Summer is Always Almost Gone

September happens sometimes. It’s pretty much unavoidable, really. All your lustrous summer dreamz crushed overnight, leaving you with nothing but a half-empty container of bug spray and a keen sense of encroaching dread. 

School was the culprit, the root of the mild paranoia that sets in during that strange twilight time between summer’s end and autumn’s arrival. I can’t be alone in continuing to experience that back-to-school sensation, even years - decades, truly - since school was a going concern. Impending responsibility is a thing I’ve never handled particularly well, especially in those days when it would rear its demanding head after so many carefree weeks of precious wasted time. Every season is part of a cycle, sure, all about the yin/yang of decay and rejuvenation, but damn, that feeling of sunlit hours being threatened by darkness, of daydreams giving way to harsh reality - it really tattooed itself on my psyche. I always wanna hang on to the dreamz.

The worst was going back to school in 1983. I was twelve, not quite old enough to date the girls who already fascinated me (too odd and awkward in any event), old enough to question whether the comics-buying habit I still ravenously fed was maybe an overly childish endeavor best abandoned. (That question had no staying power; I collected comics ‘til I was well into my twenties, still odd and awkward, just more comfortable with it.) 

Summer ‘83 had been all about late lazy nights spent disappearing into strange netherworlds via the tiny black and white television in my room, lights out, window open to the summer air. It was Twilight Zone and HBO and west coast baseball games, and it probably reveals more about the mundanity of my imagination than I should really be comfortable with to admit that these nights are among the favorite times of my life. So far, anyway. Maybe one day I’ll treasure more exciting memories, but there was something about those nights, such that they now have a dreamlike, almost psychedelic pull. Like they were part of an ongoing flow, an energy that came from some kind of elsewhere. 

The primary elsewhere was actually in Atlanta, where Ted Turner’s WTBS network had begun airing Night Tracks each Friday and Saturday night from 11PM til the early morning. Night Tracks consisted of nonstop music videos for hours on end, and at the time it was a godsend for those kids not yet hooked in to the glories of MTV. Media consumption happened at a comparative snail's pace in 1983, especially if you lived in the middle of nowhere. We’d only just gotten cable a few short months before. As a music and moving image-obsessed adolescent the joy of staying up into the night getting lost in these three-and-a-half-minute worlds was irresistible, like a drug.

If the songs themselves continue to trigger tiny dopamine shots, as songs almost always do, then the videos offer up visual signifiers, the memory of which work with the same mysterious acuity as a catchy chorus or synth hook; the big red dot that marks the spot in Human League’s “Fascination” video, those eccentrically British-looking hats and glasses worn by the members of Madness in the fittingly unkempt video for “Our House” (this lyric: “And I remember how we’d play / simply waste the day away / then we’d say nothing would come between us / two dreamers”) Annie Lennox’s vivid orange hair and immaculate suit. The wild smile that somehow stays fixed on the face of the dancing girl as she whirls dervishlike through “The Safety Dance”. Decades later I’m still a little in love with her.

Video after video, all of these images and sounds in the late night hours mixed up with the stars and the night air and the impending dreams, one dreamworld giving effortless way to the next. I always fell asleep before it was over, so I was never sure when Night Tracks went off the air for the evening. This gave the impression that maybe it never really ended, like if you kept watching it would just keep going. Can a burgeoning space cadet kid be faulted for wishing those nights might keep going on and on into some kind of forever? 

Maybe the push and pull between impermanence and infinity is a fundamental facet of our existence. That great sage Cat Stevens once noted how we want things to last forever but we know they never will. Still, while I surely wanted those nights watching Night Tracks or west coast baseball games to carry me to some other place for an indeterminate time frame, I was also surely looking for anything that might stave off the certain horror of seventh grade. 

Failing that, I at least wanted the option of tuning into that trancelike summer nighttime feeling any time I wanted. It didn’t take too long to figure out that this is a thing records and tapes and (soon enough) CD’s can do - they allow a person to float away into a multi-dimensional elsewhere before drab reality sets in.

