Porch Swingin'

When I think summer anthems, I'm unfortunately transported back to 1988. My girlfriend at the time had been forbidden to formally see me by her strict father, who'd threatened to blow my head off with a 12-gauge shotgun. So we rendezvoused informally in a Safeway parking lot every afternoon, as she cherished her father, and I cherished my head. Once adjourned to the backseat of my parents' Cutlass Supreme, we'd fog up the windows for privacy curtains while going at it like two ferrets in a pillow case. After the third-base coach within her would refuse to wave me home, she'd affect sudden disinterest (or maybe she wasn't affecting), turn on the radio and sing the cloying pop ditties of the day.

The one I can't forget, no matter how hard I try, is Pebbles' "Mercedes Boy," in which my girlfriend and the now-forgotten songstress would ask, ad infinitum, "Do you wanna ride in my Mercedes, boy?" No, I didn't. I just wanted to ride my girlfriend. If I wanted to ride in her Mercedes, we wouldn't be sacked out in my parents' crappy Oldsmobile.

I detested that song almost as much as I came to detest my girlfriend. One day, after suggesting she go into Safeway to retrieve some free deli samples, I wheeled out of the parking lot without her. Suddenly liberated, I popped in the all-time greatest summer song, Sly and the Family Stone's "Hot Fun in the Summertime."

Of course, saying the aforementioned is your favorite summer song is a bit like saying "Cocaine" is your favorite drug song, or "Muskrat Love" your favorite bestiality song. It's too easy (unlike my girlfriend). These days, when I loll on the porch next to my dog, tipping my grape Nehi to the ground in memory of my dead homeyz, the songs that most evoke summer for me are a pair of Lyle Lovett tunes. The first, appropriately, is "This Old Porch," cowritten with Robert Earl Keen. Here, Lovett likens his old porch to "a steaming, greasy plate of enchiladas/With lots of cheese and onions/And a guacamole salad/And you can get 'em down at the LaSalle Hotel/In old downtown/With iced tea and a waitress/And she will smile every time."

In music, as in life, Tex-Mex completes me.

My other selection, the "Flyswatter/Ice Water Blues," takes place during a summer that's "hotter than concrete/In July in Houston." It's the tale of a stoically loving couple muddling through their dreary lives together. It contains perhaps the finest couplet ever committed to paper: "Honey put down that flyswatter/And pour me some ice water." Why say anything else when that's already been said?