The ‘Tramp weren’t done thumbing their noses at the education system. Later, when he repeatedly sings “don’t do this!/ And don’t do that!” he nails one of the great droning-education-bureaucrat imitations of all time, like the Seymour Skinner of soft-rock. “I can see you in the morning when you go to school / Don’t forget your books, you know you’ve got to learn the golden rule,” Roger Hodgson observes sarcastically. A band that laid down filigreed instrumental explorations as silly as Supertramp’s had to be avidly pro-free expression, and they summed up that position nicely in this jazzy 1974 rant against the oppressive forces keeping young people down (an obvious sop to the Oppressed Young People market). This time of year there’s nothing more infectious than a little anti-institutional rock & roll venting – Chuck Berry’s “School Days,” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In the Wall,” the Beasties’ “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party),” with its classic opening lines: “You wake up for school / Man, you don’t want to go / You asked your mom ‘please’ but she still says ‘no!'” (definitive proof that saying ‘please’ is a total crock). No song better evokes the itchy angst of that period after Memorial Day, when the fact that they’re still making you go to school – even though it’s already hot as balls and light until 8:30 – seems like some sort of crime against humanity. “Won’t you let me walk you home from school / Won’t you let me meet you at the pool,” Alex Chilton sings in one of the sweetest, gentlest ballads of all time. Thanks to the end-of-school scene in Dazed and Confused, it’s impossible to hear this without wanting to rip up a hastily written, mostly plagiarized final exam paper on the reasons for the Watergate crisis, throw it into the air and run out into the eternal sunshine of pools and parks department jobs and deep woods kegger freedom. But back in 1972, this hard-rock distillation of the last three minutes before summer starts gave us the anthem against which all homework-hating vacation-lovers must measure their work. In 2004, Alice Cooper received an honorary degree from Phoenix’s Grand Canyon University, so his anti-school credentials have been somewhat compromised.
Here’s our playlist of the best end of school/beginning of summer jams of all time. So as the clock winds down on another year of useless learning, it’s the perfect time to enjoy the many great songs rooted in both of these loves – and even better, songs that celebrate both at once. And if there’s one thing rock and rollers love almost as much as summer it’s hating school. If there’s one thing rock & rollers love it’s summer.