"Chinese wrestler's jockstrap cooked in chip fat on a greasy day" - and other hippy ditties

It about to get very hot here in London - the temperature could be in the 90s by the end of the week, and the fans (the air circulating devices rather than worshippers) will be blowing up a storm in the Grønmark household. For some odd reason, when the temperature gets that high I tend to start listening to hippy music, which I always associate with summer - perhaps because intense heat renders me less judgmental and allows me to ignore the spectacular goofiness of most of the lyrics. Here's a selection of tracks from the late '60s that will be helping me weather the impending inferno. I'll start with the song which mentions the Chinese wrestler's jockstrap, whose lyrics are definitely a cut above the competition  (although the music isn't) - Roy Harper's "Nobody's Got Any Money in the Summer":

If you were a music-mad teenager in 1968, you might actually remember that, mainly because it was on CBS's wildly successful "underground music" sampler, The Rock Machine Turns You On, which sold for a mere 15/- (75p) - dead cheap for them days. The next track comes from the same ground-breaking album - The Byrds' fabulously dippy but terribly appealing "Dolphins Smile":

Back to England for the next offering, Simon Dupree and the Big Sound's "Kites", from 1967, which I have always adored:

Like just about everyone, I didn't get to know Nick Drake's music until years after his records were first released in the early '70s. Pity. It's hard to think of a better song for a hot summer afternoon than the gorgeous, haunting "River Man":

It would be eccentric to compile a list of hippy songs and not include Grateful Dead. Here's the lovely "Ripple" from "American Beauty" - composed under the influence of red wine in a London hotel room:

Before a friend (a regular commenter on this blog, as it happens) introduced me to the delights of Crosby, Stills & Nash's first album, I'd already fallen for the second track on it, "Marrakesh Express", released as a single in 1969. It's by no means the best thing on the album (it's too Graham Nash-influenced for that), but it's just so damned sunny, and still cheers me up:

Of all the songs in this list, the lyrics to "San Francisco Nights" are undoubtedly the most risible, naive and just plain wrong. That it should have been performed by the diminutive, snarling, pock-marked, tough-as-old-boots Geordie blues shouter Eric Burdon seems almost sacrilegious. And yet there's no record that reminds me so strongly of what 1967 felt like (at least, for an innocent, drug-averse 14-year old):

Buffalo Springfield now, and a Neil Young classic, "I Am a Child" - the musical equivalent of a cooling breeze on a day of heat:

Now for what is possibly the greatest hippy anthem of them all - Norman Greenbaum's sublime "Spirit in the Sky":

Love, now, and "The Castle":

I despise everything about the film Easy Rider - apart from the soundtrack, especially the last number on my list, the beatiful, sun-drenched "Wasn't Born to Follow":

Now, with my reputation for exquisite musical taste in absolute tatters, I will close this post and wish all Londoners good luck for the horror ahead.