RIP, Jim Seals

I saw Seals and Crofts in a peculiar double-bill with Jerry Jeff Walker at Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver, CO in 1976. Pretty locale, and we were hit by two thunderstorms during the evening:

Seals died at his home in Nashville, Tennessee on June 6, 2022, aged 79, after a long illness. 

 

 And here is an interesting article about "Summer Breeze."

It took a couple of years for Seals and Crofts to record “Summer Breeze” to their satisfaction, but when the song—with its catchy hook and indelible chorus evoking sunnier times—finally hit the airwaves, in 1972, Jim’s nostalgia became everybody’s. ... Their smiling, bearded faces were everywhere as soft rock was embraced by millions and ruled the pop charts for much of the rest of the seventies—even as it was reviled by critics, who pointed their fingers at Southern California as the likely source of this plague of mellow. 

Sitting in his house in tiny Rankin, Texas, a retired oil field roughneck and guitar player named Wayland Seals knew better. Wayland was Jim’s father, and he knew firsthand that L.A. wasn’t soft rock’s sole origin point. In fact, some of the genre’s deepest roots ran under the sidewalks and streets of the very town he lived in—and then pushed out through the barren fields of West Texas. It was a vast, desolate area, one that Wayland knew well, one where young men with pitch-black grit under their fingernails and dried mud in their hair dreamed of country music every day and played it every night.