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For the past 23 summers, every Fourth of July (give or take a day), Mrs. Fafif and I settle down to watch 1776 in our living room, where we rely on a fan to move the still air around, and Blythe Danner's showstopper just feels like a comforting late afternoon sun streaming in through the window. It sounds like a goofy answer, but this is essentially my personal summer song.
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For pure "that song, that summer" sentimentality, the Sanford-Townsend Band springs (summers?) to mind from the summer I was 14, getting up early to deliver the Sunday Newsday to a bunch of neighbors who were never satisfied that it arrived on their doorstep early enough. (And a random unlucky subscriber was always pissed when I snatched the TV Book for my parents' use...my dad hated Newsday and would only go as far as taking the six-day subscription in deference to my transitory carrier career.) "Smoke From A Distant Fire" didn't get a ton of airplay on NY stations in the summer of 1977, but every Sunday morning it seemed to be on American Top 40, where it grabbed my attention and never let go. Because I only heard it once a week, I treat every playing of it to this day as a special treat
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The worthy "summer" in the title numbers have been accounted for, but I'll throw in a vote for War, which set out to craft the quintessential summer song and hit it, I thought, in the summer of '76, even managing to rap on the CB radio (presumably about whether Jimmy Carter was gonna pick Walter Mondale or Edmund Muskie as his veep).
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First contemporary song I associate with a particular summer in a hit-loving way: Mouth and MacNeal, the summer of 1972. I was nine. I still am, musically.
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Belinda Carlisle's first solo hit, presented here only because I heard it on Music Choice's '80s channel this morning and for a moment in my mind it was July 1986 and the Mets were 13 or so games in front.
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And since we've crept into the second half of August, nothing says summer is actually going to end like EWF as junior high approached forebodingly for the first time, 1975.
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