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Throwback Thursday: Keep Your Cool in this Brutal Heatwave with a Little Surf Rock
The heat, my God, the heat
As both a Southerner and a Texan, I rarely quote Union generals from the U.S. Civil War. But I cannot deny the truth in this statement from General Philip Sheridan when he was military governor of Texas during Reconstruction:
“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.”
I also shouldn’t be surprised that the temperature today will hit 195 degrees; I’ve lived here my whole life and summers have always been insufferable. In an effort to cool things down, at least in spirit, I was going to write a piece about the most glorious of summer music genres: surf rock.
Unfortunately, I did one almost exactly a year ago (during yet another heatwave). Fortunately, I had this thought on Thursday morning, which allows me to again flog the dead horse that is my occasional Throwback Thursday article. Even more fortunate for all of you, this is the last Thursday of the month, so there cannot be another one in June.
The only downside to the piece below is that Springsteen has really never done a song that qualifies as “surf rock” (the closest is his one instrumental, “Paradise by the ‘C’”). Even so, a little Jan & Dean mixed with some Beach Boys will…
