Photo: The Beach Boys "Warmth of the Sun" single artwork
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In which Frank Mastropolo collects some of the most notable “Sun Songs” — tunes inspired by the sun.
“The sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.”
— Catfish Hunter
“When you wake up in the morning and the light is hurt your head . . . go get yourself some cheap sunglasses.” That’s the grammatically-challenged advice in ZZ Top’s 1980 single “Cheap Sunglasses.” “This song was actually written during a trip from the Gulf Coast up to Austin, Texas,” guitarist Billy Gibbons told Guitar World.
“A bright spot of creativity flared as we were passing the hamlet of La Grange, and I recited all three verses of ‘Cheap Sunglasses’ within the space of 20 miles. And that’s the way they stayed.”
“We wrote that song when we used to tour in cars,” said bass player Dusty Hill in Spin. “And every gas station in the world had a cardboard display of the cheapest and ugliest sunglasses you could imagine. I have bought a thousand pair of them.”
“The hip trip for us was to throw them into the audience as an offering,” Gibbons added. “We had to take a bad rap from an optometrist who said, ‘Don’t wear ZZ Top’s cheap sunglasses. They’re bad for your eyes.’”
Psychedelic rock traces its roots to “Sunshine Superman,” Donovan’s 1966 No. 1 hit. Donovan’s inspiration was meeting, then breaking up with his wife Linda. “It isn’t the sort of song that sounds like a broken heart,” he told Performing Songwriter.
“There seemed to be an intense feeling that we would meet again, and sure enough, we did. As for the title, ‘sunshine’ was a tag describing acid. LSD was legal and pure then. We were experimenting with it, as were poets, scientists and philosophers.”
The Superman of the title is not the Man of Steel. Donovan said the reference was to the German philosopher Nietzsche’s Superman, “the Superman of the future who would be totally enlightened and using the full potential of his brain and heart and soul. But I also love comic books, so that’s why I sang about the Green Lantern, too. Comic books are mythological. The superhero in my song is everybody. We can all become the superhero of ourselves.”
Bill Withers was working in an aircraft factory when Stax Records session legend Booker T. Jones offered to produce his first album, 1971’s Just As I Am. Jones lined up A-list musicians that included Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass, Stephen Stills on guitar and drummer Al Jackson. Originally intended as a B-side, the sessions produced Withers’ first hit, “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
One of the most memorable parts of the song was Withers’ repetition of the phrase “I know” 26 times. It was originally a placeholder until he wrote more lyrics. “I wasn’t going to do that, then Booker T. said, ‘No, leave it like that,’” Withers told Songfacts.
“I was going to write something there, but there was a general consensus in the studio . . . They were all these people with all this experience and all these reputations, and I was this factory worker in here just sort of puttering around. So when their general feeling was, ‘leave it like that,’ I left it like that.”
Though the Rivieras sang about the Golden State on their one hit, “California Sun,” the band hailed from South Bend, Indiana. The Rivieras – named for the Buick Riviera, not the French coastline – had never been to California when their song became a Top 10 hit. In 1977 the Ramones speeded the song up in a punk rock version. But the tune was first recorded in 1961 by R&B singer Joe Jones. It was an unsuccessful follow-up to his hit “You Talk Too Much.”
The Rivieras recorded “California Sun” in three takes; the band’s guitar and organ riffs replaced the horn section of Jones’ original. Though intended as a B-side to “Played On,” the song was flipped over and played by WLS Chicago DJ Art Roberts. Airplay on Roberts’ show brought the tune national attention. Unfortunately, lead singer Marty “Bo” Fortson and guitarist Joe Pennell didn’t get to fully enjoy the song’s success. Shortly after “California Sun” was recorded, the two enlisted in the Marine Corps.
“California Sun” by Joe Jones
“California Sun” by the Rivieras
“California Sun” by the Ramones
The song Brian Wilson and Mike Love started to write on the morning of November 22, 1963, was not about hot rods or surfing. “The melody that Brian came up with was very melancholy,” Love told Uncut. “I’d had an experience where this girl I liked decided she didn’t want to reciprocate, so I wrote the lyrics from the perspective of ‘Yes, things have changed and love is no longer there, but the memory of it is like the warmth of the sun.”
Later that day, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. “When we recorded that song a few days later it was charged with emotion,” Love explained in a video. “Everybody was all sad about that, the whole country was. And so that song in particular, ‘The Warmth of the Sun,’ has a lot of emotional meaning to us . . . but I always look for the silver lining.”
“That’s my whole trip,” Wilson added in Are You On Something. “Being spiritual, singing spiritual. ‘Warmth Of The Sun’ was a spiritual love thing, you know? It had love in it. I was proud to bring that kind of love to people.”
Elton John has long credited the Beach Boys for the impact they’ve had on his music. John said that their classic LP Pet Sounds “undoubtedly changed the way that I, and countless others, approached recording.” When John recorded “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” he asked Beach Boys Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnston to contribute backing vocals.
The song was written with lyricist Bernie Taupin, who told Esquire, “I like it to be a bit more interesting than a good old ‘I love you, you love me, my heart will break if you leave me.’ Throw in a curveball . . . put a dark twist on them.”
But the song almost didn’t make it to record stores. “When Elton recorded this track, he was in a filthy mood,” said producer Gus Dudgeon in Sir Elton: The Definitive Biography. “On some takes, he’d scream it, on others he’d mumble it, or he’d just stand there, staring at the control room. Eventually, he flung off his headphones and said, ‘Okay, let’s hear what we got.’
