The summer classic that spent seven weeks at number one in 1970
The summer of 1969 marks the end of perhaps the most immortalised decade in recent history.
Anybody with half a foot in the world of music knows about the 1967 Summer of Love, which eventually led to the ’69 summer jam-packed with recognisable cultural iconography, from Woodstock to the man on the moon, the Manson murders and the Stonewall riots. As these things go, the summer of 1970 was bound to be a letdown.
As the high from the drugs faded and the claws of addiction sank in, while the side effects of the contraceptive pill began to turn free-loving into anything but, things turned from bad to worse: In April 1970, The Beatles announced a legal and practical disbandment. John Lennon’s furious anti-Paul McCartney statement, “Paul hasn’t left. I sacked him,” echoed endlessly around groups of hippies swiftly realising a new, darker decade had begun.
As the cultural hegemony of the Liverpudlian group fractured into pointed interviews with different outlets, there was a gap in the market for a new band in town. Ozzy Osbourne, aptly named the ‘Prince of Darkness’, would at least swoop in with a Black Sabbath debut. But it wasn’t until October of that year that the heavy metal stalwarts would take the top spot on the charts.
It’s fitting for our story that, following the shutdown of the hopeful hippie era, the song that topped the charts refused to believe that anything other than sun, sex and smiles existed: Mungo Jerry’s ‘In The Summertime’ is, more than most summer classics, a refusal to believe in the darkness of an era defined by addiction, violence, and the Vietnam War. The debut single by the British rock band reached number one in international charts, including seven weeks in the top spot of the UK Singles Chart, two weeks at number one on the Canadian charts and three weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in the US.
The song, which celebrates the carefree whimsy of the summer, fittingly took only ten minutes to write. Vocalist Ray Dorset wrote the song in record time with a second-hand Fender Stratocaster while taking time off from his regular job in a lab for the watch manufacturers Timex. Makes sense that a man who worked to ensure we could tell the time only ever wanted to freeze it.
Initially, the song was only two minutes long, and Dorset had all but run out of ideas. To make it longer, producer Barry Murray played the recording twice with a slight remixing of the latter half, and jammed the sound of a motorcycle in the middle of the two snippets. Well, if you consider the field recording of the engineer’s old Triumph sports car, the ‘sound of a motorcycle’, that is.
It’s a spritely, happy-go-lucky song, but, just like the decade, it doesn’t have quite the happy ending. In 2012, Dorset moved to sue his management and former friend Eliot Cohen for over $2.9million in royalties, which had allegedly been unpaid.
However, the case took an odd turn and concluded with Dorset being ordered to reimburse around $46,000 for under-accounting and unpaid royalties for another track, ‘Alright, Alright, Alright’. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot there, mate. Dorset will know better than most that, eventually, the summer must come to an end.
