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Summer of '69

 






I've been thinking for no good reasons about the lyrics to the Bryan Adams classic "Summer of '69." [And I'm glad that Adams is still vital and touring.]

Two prominent "slanted rhymes" caught my attention.  The first of them comes right at the start: 

Got my first real six string, bought it at the five and dime

Played it 'til my fingers bled, was the summer of sixty-nine. 

Of course "dime" and "nine" don't exactly rhyme. A small point, like a fork's tine. But soon we get another slightly slated rhyme when the lyrics are describing youthful doomed ambition.

Me and some guys from school had a band and we tried real hard

Jimmy quit Jody got married, Should've known we'd never get far.

Now, "hard" and "far" don't exactly rhyme either. 

Other rhymes in the song are simple and unslanted, like "ever" and "never".

But those two slants right upfront got me to wondering. Did Adams write his own lyrics here?  Well ... not entirely. He had the assistance of a fellow Canadian named Jim Vallance, a versatile pro who had also written for Anne Murray and Joe Cocker.  There was something more here than just "getting the rhyme wrong." 

Perhaps the two slanted rhymes were supposed to correspond to the youthful-but-doomed ambition of the young teenagers in the garage? We should've known we'd never get far because we weren't attentive to such facts as the distinction between "ar" and "ard". 

Yes, I know the lyrics don't place them in a garage. But the image is virtually inevitable. It was, after all, the summer of sixty-nine.



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