Trying out a new format this week — wherein I recommend to you just one song. This week, it is Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day. You can stream the song while you read here.
Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day by the Sir Douglas Quintet is easy listening. Originally released in 1969, the track starts with an overheard conversation. We hear band members making plans for tomorrow, with one instructing the other to show up at 9:00 AM. Something about planning makes them let out a big laugh. Then the song rolls open.
When there's nothing left to say
And all the clouds have faded away
And my mind wanders out there across the bay
Just to be there in the mornin'
With the sun coming through the trees
Well you know there ain't no place I'd rather be
It is an innocuous opening, a propulsive bar-band groove; the song lifts, lofts, like a kite in the wind as Doug Sahm looks out across the bay. There is nowhere in particular he needs to be, nothing in particular that needs to get done. Thus this time is made magical in its simplicity.
Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day
You can feel the magic in the air
The chorus comes on without warning, the band playing straight ahead as they do the entire track. It is Sahm who signals the chorus is happening at all, his voice suddenly ascending, sounding insistent. What was on its face a simple Sunday spent near the bay suddenly gives way to an epiphanic insight, a thought come through clarion; he sings the captured wisdom.
And when it's over
And the clover has left the mountainside
You'll be king of what you survive
It sounds like the type of thought that comes on when you finally stop struggling toward having it all figured out. You’ll be king of what you survive, be it clover in the fields, be it the week that just passed. But something in Sahm’s impassioned vocal hints at something deeper and universal. There is an emotional exhilaration in his delivery. He pushes his voice to its limit, bellows, sings out his gospel, of which he wasn’t always certain.
How much life does a bar band see? Sahm seems to imply quite a bit. Douglas Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet were working musicians in Texas throughout the ’60s and ’70s. They were meant to play holes in the wall and make people dance. Sahm is known for pioneering the “Tex-Mex” sound — a honky-tonk, party-band take on the rhythm and blues of the time — there is twang, a danceable sway, slide guitar, reliably propulsive rhythm sections. Though when I think of the special character of Doug Sahm’s music, I always think of the way he combined the Tex-Mex sound with influence from the Beatles; to me, this cross-pollination gives his music wings. (This influence always stood out to me as particularly detectable on another of my favorite Sahm tracks titled ‘It’s Gonna Be Easy’).
Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day has just one verse, then the chorus, which is repeated three times in all, buttressed by some la-la-la refrains. Sahm and the band can’t help but repeat it. It just feels right — to circle the wagons around the sentiment, that last line of the chorus, the line where the whole band gets to sing the harmony. You’ll be king of what you survive. The second and third deliveries of the chorus might as well be a victory lap around that one notion: the idea that eventually, inevitably, you end up arriving on the other side of whatever you struggle against, whatever threatens to take you down. It is the kind of awareness that comes as you look out over the water, eyes fixed at the furthest point, where the surface and the sky start to blend; suddenly you are struck by the realization that you have won your life back; what you thought you could not, you have survived.
I remember the first time I heard the song. Of course, it was the chorus that got me. I was some version of between things — lost deep inside my own head, sitting at a picnic table in the back of a coffee shop in Highland Park. I was in the middle of working on something, but everything halted when I heard it. I craned my neck to hear, stared into the speaker, and heard a message made for me. I took out my phone and typed, you’ll be king of what you survive. I found the song and saved it and listened to it as I drove across Los Angeles. I must have listened to it hundreds of times since I first found it, or it found me. Very few things feel better to sing. Thanks to our chance encounter, Sunday Sunny Mill Valley Groove Day soundtracked a time in my life I am now the king of.