“A Summer Song” / Chad and Jeremy 

 IT'S BRITISH INVASION MONTH! 

Rock stars in glasses -- I never could resist them. When Chad and Jeremy came along, there was no question which one I’d have a crush on. (Though Jeremy was pretty dishy too.) Amidst all the rock & roll combos we imported from England in 1964, Chad and Jeremy were different – just the two of them, with an acoustic guitar and soft, earnest folk-singer vocals. I picture them perched on stools, either side of a microphone stand, wearing turtleneck sweaters, looking arty and intellectual. (Chad’s glasses certainly added to that image.) Yet their music was much less groundbreaking than the Merseybeat records. Loaded up with strings, a horn section here and there, those tracks were closer to Gene Pitney than Gene Vincent.

Still, I was young, they were English, Chad wore glasses – I had to love them. Their first US single “Yesterday’s Gone,” had a twanging guitar riff that was a little too country for me (it actually began to chart as a country & western song, until fans learned that these guys were longhaired Brits.) But “Yesterday’s Gone” thrived on the pop charts, and was followed a couple months later with “A Summer Song,” a wistful ballad from their second UK album. Released in August 1964, right on time for those end-of-summer break-ups, it totally hit a chord. 

“Yesterday’s Gone” was a summer farewell song, too, but it was brisk and bitter compared to this honeyed gem. “A Summer Song” offered the sort of poetic images guaranteed to melt teenage girls’ hearts: “Trees, swaying in the summer breeze, “Soft kisses on a summer's day,"  “Sweet, sleepy warmth of summer nights," with the young lovers strolling through it in soft focus, gazing at the stars, and "Laughing all our cares away, / Just you and I.” (How comforting to realize that even Englishmen could mess up grammar for the sake of a rhyme.) 

Drums and horns invade the folkie sound on the bridge, as the emotions darken: “They say that all good things must end some day; / Autumn leaves must fall.” But Chad and Jeremy aren't having it. Their voices join in unison, declaring: “But don't you know that it hurts me so / To say goodbye to you?,” splitting only on the trilled “you.” And then -- well, they're teenagers, not in control of their fate, and though they ruefully protest one last time -- “Wish you didn't have to go [nice horn riff here] / No, no, no, no” -- soon enough in the last verse they're back home, listening to the autumn rain. The circle is closed, with all cliches intact. And as an adolescent who had never yet loved, let alone lost, it was a perfect sign-off.  

The equally dreamy “Willow, Weep For Me” followed that fall, scoring a trifecta of 1964 hits for C&J. In early 1965, they popped up in guest roles on both The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Patty Duke Show -- Chad and Jeremy were also legitimate actors, who’d met at London’s prestigious Central School for Speech & Drama -- and those well-bred accents sealed the deal for me. (Jeremy had gone to Eton, was descended from the Duke of Wellington, was a page at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation – you couldn’t get further from the Liverpool slums). 

And then . . . they seemed to fade away, like a summer romance. Jeremy wanted to be an actor with a sideline in music; Chad wanted it the other way around. Whatever. I soon had Herman’s Hermits to keep me warm. But I always kept Chad and Jeremy pressed in my British Invasion scrapbook – like a ticket stub, faded summer flowers, a few grains of sand. Old loves.