'This Ain't The Summer Of Love' Now A Book!

This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk -- written by Steve Waksman (an Associate Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College) and published by the University of California Press -- takes its title from a song originally written and performed by the Imperial Dogs back in 1974.

Moving from Grand Funk Railroad, Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop to the Dictators and the Runaways to Motorhead and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal to grunge, Waksman not only details how heavy metal and punk arose as a reaction to the prevailing trends in rock music of the '60s, but also how much these two styles influenced as well as opposed each other, and provoked widely different reactions from critics and fans.

Waksman packs a whole lotta research into these 400 pages, and although certain sections of the book are far too academic in tone to appeal to the casual reader, it benefits greatly from Waksman actually being a guitarist as well as a true fan of the music. You might not share his taste, but that's inevitable -- and not really the point.

As for the tome's title track, Waksman recounts how Kim Fowley introduced former Imperial Dogs frontman Don Waller to then Blue Oyster Cult co-manager/co-producer Murray Krugman, which resulted in the BOC's reworking the I-Dogs' original tune -- retaining the hookline, title, and concept -- and recording it for their 1976 Agents Of Fortune album. Waksman also notes how this chorus was later interpolated into pioneering Seattle outfit Green River's 1988 re-recording of their own "Swallow My Pride":

"Like Blue Oyster Cult singing Don Waller's lyrics in 1976, they mock the suggestion that the late 1960s was some golden era never to be reproduced or recovered ... Performing an undisclosed partial cover of a song that was not quite obscure but not quite a hit, by a well-known but hard to categorize band from the previous decade, Green River asserted above all the value of hidden knowledge in the sphere of rock ... Resources from the past became the means to counter the orthodoxies of the present and to create a new synthesis that melded hardcore's radical sense of refusal with the ambivalent embrace of heavy metal excess."

Yeah, what he said ...