W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

July 1960 – Sammy Kay

(Sell The Hearts Records)

As I’ve previously said on these pages, Sammy Kay is the quintessential New Jersey dude.  He lives and dies for “the shore”, pork roll, The Boss, Bon Jovi, The Turnpike and I could go on and on.  Its a known fact that his bandmates will often use a clicker in the tour van to keep track of the number of times each day that Sammy mentions The Garden State.

With July 1960, Kay, along with John Calvin Abney (Pedal Steel & Electric guitar, Piano, Mellotron and Harmonica), Cory Tramontelli (Upright Bass) and Collin Thompson (trombone) has put together what feels like Sammy’s Nebraska.  

From start to finish July 1960 is a dark and somber listen.  Ironically, it feels like what Asbury Park must have been like after the riots tore apart this sleepy little beach town.  It took AP decades to recover from the riots and one can make an argument that it still hasn’t fully recovered.  But in any event, I say ironically because the title of this album is exactly 10 years before the riots took place, between July 4th and 10th, 1970.

With its lo-fi production, a production which sounds and feels like it was an AI clone of Springsteen’s masterpiece, Nebraska.  Some might take that as a criticism, but believe me, I say it with the utmost of appreciation and respect.   July 1960 often sounds as desperate as the various protagonists within its songs.  The opening track, “How Fast To Run”, with its opening piano notes on top of John Calvin’s melancholic pedal steel, one gets the image of what a Willy Vlautin book might be like if Willy wrote about being desperate and despondent in New Jersey rather than the American West.

About midway through the album, we get “Jim’s Ride Home” which uses a harmonica solo as its centerpiece much like Springsteen’s title track to the Nebraska album does.  And like Springsteen’s album, Kay also closes out July 1960 with a tinge of hopefulness.  Like Nebraska’s “Reason To Believe” which closes out Bruce’s album, Sammy offers up “A Better Way” to close out his LP.  Both songs are filled with images of a poor soul dealt a horrible hand by life.  Yet in each of their own ways, the characters in each song maintains hope.  They each cherish their own reason to believe that there can be a better way and as such there’s no giving up regardless of how desperate times get, no matter how dark things seem, no matter how down and out one might get.

And that in and of itself pretty much encapsulates Sammy Kay himself.  Sammy it seems is in a constant struggle with everything life throws at him but he keeps coming on.  He fights through adversity, oftentimes only to get knocked back down but like the characters he sings about in July 1960, he gets up and tries again.  And sometimes again and again.  I only hope that July 1960 turns out to be the light at the end of Kay’s tunnel much like the character in “A Better Way” sees it coming, he certainly deserves it.