One particularly late night/early morning I was fighting off sleep when Night Tracks ran the video for Dire Straits “Romeo and Juliet”. In my hazy, bleary-eyed state I felt I was experiencing something truly unique and beautiful. An exalted plane of creative expression. Look, I was twelve. Emotional reactions tended to go big back then. Watching the video now, while not quite caught up in the same kind of thrall, I’m also not terribly disappointed. It’s quite evocative - simple but stylish, moody but humorous. It’s a fairly literal interpretation of the song; a hapless, hopeful Romeo comes calling up to a distracted Juliet’s window. The shadows and angles and weird geography of the video - it takes place in a maze - evoked in my addled and impressionable mind images of the hedge maze in The Shining, or the monolith on the moon in 2001, representations of endless mystery. Like the song itself, the video presents love as an unsolvable puzzle that humans are condemned to keep trying to figure out.

I loved and still love the way all the people in the video dance to a rhythm that is clearly not the rhythm of the song, moving with a kind of nonchalant swagger. It seems to imply that we’re all kind of shuffling along, ultimately, helplessly, dancing to our own rhythm. Near the end the title characters are seated on a couch watching their own story on a movie screen. The woman rises and saunters coolly out of the room, hips swaying in time to a tune only she can hear. The man rises to do the same but he trips and stumbles over himself on the way out. That seemed about right, given the little information I had about the inherent clumsiness of love’s pursuit. 

Luckily my sister owned the Making Movies album, and I kept listening to “Romeo and Juliet” all that summer, caught up in the story, the remembered passion, the unresolved questions. I was very taken with the sense of resignation in the song - the idea that we know we’re probably gonna get tripped up, but we keep going for it anyway, willingly, almost compulsively. I wanted very badly to live the song out. And somewhere a voice whispered, sing-song and sly, “Be careful what you wish for.”

“Romeo and Juliet” had been out for only two years, but somehow in 1983 it felt so much older. Maybe this was due to the fact that I first saw the video on a black and white television. Those used to exist. Somehow I could still infer that Annie Lennox’s hair was an unnaturally vibrant color, or that the street was strangely painted red just outside where the Human League are playing “Fascination”. I totally missed, however, the Wizard of Oz-like shift from black and white to color and back again in The Motels' video for “Suddenly Last Summer”. 

The Motels song doesn’t necessarily need that visual device to get its point across. It’s all melodrama, shot through with a hint of classic Los Angeles occult glamour. Martha Davis, voice wracked and sultry, sings about days of enchantment come and gone, then back again and gone again, replaying in memory like a dream movie. The video reinforces the mood with gauzy beach scenes, fraught with mysterious feeling, late night in broad daylight.

The song is a fever dream, a mirage. It begs you to disappear with it.

While it shares its title with a Tennessee Williams southern gothic that was later turned into a film by Joseph Mankievitz, I’ve always felt “Suddenly Last Summer” has a little Sunset Boulevard lurking at its core, a sense of old Hollywood, faded dreams, fading beauty, romance long since evaporated. A film is flashing on a screen, maybe it’s Romeo and Juliet, and someone is watching it over and over, enraptured and weary, searching for some kind of connection to some kind of real or imagined past. 

The heroine in the video is in bed dreaming, drifting in and out of sleep while reading a trashy romance novel. She wakes up having transformed into a teenager, an assortment of creepy Rosemary’s Baby old people staring from the foot of her bed. This spell is broken in typically ‘80’s fashion by the sudden appearance of the band - only the male members, had to work them in there somehow - all lined up, hats on, dressed in slimming black, doing their best to look tough and falling sadly short.

“Suddenly Last Summer” was released near the end of summer in 1983, a bit on the nose, as the song is literally about summer’s end. But then it’s also about how summer keeps on ending, over and over.

