L.A. Music: War and Summertime

It's been forever since I've done an L.A. Music post, but I wanted to get one in before the end of summer.  Technically, summer will be around for another month, and with it just now getting seriously hot around here, we'll be sporting our flip-flops well into October.  But summer-as-concept, the lazy, unstructured stay-up-late summer, is ending next week for my kids. 

In honor of SoCal summers, and our recent cruise down to Mexico, land of my maternal forebears, here's War.  War is the iconic sound of Mexican-American/Latino/Chicano culture in 1970s SoCal.  Take your pick on the label. 

I want to say a lot of complicated things about culture, and race, and the world that I grew up in, being a half-white, half-Mexican-American girl myself.  How in my junior high art class, most of the full-blood Latino boys drew complicated, colored pencil shaded renditions of the WAR logo and low rider cars. (And the few white boys drew swords and Eddie from Iron Maiden.)

But it's too hot too delve too deeply into those memories, or play dime-store sociologist.  Like, 105 degrees hot.

So later today, I'm going to crack open a beer and kick up my bare and very browned summer feet. I'll reminisce about the little white houses on Slauson Ave. that are no longer there, and the alleyways behind them off of Serapis St., with yards full of pottery and cactus and bougainvillea draped over the wooden fences.  About walking to the TG&Y drugstore with my second cousins for Hersey bars, how the smell of Irish Spring reminds me of my great-aunt scrubbing down my dirty, sweaty arms on summer afternoons, before my mom came over to pick me up after she got off work. 

How my older second-cousin had long black hair and sported the uniform of the cholas without quite being a chola herself, and how she played her 45s of War on her portable record player in the tiny, tidy living room. 

And it sounded like this (apologies for the video with cheesy graphic, it was all I could find with the original single version).

Happy Friday!  And here's to summer...my time of year.