No. 688 – Summertime

Performer: Big Brother and the Holding Company

Songwriters: George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, DuBose Heyward

Original Release: Cheap Thrills

Year: 1968

Definitive Version: None

My first exposure to this song was from the Ralph Bakshi movie American Pop. Did you see that? It had its moments, and of course my favorite section was the Sixties stuff; I had just found The Who, Hendrix and Woodstock.

Anyway, Mike, who rented me the back bedroom of his and his family’s apartment in the summer of 1987 had Cheap Thrills, and I became reacquainted with this song. Consequently, I had it on my Walkman a lot as I rode the L to and from work—my internship in the communications department at the YMCA national headquarters.

I had my riding routine down: Because this was before Sudoku, to which I got addicted when I moved back to Chicago in 2005, I did a lot of reading.

Mike’s apartment was on the southern end of Evanston, so the closest L station was Howard, which is the Evanston-Chicago border and the end of the main north-south city route. In those days, the now Red Line had three trains. Two were typical A-B trains, which is to say the train stopped only at every other station with a few exceptions. Another train was an all-stop.

Howard to the Loop was an hour if you got on an all-stop train, 45 otherwise, unless I got lucky and caught an express Evanston train. My internship was everyday—typically for half-days, with a few exceptions—so I was on the train every day, and I had a lot of time to read.

I kept track of what I read and how quickly. I blew through Return of the Native and The Woodlanders, by Hardy, Heart of Darkness by Conrad (I liked the movie, Apocalypse Now, much better) and tried and failed—again—to get through Moby Dick.

I loved working downtown. Taking the L, going into an office building while wearing a shirt and tie with a briefcase and sitting in a cubicle made me feel very grown up. It was a long way from being a student, wearing sweats and a T shirt and carrying a bookbag.

I particularly liked lunchtime when I’d leave for the day (normally). I’d stop and get a hot dog at some stand, which was my first experience with Vienna Beef hot dogs, the world’s greatest mass marketed dog and walk around with the rest of the swells of humanity.

Now if only I could get that woman in the next cubicle to take a liking to me. Sasha, her name is, I think …