Tampa Bay’s influence on music is no secret. The “Chitlin Circuit” ran through downtown Tampa and the Manhattan Casino in St. Petersburg. Savatage brought sophistication and shimmer to ’80s metal. The Digital Underground — a band formed by the Chamberlain High School dropout best known as Shock G — played a huge role in the development of rap deity Tupac Shakur. Rabbit In The Moon changed EDM in the ’90s. It goes on and on. On a local level, punk, pysch-rock and art-pop bands like Pink Lincolns, White Witch and Clang inspired other artists to step up their creative approaches.
TURN THE PAGE
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Billy Summer — who is the son of two classical musicians — will never let himself be considered an influential figure in the Bay area rock and roll sound, but the 46-year-old songwriter and studio hound has been distilling an appreciation for golden guitar tones and impeccable song structures into tasty nuggets of sound for at least 15 years now. It all started when the sound of Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” grabbed hold of a 11-year-old Summer. Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” followed quickly behind, and Summer can still smell the moment that he set his eyes and ears on a Fender Twin owned by a friend’s dad.
“He hit a note on the guitar through the amp in his garage — it was shockingly loud, and I was instantly hooked, so I got a guitar. But instead of learning to play, I bought mirrored squares from the 1982 equivalent of Home Depot, and put them up opposite my bed so I could practice my stance while listening to the Scorpions at full blast,” Summer explained in what’s become a familiar, self-deprecating approach to his rock and roll life. “That was my main pastime for years 12 and 13. And my stance remains top-notch.”
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Humor is a hallmark of Summer’s output — it’s been there since his band The Semis released its 2004 debut album. JCT 666 was 23 minutes of frenetic garage-pop anchored in the opulence and ambition of bands like Thin Lizzy and The Kinks. Melodies on songs like “No Function” were fun but also dished out alongside dark lyrics that seemed to be standard-issued inside of powder-lined plastic baggies. The mischief continued on a 2007 follow-up — White Powder, Black Power — but things turned after Summer dumped a bunch of demos and unreleased songs on a compilation called Upper Middle Trash. He talked openly about recovery on 2010’s Back To The Beach, an album he made during a pivotal time in his personal life. Devotion to influences like The Byrds, Neil Young and Cheap Trick shine throughout Beach, and Summer laid his cards out plain as day on its emotional high point, “Popov.”
“Look out sonny, before you wreck your life/Looking so sharp you could cut me a slice/But don’t twist the top off that bottle of Popov,” he sang. “We got your back and everything here’s gonna be alright.”
MANE ATTRACTION
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And it was. The Semis released two more albums before Summer formed a new band, Luxury Mane, which made its debut with 2013’s Natural Beauty. Four more Luxury Mane albums followed over the next three years, all of them colored by the sounds of Elvis Costello, King Tubby and other records that marked Summer’s younger days.
“I waste a lot of money on new LPs just to see what’s what, but once I realize the futility of catching up with what’s hip, the melodies of my youth are still what haunt me the most,” he said. “It’s a wide array of sonic delights at the Summer house. We’ll listen to Mahmoud Ahmed and then put on Loverboy’s Get Lucky right after.”
On May 21, Summer gave Luxury Mane fans seven new songs as part of a as-yet unfinished album called The Secret Empire of Florida UK. Recorded at a home studio that’s had many different names, the effort represents something of a shift for Luxury Mane, which normally records analog. Bassist Aaron Nelson switched to guitar, so he and Summer skipped the tape on half of the songs, running signal from their pedal boards into direct boxes, CAPI V28 preamps and then into the digital interface. Summer said that it resulted in some of the thickest, cleanest guitar sounds Luxury Mane has ever had.
MUSIC ISSUE 2015
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The subject matter on The Secret Empire of Florida UK is all posi-power-pop gold (listen to “I Can Almost See The Don,” where a little wordplay is deployed in describing that great big pink hotel on Gulf Boulevard), but the effort is probably the heaviest Lux album to date since the vocals were recorded after Summer was hit with a cancer diagnosis that left him in shock and total disbelief. He had surgery in January and was undergoing chemo until the end of May, but the treatment left him wiped for a week, so he’d only hit the studio whenever he felt good enough.
“Maybe I was a little afraid of, you know, death,” Summer said about the release of a partial album. Unfinished music, admittedly, is going to have to wait a little longer.
“This record came out prematurely mainly due to my impulsive nature, but also because the psychosomatic effects of the drugs made me nauseated whenever I even thought about things I did, or ate, or places I went, during the treatment. I was so ready to kick that portion of my life out and move on that I just couldn’t wait any longer.”
Summer — who almost changed the band’s name to “Florida” before releasing this album — said that the loving kindness and total support of his wife Zoe and bandmates in Luxury Mane and the Black Honkeys pulled him through. Lux will play two release shows on both sides of the Bay this weekend. Summer can’t wait to be back in the embrace of a guitar and surrounded by friends who let him face his cancer “without too much fear.”
“My main concern was making better music,” Summer said in closing, this time sans his trademark snark.
“Life’s a fragile gift. Don’t suck. Be authentic. Do your best. Those type of things became mantras, corny as it sounds.”
Get more information on the show and listen to ‘The Secret Empire of Florida UK’ below. Check out a Spotify playlist about Billy Summer here.
This article appears in Jun 7-14, 2018.
