Hissing of Summer Lawns - Travelling North

The Hissing of Summer Lawns – Remembering

After a long, cold and gray winter in North Carolina, we are well into spring, with warm days and plenty of rain ensuring plants and trees are growing quickly. It’s around this time of the year a line from one of Joni Mitchell’s songs often pops into my mind: “the hissing of summer lawns”. However, there’s no hissing here. In part that is because it rains enough to keep the gardens green without watering, (quite a different story over on the west coast). But the other reason Joni Mitchell’s line doesn’t work in our area is because the sound of spring and summer on this side of the US is the roar of the lawn mowers: with larger blocks, it often takes 1-2 hours for the mowing team to chop down the grass, and then turn on the leaf blowers to blast every clipping off roadways, paths and steps. If the work is done by the house owner, it can take even longer. On a bad day, I have the stereo up loud, so I can ignore the unrelenting insistent droning.

What was that song about? I found the other words hard to recall, so I decided to go back to look at the lyrics.[i] That was a shock. I could vaguely remember the first part:

He bought her a diamond for her throat
He put her in a ranch house on a hill
She could see the valley barbecues
From her window sill
See the blue pools in the squinting sun
Hear the hissing of summer lawns

However, what I recalled as an evocative song about suburbia in the summer was a lot more than that. This was about being imprisoned, a woman kept behind a (barbed wire) fence. In a way, Joni Mitchell was anticipating #MeToo, by 40 odd years. And it ends with the disquieting sense the woman accepts her situation:

He gave her his darkness to regret
And good reason to quit him
He gave her a roomful of Chippendale
That nobody sits in
Still she stays with a love of some kind
It’s the lady’s choice
The hissing of summer lawns

There is a strong theme of alienation in this, a self-imposed subjugation even, without really telling us why. Was it for the ranch house and the Chippendale furniture, or something more? We are left to wonder.

Once you start down the track of recalling popular songs from the past, it is hard to stop, so I hope you are ready for Peter Sheldrake’s trip down memory lane! After Joni Mitchell, I next thought of Carole King and another great song of the 1970’s, Tapestry, recorded two years earlier.[ii] I have used the lyrics of that song many times, in discussion groups and in my teaching. The first verse is wonderful, a hymn to complexity, to the various strands of life we experience, and to the ineffable sense of who we are, always just outside our consciousness:

My life has been a tapestry
Of rich and royal hue;
An everlasting vision
Of the ever-changing view;
A wond’rous woven magic
In bits of blue and gold;
A tapestry to feel and see;
Impossible to hold.

Did I say great songs of the 1970s? Let’s get real: the 1960s were the best. For me, it started with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Then suddenly, out of the blue, it was 1964, The Leader of the Pack, and The Shangri-Las.[iii] It took me years to get this one out of my head – narrative, drama, a bad boy and the girl who loved him:

My folks were always putting him down
They said he came from the wrong side of town
They told me he was bad but I knew he was sad
That’s why I fell for the leader of the pack

Do you remember the song, the sound of the motor bike, the crash? I’m not now clear why that particular song grabbed me in the way it did. Was it the story-telling element? Not just that: after all, if you wanted a story what about The Beatles and their sad tale of Eleanor Rigby? The sound effects? Maybe. Whatever the reason, I see it like a little gem, standing out in the midst of one song after another taking the Mersey sound and tweaking it this way and that.

I guess there will always be people and songs I can never forget: from Procul Harum to Dave Clark Five, Donovan to Arlo Guthrie. The list goes on, but even more firmly stuck in my head than these are the songs of The Who, and especially My Generation.[iv]

People try to put us d-down (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we g-g-get around (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Yeah, I hope I die before I get old (talkin’ ’bout my generation)

Later in the decade The Who released a ‘pop opera’, Tommy, all about the pinball wizard’s life. Pink Floyd released weird albums reflecting the troubles of the group. Social commentary was everything. In the same year as My Generation, Bob Dylan lashed out at the pretentious rich, contemplated their downfall, in Like a Rolling Stone.[v]

I’ve got to stop quoting so many lines, but the beginning says it all:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

1965 must have been a remarkable year. It was around then The Rolling Stones really hit their mark, with Under the Boardwalk and, best of all for hormone driven young men, (I can’t get no) Satisfaction. The raw sexual tensions of that song were only to be relieved in 1967, when The Doors brought us Light My Fire.[vi]

Well, Jim Morrison and the rest of the gang weren’t really into deep lyrics, but you got the point:

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn’t get much higher

Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire

1967 was also the year we saw the culmination of The Beatles evolving style with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, packed with extraordinary songs, and ending with A Day in the Life.[vii] Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote alternating parts of this amazing track:

[Paul McCartney]

Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Made my way upstairs and had a smoke
And everybody spoke and I went into a dream

[John Lennon]

I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
I’d love to turn you on

1965-1967 was an extraordinary time in my memories of the past. There were lots of hedonistic songs, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Bu there were also moments of real insight, delineating the era’s troubles through personal and social analysis.

Back in the 1960s and into the 1970s I would listen to popular music all the time, and tried to watch Top of the Pops every Saturday night. I think that stopped when I moved to Australia in 1975. To my chagrin, there’s scarcely a song I know, or even many performers I think about from the rest of that decade. Madonna, REM, Duran Duran, The Cure, AC/DC, Pet Shop Boys, Joy Division, New Order: yes, I know those names, heard many of the songs, but they haven’t stuck. Past then, I scarcely even know the names of the groups or solo artists. Is that what happens to us all? Popular music is for the young? Or did I just get busy with work, and stop having or spending the time to listen to the radio?

It’s the music from 1965 to 1975 which is stuck in my head. But of all songs from the past, I always keep coming back to Tapestry. I must have suffered from a short attention span when I was younger because it is the first verse that always comes to my mind, not the rest. Now, older and wiser, I know better! In fact, Tapestry concludes on a much darker theme than the first verse might suggest, moving on to death, the death of self, the death of consciousness:

As I watched in sorrow,
There suddenly appeared
A figure gray and ghostly
Beneath a flowing beard.
In times of deepest darkness
I’ve seen him dressed in black.
Now my tapestry’s unraveling;
He’s come to take me back.
He’s come to take me back.

Hard to beat. Carol King was just twenty-nine when she wrote that: what a poet.

Great memories. Do my neighbours think about the hissing of summer lawns when they are mowing? Of pop songs from their younger days? Have their lives been a magical shifting tapestry of many colours? Yours, too? I hope so.

[iii] Songwriters: Jeff Barry / Ellie Greenwich / George Morton; Leader of the Pack lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Carlin America Inc

[vi] The Doors, Light my Fire, 1967:Songwriters: John Densmore, Jim Morrison, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek

[vii] A day in the Life, Beatles, 1967, Songwriters: John Lennon / Paul McCartney; A Day in the Life lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

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