Why doesn't Ray Charles get a fucking twenty-one gun salute?

Brian Eno, Another Green World

I've never been a terribly ambitious person. In college, while many of my peers were busy scrambling about to apply for summer internships�and, our senior year, going so far as to actually pursue employment or some post-graduate study�I was content to spend my summers in a laid-back fashion. This isn't to say I slacked off�well, no more than usual. I worked at a camp for a couple summers. I recorded an album immediately after graduation (which might not look as good on paper as law school, but it was far less expensive). The summer after my freshman year, however, was probably the most laid-back, dreamlike boondoggle of all time. I went back to Grinnell and took a job as a stockboy at McNally's, the quaint (read: small and overpriced) grocery store downtown. All I asked was a small paycheck and enough free time to hang out with my friends and play my drums. The lion's share of that summer was spent with two people: Neil and Gwen. There were other assorted characters (Ben, Wes, Mark, etc), but those two formed the reliable team I could count on to be available at any time, day or night, to watch a movie, drive to Perkins, or ... um, watch a movie. Life was simple, some would even say boring, but simplicity was necessary at that point.

Neil discovered Another Green World first; after I'd gotten some of Eno�s ambient stuff, he sought out the man's pop music. Of course, AGW appealed to me immediately, not just because the album's roster included some of my favorite musicians, or because my love of ambient music was burgeoning, or because I'm probably going to naturally be fond of all things Eno. No, there was something about AGW that transcended its musicological pedigree, the already-legendary resume of its creator, its groundbreaking instrumentation and textures�all these things are de rigeur for an Eno album. There was something more: it was the mood it created, the pastoral lull suggested by the album's title and watermelon-sugar aura of summer with which the music was imbued. Neil and I spent countless hours in his stuffy attic bedroom listening to this shit, in between movies and other mischief. (This was all before I really discovered alcohol or other drugs, so perhaps that's why I'm idealizing the purity of this musical experience and, by extension, that whole summer.) Perhaps Brian Eno had a summer like this himself, from which songs like "I'll Come Running" and "Golden Hours" were born: deceptively simple, lyrically honest, casual remarks about endless summer evenings, midnight trysts, boring afternoons, beach-cottage languor. Several times I've seen the evenings slide away / watching the signs taking over from the fading day ...

"St Elmo's Fire" is an anthem for the disillusioned traveler with nowhere to go, and Neil and I would occasionally catch ourselves singing its chorus aloud simultaneously while walking through the impossibly green, overgrown grass of Grinnell's campus, or wasting fuel on another destinationless drive through the country. Never would there be another summer that slow. While I have no desire to be twenty again, I think there might be a parallel universe where Neil and I still live in Grinnell, our misadventures are still mediated by VHS and primitive Apple computers, Gwen is still alive, we still ride our bikes everywhere, the temperature never drops below seventy, and we are idly singing In the blue August moon, in the blue August moon all night long.

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