“The Boys of Summer” by The Ataris, Saturday, August 31, 2024 (reworked repost)

In the summer of 2003, a rock station in LA started playing an inside cut from The Ataris' So Long, Astoria, an album built on the late '70s and early '80s nostalgia. The band's first single, "In This Diary" reached number 11 on the Modern Rock chart. They were set to release the second single, "My Reply," but the accidental hit "The Boys of Summer" overshadowed anything the band would produce in their twenty-five-year career. A cover of Don Henley's 1984 number 1 hit, The Ataris' punk-rock reworking took the single to number 20 on the Hot 100 and number 2 on the Modern Rock chart, unable to beat Linkin Park's "Faint." Eighteen or thirty-seven summers later, "The Boys of Summer" remains a melancholy reminder that summer is over and that we all are getting older.    

I SAW A BLACK FLAG STICKER ON A CADILLAC. Written by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' guitarist, Mike Campbell, "The Boys of Summer" was intended for a Tom Petty album, but Petty felt it didn't match their current sound. Former Eagles singer/guitarist Don Henley was recording his second album, working with Campbell, who offered him "Boys." Henley took the music and crafted words that painted a vivid picture of the end of summer and that clearly symbolized getting older and longing for the past. In the third verse, Henley gives an interesting juxtaposition. The original line, "a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac" was inspired by something Henley had actually seen. He says: "I was driving down the San Diego Freeway and got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the Right-wing upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie – all the guys with the blue blazers with the crests and the grey pants – and there was this Grateful Dead ‘Deadhead’ bumper sticker on it!" Henley is the hypocrisy of the Baby Boomer generation, who went from hippies who protested the corporate-structured life to those who participated in it and later propitiated it. The Ataris' Kris Roe updated this reference--"a Blackflag sticker on a Cadillac." Black Flag is a punk rock band that, like the Grateful Dead, protested materialism. The punk rock of the '80s, in some ways, was a resurgence of Hippy culture, and a new generation's "Boys of Summer" gets an updated band to remind listeners that rock 'n' roll--despite rockstars like Creed's video budget--is really not all about money. The biggest mystery of the song, though, is who are the "boys of summer"? In the context of the song, they could be the other boys who love the listener for a time. The song borrows the title of Roger Kahn's book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, which borrowed the title from the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas's poem "I See the Boys of Summer." Thomas's poem, too, captures the death of summer, although this poem is much frostier than the subtle change in summer to fall captured by Henley.  

AFTER THE BOYS OF SUMMER HAVE GONE. With the summer of 2024 wrapping up, 40 years after Don Henley’s hit and 21 years after The Ataris’ remake, the song still captures a nostalgia for youth. The summer freshness we kicked off with TWS’s “Hey! Hey!” has ripened into maturity. This summer may have been the first year someone drank alcohol, smoked a cigarette, had sex, or gotten into other mischief. It’s horrifying for parents to think about their kids. But when we hear songs like “The Boys of Summer,” we’re instantly brought back to the hot days of our own youth and think about what was on our minds back then. In particular, I think about the homoerotic Men’s Health magazines and other men’s fitness magazines that littered racks in the supermarkets. I remember finally working up the courage to buy the magazine and trying to hide it until I got home or made up a half-lie about wanting to start exercising. The magazines weren’t The Advocate, DNA, Attitude, Freshmen, or the other magazines behind the plastic in Barnes & Noble. Nothing was overtly sexual, but occasionally there were gay advertisers for fantasy jock hotlines and there was a curious video series called The Boys of Summer, which featured 20-something models. All the while, “The Boys of Summer” was a hit on the radio and I was really confused about what was happening to me post-puberty.

Don Henley's Original The Ataris' cover

The Ataris' cover: