The Summer Project: Electric Avenue (1983)

 "Out in the streets there is violence, and-and a lots of work to be done."

In the summer of 1983, "Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant was the absolute coolest song playing on the radio. And this was during a summer of cool songs, from "Rock of Ages" by Def Leppard" to "Gimme Some Lovin'" by ZZ Top to "Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats. I can't quite explain what made it so cool -- it's not a musical masterpiece by any means -- but it was just different. Moreover, it might have struck a chord for me because it seemed to embody the heat of that summer.

Before 1983, yes, I knew summers were hot. I'm not sure if 1983 was necessarily an unusually hot summer, but it was the first summer I think I really felt the heat, if that makes sense. I had to exist in that heat instead of it being an afterthought. I wanted to enjoy it but cool myself off from it. It felt inescapable at times.

In the summer of 1983, I moved into my new room upstairs finally, three years after the addition had been built. I can remember hearing "Electric Avenue" in both rooms. I made a little money with my weekly paper route.

I played so many video games that summer. I inputted games in BASIC on my Atari 400 computer -- Compute magazine would publish coding for simple games that you simply typed in and, voila, you had a working game (if I didn't input any typos ...). Although the video game crash was beginning, that summer might have been the apex of arcade games. 

I played plenty of Dungeons and Dragons that summer, buying modules with the money I made from my paper route. I saw "Return of the Jedi" and "WarGames" and "Superman III" and "Krull." We didn't have MTV yet, but "Friday Night Videos" premiered on NBC and I was hooked. I made baby steps to get over my fear of water, going swimming maybe three times that summer (I would backslide the next couple years).

And underscoring it all was "Electric Avenue." My saying how I can't believe something was so many years ago is a broken record, but this seriously doesn't feel like 40 years ago. The heat and the games and the music and the chlorine are so vivid. And whereas earlier summers feel like four-plus decades, this might be the first that feels almost ... recent. I was just hitting puberty this summer, and I wonder if that created a sort of distinction. 

Up in my new room (which was my sisters' old room, they moved into my parents' old room when the addition was completed),  my bed was next to the window, perhaps the first time I slept so close to one. At night, the sounds of our residential Chicago neighborhood came through that window. A breeze might blow through. And the orange glow of the streetlights was always present. In that way, I not only found Electric Avenue that summer -- it also found me.