Summer is like that. It happens, and it’s full of sky and water and lust and laughter and then all of those things fade. A slow fade, apt to reverse itself periodically, feeding into an illusory sense that summer might not actually be over. All of it happening like a late-night movie on a black and white television, playing on repeat into the early morning hours, hours that at some point stop being hours and morph into a different kind of time, somewhere between right now and several lost years ahead or behind, the difference imperceptible. 

The same sensation can happen while driving in a car on a long trip, especially at night. Hours pass and life goes static, and maybe you’re not even sure where you were supposed to be going anymore. 

Robert Plant captured that feeling vividly in “Big Log”, another radio hit from late Summer ‘83. Strangely neglected in the years since its top forty run, especially given the ubiquity of so many songs by its primary creator’s previous band, “Big Log” is an absolutely exquisite track. A song about movement and loneliness and the emptiness between destinations, it somehow evokes both stillness and restlessness simultaneously. “My love is in league with the freeway,” Plant sings, a lovely keening melody, a Spanish-tinted lead guitar figure adding mournful color, mixing deep longing and wanderlust. 

The promo video honed in on the driving theme, beginning with Plant pulling into an isolated gas station with car trouble. He visualises himself driving the desert highway, pausing to drift ghostlike through a seedy poolhall, a motel room, an abandoned schoolroom. It’s a little like that Twilight Zone where the guy is wandering the empty town looking for signs of life. There’s a sense of something missing or lost, some dilemma left unresolved. “There is no turning back, no.” No turning back to what? The singer doesn’t seem all that eager to turn back anyway. Whatever’s back there would only be a reminder of why moving forward is such a necessity. Finding a way forward might not seem all that enticing either; the singer’s attitude is one of resignation, he’s moving with a shrug and a sigh - may as well, nothing better to do. 

For all the semi-forlornness going on in the song, there’s also a kind of light touch at work - an ease of spirit, a sense of release. That must be what I responded to when I was twelve. Back then I would’ve done anything to get out of the house for any length of time. Driving into nowhere for no good reason was an extremely enticing proposition, a desirable fantasy on a level with almost any other, save maybe pitching for the Dodgers. 

Night driving held a particularly strong allure. Daylight was associated with school buses, textbooks, mouth-breathing classmates. Any kind of escape from that hellishness was more than welcome, especially if it involved a car with a radio, or better yet a tape deck. Those used to exist.

Why the urge to escape? I had it pretty good, in so many ways, no real hardships other than a kind of vague, inexplicable anxiety. Poverty, abuse, hunger, discrimination? Forget it, mine was a cushy world of frozen pizzas aplenty and hours spent idly watching WKRP reruns on cable television. 

That said, the comedy of being twelve years old often feels like tragedy, and the unwieldy tangle of emotions set in motion by a sea of surging hormones can make it hard to discern the difference in any case. A simple song about driving the empty highway at night can turn into a hyper-romantic reflection on super-sized feelings like desire, confusion, loneliness. I had plenty of friends in 1983, but still my biggest fear was loneliness. I partly blame it on too much heavy identification with Charlie Brown, always waiting for the valentine that never comes.

Not really sure I knew what loneliness truly felt like, but at the very least songs like “Big Log” and “Romeo and Juliet” allowed for a kind of preemptive loneliness, or better yet an inoculation against future loneliness. 

We don’t really need something to feel afraid of or alienated from in order to feel the need to escape. Escape for its own sake is a downright necessary plan of action on occasion. Even when, or especially if, we don’t realize it.

Night driving for its own sake, under a full summer moon, radio playing some forgotten song, who doesn’t need that kind of thing every now and again? Even if you can only live it out in your imagination, or vicariously, through songs or somebody telling you about a dream they had that took place on a beach somewhere so many summers ago. We can find a way.

Even if nobody’s there at the gas station and you’re left remembering whatever brought you out here into this particular nowhere, so you fall asleep in the car and dream about driving off again. 

“And the taillights dissolve with the coming of the night.”

Everything dissolves, and summer always fades away. 

It’ll come back around, probably.