With the beginning of summer on the afternoon of June 21st, the dreaded monsoon season (jangma in Korean)  starts here in eastern Asia.  Not exactly my ideal summer, but it only lasts for a couple weeks from what I understand.  Good luck getting anything to dry with this humidity.  That's alright, though, I haven't really gotten used to this hanging-your-clothes-to-dry thing anyway.  At least, now, I have an excuse. 

The depressing nature of this rain has me thinking about what I really like about summer, what it's supposed to be.  I don't know if there's anything in the world that affects the collective quite like the advent of summer.  It causes a level of hysteria in a 10 year old that a lethal dose of candy could never touch.  The promise of days at the pool, or days at the beach, or just days playing in the sprinkler in the front yard:  this is the beginning of summer for me.  Barbeques and beers and baseball and, in the background, the music.... always the music.

Music has been piggybacked on to my life's party since I was still wearing underoos.  I was about seven when I first got cable piped into my home and that's when I discovered MTV.  At that point, Twisted Sister was the band calling my name and summing up my summer.  Ya, I know what you're thinking, "a 7-year-old listening to Twisted Sister"... kinda says a lot about my life, actually.  In a lot of ways, this was really the beginning of my summer.  Frankie and Annette didn't have shit on "I wanna Rock" when it came to my own personal Beach Party. ("What are you gonna do with your life!?!")  It really started a life's infatuation with the sound, and more importantly, the words.  I'm not saying that this album is quintessential or that it'd end up on any all time lists, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit to a closed-eye-fist-pump every time that "The Price" comes up on my random.  Next up for me was Guns and Roses (Paradise City anyone) and Motley Crue.  Then we move on down the line with a solid couple of months trying to play Poison covers with Curt Gibbs, Aaron Woodrome, Jeff Klein, and the occasional Nick Hoffman... these were my early summers.  Innocence and music to get us through. 

The summer before my junior year was really the next big soundtrack change.  There are certain albums and certain songs that immediately take me back to that time.  While Twisted Sister, GnR, and Poison summed up many summers over the course of my childhood, these next few are more of a snapshot over that one summer... and that summer was anything but innocent.  Evil Empire was really the big one for me, but some old Grateful Dead, the soundtrack to Hair, and, of course, Korn rounded out the shortlist.  Hell Tupac was still alive and putting out albums at that time.  Life was good.  This music is like a wormhole to '96 for me... albeit that time is still a bit hazy for me, though. 


One year later, it was Cake's Fashion Nugget and When I Woke by Rusted Root that accompanied us when Jeff Ward, Luke Crawford, my brother, and I conquered the river that broke Burt Reynold's leg and made Ned Beatty "squeal like a pig".  Those two CD's were the only ones we had for the entire trip.... they were literally beat into our minds over that drive.  They will always be summer... just like the rest.

I've read a dozen books about "the greatest summer of my life."  The authors always seem to focus on some trivial event that happened when they were 10 or 12.  It just doesn't fly for me.  Summer just is.  It's not one specific moment or one specific event.  It's the culmination of everything good in the world.  It's all my smiles and all of my emotion.  It's everything.  It gets harder to separate the songs into the years, but the music is always there to send me back.  It usually catches me off guard (thank you Random Play), but it never fails to make me smile.... even on a shitty, rainy day on the other side of the world.