You knew this would be coming

The Eddie Cochrane video was not quite a set-up, but I had to include this YouTube clip of the band who made "Summertime Blues" their own, especially after they were shown performing it in Woodstock, complete with guitar acrobatics caught in freeze-frame. ("Blue Cheer?" "Quiet, or you'll be taking a trip to Michael Vick's home for retired bears.") Daltrey used to introduce this song as "The only one we do that was written by someone else, so you know it has to be good," forgetting about Mose Allison's "Young Man Blues."

The Woodstock version of that song was the one they did with Moon, which they usually performed right after whatever version of Tommy they were doing live. They would start the song off almost in mid-beat, the whole band together, like a wave of sound hitting a beach. This version begins more like Cochrane's, with the beat slowly filled in on guitar. The notes to the clip say that this performance was a 1989 rehearsal version of the song, with the larger band that the group toured with after getting rid of Kenny Jones. Townshend is in his David Carradine-as-Caine-with-a-beard phase, and although he's surrounded by walls of transparent plastic to shield his hearing, he still shows the lead guitar player who's in charge by signalling the key change during the lead guitar break.



In the Cochrane version, the bass player looks supremely bored, probably because he's not very good. I like this live version by the Who because of the relative clarity of the sound; Entwhistle's bass is shorn of the fuzz overtones that accompany the normal Who version. And nobody--well, maybe Bill Wyman on "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown"--looked so cool doing a bass run. John, why didn't you leave that cocaine alone?

Summer Nights

According to what I've gleaned while teaching Homer, the phrase "dog days" refers to the appearance of the Dog Star, Sirius, during the month of August--something which many people know. But why is Sirius baleful? Its dominance of the heavens signified the most dangerous period of time for the plague: the rats get frisky and the fleas are jumpin' and the cotton is...oh, that's another allusion. At any rate, when Achilles races after Hector near the climax to the Iliad, his newly forged armor shining in the rays of the sun, he is compared, in a somewhat brief epic simile, to the fateful and dangerous Sirius.

I'm sure that was on Eddie Cochrane's mind when he penned his most famous song, "Summertime Blues." Here's a video from YouTube of Eddie, at the height of Fifties cool, doing that song. (The volume is extremely low on the recording.)



(I love the way he breaks up more and more when the backup singer delivers the punch lines.)

One more summer allusion--a song I very vaguely remember from the Sixties was titled "Summer Nights." All I could remember that it was sung by a British female singer and had a prominent harpsichord--as well as a few words from the bridge's lyrics: "there's a little cafe..." I thought the singer might be Linda Hopkins, but it was, as Google told me, the much throatier Marianne Faithfull. And thanks to iTunes, I found it was much better than I remembered, which, unfortunately, is not always the case. That vibrato contralto...