Seals and Crofts -- Summer Breeze

 

Well, we're still about a month away from official summer. However, it's definitely been feeling like summer here in Toronto over the past couple of days with the temps going into the 90s and plenty of sun. Besides, this ROY song for this week has been getting played again via a commercial for some sort of drink...maybe it's beer or a wine cooler.🍻

"Summer Breeze" is a song that I hadn't heard in years but it was a pretty frequently played tune on AM radio when I was a kid. The crazy thing is that the duo behind it, the soft rock Seals and Crofts, was a group that I always confused with Sid and Marty Krofft, the pair behind the bizarre kids' show "H.R. Pufnstuf". For that matter, I also got them confused with "arts and crafts", probably because the musical duo and the hobby both seemed so down-to-earth. For the record, it's James Eugene Seals and Darrell George Crofts.

The song was released as their second single in August 1972 and as the title track for their fourth album which came out in September. In both Canada and the United States, the mellow-as-can-be "Summer Breeze" reached No. 6 and it even was considered the No. 13 song on Rolling Stone's "Best Summer Songs of All Time" list. Listening to it once more after so long, I could imagine that "Summer Breeze" could have been one of the inspirational songs for Japanese groups such as Bread & Butter and Makoto Matsushita's（松下誠）The Milky Way duo. And the title was also adopted by City Pop band Piper for their own album in the 1980s.

Now, there were two singles which were released in August 1972.

Rumiko Koyanagi -- Kyo no Niwaka Ame （京のにわか雨）

Hiromi Go -- Otoko no Ko , Onna no Ko (男の子女の子）