![]() ![]() He’s stranded.Ĭochran died in a car crash less than two years after “Summertime Blues” cracked the Billboard chart, but the song quickly became a rock standard, and all these summers later, it’s still an archetypal protest song. The beleaguered and persecuted hero of “Summertime Blues” fit right in, except by all rights he should have been living it up and splashing around like the Jamies in that other big “summer” song of ’58, “Summertime Summertime”: “We’ll go swimmin’ every day/No time to work just time for play.” No swimmin’ for Eddie. There were “Problems” by the Everly Brothers (“Can’t get the car my marks ain’t been so good”) and “Gas Money” by Jan & Arnie (“Well I done run out of bread/And that’s the only thing I dread”). In the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak,” parents barrage the singer with a litany of chores the protagonist of the Silhouettes’ “Get a Job”-an adult, presumably, because his woman is the one who’s bugging him-is harangued about being unemployed. There were a bunch of songs in ’58 that grumbled in protest. If there were obstacles, and there were, he’d forge ahead. “C’mon Everybody,” “Somethin’ Else,” “Nervous Breakdown” all had irrepressible impudence, a streak of bad boy. By 1958, he’d already appeared in a couple of movies, The Girl Can’t Help It and Untamed Youth (vehicles for Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren, respectively), and released a few charting 45s on Liberty (the top 20 hit “Sittin’ in the Balcony,” “Drive In Show” and “Jeanie Jeanie Jeanie,” the latter a rockabilly cousin to Little Richard’s “Jenny Jenny”), but it was “Summertime Blues” that established his musical character, a pop James Dean: he was a teenager hopped-up with adrenaline, eager to bust loose. It was the only top 10 single Cochran had in his brief career, his breakthrough song. It has three scenes, three chances to turn things around, but each time it ends up in the same place: “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.” Cochran might as well be waiting for Godot. The record is like a hot rod that lurches forward for a few seconds, then stalls, lurches again, stalls, with a repetitive eight-note riff that punctuates all of Eddie’s complaints. “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues,” he decides. He considers making an appeal to the United Nations (although presumably Dag Hammarskjöld had more pressing matters on his desk), and goes to see his congressman, but that gets him nowhere. He needs to work to make money, but then he doesn’t have the time to spend with his girlfriend, and when he skips out on his job, his parents take away his access to the family car no one is on his side. On “Summertime Blues,” released sixty years ago, Eddie Cochran, who wrote it with Jerry Capehart, is trapped in a cycle of frustration. “Summertime Blues” is a song premised on an oxymoron: Isn’t summer a time of liberation, irresponsibility, romantic potential? ![]()
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