Beautiful Summer Weather in Chicago: Some Nice Summer Music

Annie M., one of our devoted regular Chicago Lampoon readers, which we are delighted to report now number well into the double digits, wrote in to say that we were too negative and snarky in tone.

A Beautiful Day in Chicago

"Why do you have to be so critical and negative all the time?" she queried. "If it were the most beautiful day ever, you would still find something to complain about."

We have to admit that she is right. We are too negative and snarky.

Weatherwise, this is truly a glorious day in Chicago -- 84 degrees, nary a cloud in the pastel blue sky --if every day were like this climatically, the place would be almost habitable -- its' crooked political climate nonwithstanding.

So in deference to Annie's wishes we are going to write a nice, non-critical, barely snarky article.

We are going to post videos of some of our favorite summer songs. Hope you enjoy them.

Here's Frank singing his great 1967 hit, The Summer Wind. In the 60s, when Sinatra wasn't punching out drunken audience hecklers in Las Vegas, he was turning out some great easy listening hits:



OK, I know it's kinda gay, but ABBA's Our Last Summer was really a nice tune:



Here's a pretty good video of Bryan Adam's really great hit from 1984 Summer of '69. Reportedly, the song was not about the chronological year 1969, but about something else:



Here's John Sebastian and the Lovin' Spoonful performing their 1966 hit Summer in the City on what looks like the Ed Sullivan show:



Here's Don Henley's Boys of Summer.

This brings back a flood of memories as it was omnipresent on the airwaves during the summer of 1984. That's when I would hear it on the radio of my great little MGB while driving along the Delaware oceanside with a tall athletic blond from Tennessee named Debbie Roberts who claimed to be related to General Douglas MacArthur and who had worked for then-Congressman Al Gore.

We spent much of that summer eating hardshell crab, drinking beer and making love at Dewey Beach, Delaware, but actually couldn't really stand each other. She once told me that the only really good thing about me was my car. Charming girl, that.



And here, courtesy of The Chicago Schlager Music Review is one of our favorite German performers, Ella Endlich, singing her 2010 release Der Sommer ist Da (The Summer is Here.)

Ella Endlich was born behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet-occupied East Germany in 1984. She has emerged as a mid level pop star in Free Germany and likes to wear 60s-retro attire and perform stuff that sounds like it's straight out of that era, so, you see, we didn't win the Cold War for nothin':



So there you have it. A celebration of beautiful Chicago summer weather with some nice summer songs.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled snarky, hypercritical Chicago Lampoon bloviation.