, I first called it ‘Flaking in the Grass’ because I didn’t know I could use the same title as the instrumental since I was changing the song and adding lyrics. But everybody was like, ‘Get out of here!’ so I came back with the same music and title and they loved it.”

It sure is mellow grazin’ in the grass
(Grazin’ in the grass is a gas, baby, can you dig it)
What a trip just watchin’ as the world goes past
(Grazin’ in the grass is a gas, baby, can you dig it)

There are so many good things to see
While grazin’ in the grass
(Grazin’ in the grass is a gas, baby, can you dig it)
Flowers with colours for takin’

Everything outta sight in the grass
(Grazin’ in the grass is a gas, baby, can you dig it)
The sun beaming down between the leaves
(Grazin’ in the grass is a gas, baby, can you dig it)

And the bir-ir-ir-irds dartin’ in and out of the trees

In 1969 their Masekela re-make stayed on the pop charts for 16 straight weeks and went gold, topping at #3 in June.

Fast forward to 2000 and Boney James on sax and Rick Braun on trumpet…

These cows got it made.”
Harry Elston

The GRAMMY Hall Of Fame was established by the Recording Academy’s National Trustees in 1973 to honor recordings of lasting qualitative or historical significance that are at least 25 years old. Masekela’s original recording was inducted in 2018.

Driving down a highway, radio turned up loud, a Beach Boys song is heavenly in the summer.

After successful collaborations between Elvis, Roy Orbison, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Beach Boys in 2018 did a similar project with their vocals paired with new symphonic arrangements by the orchestra, recorded at Abbey Road Studios.

Very nice.

From the band’s website:

The Beach Boys are one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful bands of all time, with over 100 million records sold worldwide. Between the 1960s and today, the group had over 80 songs chart worldwide, 36 of them in the US Top 40 (the most by a US rock band), and four topping the Billboard Hot 100. Rolling Stone ranked The Beach Boys No. 12 on its list of the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time.” Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and recipients of The Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement GRAMMY Award®, The Beach Boys are a beloved American institution that remains iconic around the world.

The Beach Boys tour has the band scheduled on July 11, 2024, at Capital Credit Union Park, Green Bay, WI.

In the 70’s musical superstar Henry Mancini capitalized on the times by producing a disco-inspired album. Not the true disco sound. The album was done more in Mancini’s recognizable style.

From Ambient Exotica about Mancini’s Symphonic Soul:

“…released in 1975 on RCA Victor during a time where the importance of orchestras and their luminaries slowly faded away due to the cool slickness of certain other genres. Who wants to listen to their parents’ preferred music anyway? However, Mancini handles these rougher times surprisingly well, and this LP proves it. Symphonic Soul is an astonishingly good and stringent album.

Jon Lind’s and Maurice White‘s exotic Sun Goddess merges a cinematic prelude of prolonged chimes and cymbals with aqueous faux-marimba synthesizers, megalomaniac organ spikes, vivacious string washes and a maraca-based underbrush. Trumpeting horns sound like elephants, adding Exotica to the omnipresent Funk. Dreamy and playful, Sun Goddess is gorgeous.

Check out Mancini’s version of this classic composition. Note the final instruments and their brief solo notes.

Mancini’s bio is phenomenal.

During his lifetime, Mancini was nominated for 72 GRAMMY® Awards, winning 20. He was nominated for 18 Academy Awards winning four, honored with a Golden Globe Award and nominated for two Emmy Awards.

An in-demand concert performer, Mancini conducted over 50 engagements a year, resulting in over 600 symphony performances.

More of that 70’s sound next.

Remember the music variety TV show “Soul Train”? The theme song became a huge hit in 1974, recorded by MFSB (Mothers Fathers Sisters Brothers), a large orchestra-like group of studio musicians. Who’d have thought a bunch of old men with horns and strings could be so cool?

Two years later MFSB recorded an album with a summer theme. One of the tracks with easy to remember lyrics…

That’s it for this week.

Goodnight.

Sleep well.

Have a great weekend.

Know that the real bona fide official opening of summer is not that far away.

What’s the greatest ‘summer’ song/tune of all-time?

That’s not a simple question since there are plenty of deserving answers.

How about “Theme From A Summer Place”? Percy Faith’s 1959 instrumental remains the longest-running number one instrumental in the history of the Hot 100.

We’ll close with a twin spin and two versions.

The first is by the WDR Funkhausorchester, a German broadcast orchestra, recorded in February of 2022. That’s followed by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra that recorded a quicker-paced version in a 1979 movie album.

“Summer means happy times and good sunshine. It means going to the beach, going to Disneyland, having fun.” –Brian Wilson

“If you’re not barefoot, then you’re overdressed.” –Unknown

“Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.” –Al Bernstein

“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.” –John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.” –Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“If it could only be like this always—always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe.” –Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I could never in a hundred summers get tired of this.” –Susan Branch

“The tans will fade but the memories will last forever.” –Unknown

“I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.” –L.M. Montgomery

“Summer: Hair gets lighter. Water gets warmer. Nights get longer. Life gets better.” -Unknown

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” –Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady