It’s hard to get more mellow than the 1972 hit by Seals and Crofts, “Summer Breeze”. Just as the title suggests, the song is a pillowy cloud of a track, gently bouncing you along its three-and-a-half-minute journey of vocal harmonies, piano, and breezy guitars. But before Seals and Crofts were proving just how strong a gentle approach could be, the duo was taking the opposite approach—a beautiful testament to the fact that not all musical evolutions are linear and rational.
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During a 1972 interview with Record Mirror, Jim Seals described the surprising musical origins of him and his bandmate, Dash Croft. “We once had a rock band in LA called The Champs,” he explained. “We made a sound like a jet engine warming and worked out until we had smoke pouring out of the amps and everyone’s ears were bleeding. The noise was almost ungodly.”
Interestingly, Seals and Croft were making that “ungodly” music alongside Glen Campbell. The three musicians moved on from The Champs to form Glen Campbell and the GCs in 1963, but the project was short-lived. After joining one more band that fell apart in its earliest stages, Seals and Croft decided to work together as an eponymous duo. Summer Breeze was the group’s second album with Warner Brothers and remains arguably their most well-known.
How Seals and Croft Went From Jet Engines to Sunbathing on a Jetty
Before Seals and Croft were recording laid-back, soft-spoken hits like “Summer Breeze”, the two musicians were among countless artists acting as soldiers in the so-called “loudness war” (if you’ll accept the hyperbole). The “loudness war” referred to a phenomenon dating as far back as the 1940s, in which engineers competed with one another to create the best, most attention-grabbing records as recording technology evolved. This same sort of battle also appeared outside of the studio and on stage as guitar pickups became more sensitive, amplification improved, and rock ‘n’ roll grew more popular.
As an engineer himself, Croft saw musical trends start to skew toward ear-splitting volumes. In the same Record Mirror interview, he recalled a Las Vegas band he was in called The Mushrooms. During live shows, he recalled “[watching] the audience sitting there and getting hardening of the arteries right before your eyes.”
“After two years of that, we sort of became mentally deranged,” Croft said. “About the same time as people like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, we realized that we had to get out of the money-making aspect of loud rock ‘n’ roll into some music which we really believed in.”
For Croft, that came in the form of a mandolin that his brother hung on the wall of his Los Angeles bedroom. “It was used purely as an ornament. And I took it down and started plunking it,” he recalled. “It had such a beautiful sound just open that I took it up. It was a real joy. A sort of merciful release from the loud rock I had been engineering.”
Like a cool summer breeze, you might say.
Photo by Gems/Redferns
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