“When it was played back, John said, “That’s a load of crap. You can send it to Engelbert Humperdinck, and if he doesn’t like it, you can give it to Lulu as a demo.”
But John persevered, and in 1974 the song became a Top 10 hit. In 1991, John recorded a duet of the tune with George Michael that reached No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart.
“Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” by Elton John and George Michael
By 1965 the success of the Four Seasons led lead singer Frankie Valli to launch a solo career while continuing with the group. His first effort: “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” written by producer Bob Crewe and the Seasons’ Bob Gaudio. “When we were writing ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine’ we were writing it specifically for Frankie to sing,” Crewe recalled in The Impossible Dream. “That particular morning was so grey, and I looked at it and I said, ‘The sun, it ain’t never gonna shine no more.’”
“Frankie walked by our little writing room,” Gaudio added. “We were in the Atlantic building at the time. He heard it and said, “That goes nowhere, it’s mine.” The song was a rare flop for Valli but was picked up by the Walker Brothers, who made it a Top 20 hit in 1966.
“‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’ was recorded by Frankie Valli, and he didn’t get it,” John Walker of the Walker Brothers told the Birmingham Press. “We heard it and recorded it, and we didn’t get it either. I listened to it and said to the producer, ‘We’re not doing it right. We need to re-record it and make some changes.’ We changed the key, the structure and went back in. Until that point we had a very expensive recording that was going to do nothing.”
“The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” by Frankie Valli
“The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” by the Walker Brothers
“Walking on Sunshine” has been a feel-good radio favorite since it reached the Top 10 in 1983. Katrina and the Waves split up in 1999, but lead singer Katrina Leskanich still happily performs the song. “‘Walking On Sunshine’ is always my safety net and I know however the set is going I will always be saved by that song,” Leskanich told Old School.
“It is like a sweet trusted friend who always makes me happy and joyful and gives me the understanding and the bond with the audience that is almost tangible. It really has become the one constant in my life and the one thing I can count on to bring happiness to myself and others.”
Royalties from airplay, movies and TV commercials from “Walking on Sunshine” have enriched its writer, singer and guitarist Kimberley Rew. But Rew told Perfect Sound Forever that the monster hit has had its downside.
“‘Walking on Sunshine’ is pretty timeless, but it got a pop label put on us and we weren’t seen as hip. That didn’t help us with getting a fan base. We were just seen as a one-hit wonder. We got the image of being the ‘Walking on Sunshine’ band. We’d play that at shows and the people would go bananas for the song. That was the appeal. The thing is, we didn’t get any credibility for anything else.”
The Kinks’ Ray Davies says he’s nothing like the carefree character of “Sunny Afternoon.” “I’m easy driving,” Davies admitted to Rolling Stone. “But I’m not a person who loves living pleasantly above all else. I’m not that way at all. I might think I’m that, but I’m not really that.”
But the music hall-style song did describe Davies’ situation at the time. “I’d bought a white upright piano,” Davies said in Isle of Noises. “I hadn’t written for a time. I’d been ill. I was living in a very 1960s-decorated house. It had orange walls and green furniture. My one-year-old daughter was crawling on the floor and I wrote the opening riff. I remember it vividly. I was wearing a polo-neck sweater.”
“The only way I could interpret how I felt was through a dusty, fallen aristocrat who had come from old money as opposed to the wealth I had created for myself,” Davies explained in his autobiography X-Ray. “I turned him into a scoundrel who fought with his girlfriend after a night of drunkenness and cruelty.”
George Harrison wrote “Here Comes the Sun” at a time when the business of being a Beatle had become overwhelming. “Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘Sign that,’” Harrison recalled in The Beatles Anthology.
“It seems as if winter in England goes on forever; by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go and see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote ‘Here Comes the Sun.’”
“He was just a magical guy,” Clapton said in the documentary The Material World. “We sat down at the bottom of the garden, looking out, and the sun was shining; it was a beautiful morning, and he began to sing the opening lines and I just watched this thing come to life.”
Tom Petty, who played with Harrison in the Traveling Wilburys, said in Rolling Stone, “No piece of music can make you feel better than this. It’s such an optimistic song, with that little bit of ache in it that makes the happiness mean even more.”
After attending a Jimi Hendrix performance, bassist Jack Bruce was inspired to write the guitar lick that runs throughout Cream’s 1967 hit “Sunshine of Your Love.” Bruce and writer Pete Brown struggled with the lyrics during an all-night session. “I picked up my double bass and played the riff,” Bruce told the BBC’s The Birth of Rock. “Pete looked out the window and the sun was coming up. He wrote, ‘It’s getting near dawn and lights close their tired eyes.’”
Clapton contributed the song’s bridge and Ginger Baker the tempo, which he based on African drumming. Remarkably, Atlantic Records head Ahmet Ertegun and producer Felix Pappalardi were unimpressed. “They said it was rubbish,” Bruce recalled in Cream: The Legendary Sixties Supergroup.
“I think ‘psychedelic hogwash’ was one of the phrases they used. They also said, ‘You’re not the lead singer. Eric is going to be the lead singer and you guys are just the backing group.’”
When Booker T. Jones and Otis Redding heard the song, they assured Ertegun the song would be a hit. “Then the attitude changed very quickly,” said Bruce. “Since then ‘Sunshine’ has had over a million plays on the radio and it became the biggest-selling single that Atlantic had ever had up to that time.”
Frank Mastropolo is the author of the 200 Greatest Rock Songs series.
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