‘Caught By A Gulf Stream . . .’

by whiteray

This exploration of my third-favorite single – continuing a sequence begun two weeks ago – is different from the previous two. I have no personal tale to go with the single that sits in third place on my long-time list. It’s just something that I heard and loved. 

In that, Johnny Rivers’ “Summer Rain” may be a more pure selection as a favorite single than the previous two entries. Those were attached by memory to one of the more important women of my life. My admiration for “Summer Rain” is attached only to itself. 

The song – written by Jim Hendricks – does tell a story: 

Summer rain taps at my window
West wind soft as a sweet dream
My love, warm as the sunshine
Sitting her by me, yeah
She’s here by me. 

She stepped out of a rainbow
Golden hair shining like moonglow
Warm lips, soft as her soul
Sitting here by me, now
She’s here by me

All summer long, we were dancing in the sand
Everybody kept on playing “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”

We sailed into the sunset
Drifting home, caught by a gulf stream
Never gave a thought for tomorrow
Let tomorrow be, yeah
Let tomorrow be

She wants to live in the Rockies
She says that’s where we’ll find peace
Settle down, raise up a family
One to call our own, yeah
We’ll have a home

All summer long we were grooving in the sand
Everybody just kept on playing “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”

Winter snow drifts by my window
North wind blowing like thunder
Our love is burning like fire
She’s here by me, yeah
She’s here by me
Let tomorrow be

Released as a single in late 1967 – with the Summer of Love still fresh in people’s memories – the record eventually made it to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, not the best performance by a Rivers single, but by far not the worst. The record also presaged Rivers’ next album, Realization, which went to No. 5 on the Billboard 200 during a forty-one week stay on that chart that began in late June 1968. 

(And I’ll note here that I think that Realization is one of the best albums of 1968, in fact, one of the best albums of the entire decade of the 1960s.) 

As I said, Hendricks’ song and Rivers’ presentation of it tell a story, and it’s interesting to me that even as it offers echoes of the Summer of Love and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, it seems to presage a “back to nature” ethos that was embraced by a good number of the folks who heard the call of the Summer of Love (even those who never got as far from their homes as the next town over, much less San Francisco). 

The desire many folks felt to find a place to call their own – summed up by Joni Mitchell’s urging in her 1969 song “Woodstock” to “get back to the land and set our souls free” – was fairly widespread, as I look back more than fifty years to the zeitgeist of my mid-teens. How many folks acted on that urge, I don’t know. There were at least enough for newspapers, magazines, and cultural critics to notice. Nor do I have any idea how many of those who acted on that urge actually succeeded in making their own place away from the city. 

I would guess not many. As I wrote elsewhere more than ten years ago, “I think that the reality of how hard life could be on the land shocked many of those who actually tried it, even as those who stayed in town romanticized those hardships away. I imagine . . . some survived, maybe even thrived, but my guess is that the vast majority of those who left the cities and towns for their own plot of land were moving in the other direction not long afterward, dirt under their fingernails and stars gone from their eyes.” 

It’s enough to say, I guess, that “Summer Rain” hints at that movement-to-come (just as Realization and the next few albums Rivers would release pick up that theme as well). 

Beyond all that, “Summer Rain” is just a good piece of songcraft, and one of the reasons it grabs me still is the descending bass line, one of the tools of songwriting I love. 

And all of that puts “Summer Rain” at No. 3 in my list of all-time favorite singles.