Dream Weaver

Summer was already heating up when Local Honey hosted its first backyard shindig a few weeks ago. The night had all the ingredients of a carefree, outdoor summer party, but with a bathroom nearby. There were good local bands on the bill, good company and the kind of beer buzz that invokes that vague youthful sense of possibility. You know, where your life still isn’t all figured out yet, where every passing moment is still a chance to turn it all around and where, in the right light, you could still pass for 25.

JEFF was playing that night. It was one of their first few shows back in town for the summer, and they are to be credited always with invoking the raw youth clause: spontaneity is good, plans are bad, anything goes, rock is still true. And so on this night—under the influence of youthful abandon, Nashville humidity and Yazoo—a dream was born. The Summer of Dreamz.

It was just an embryo of an idea, a parenthetical aside whose infectious power at the time was unknown to us. But weeks later, when I started hearing about it from complete strangers, I realized it had really caught on. One kid named Dylan thought it had been lifted from some 15-year-old’s blog. Commenters on Nashville Cream thought it was an ironic inside joke. But we couldn’t be more serious about it—so I write this column to dispel the myth, a kind of Behind the Music on the Summer of Dreamz, if you will.

Bear with me, reader: the details may be a little hazy, but the genesis remains lucid. Standing in a circle in the grassy backyard of Local Honey, Chris Slack—whom you know as the arbiter of Nashville Cream—suggested casually that this summer should be the Summer of Dreamz. Sure, we’d worked our way through a growler of Yazoo already, but that doesn’t make it any less sincere. Michael Madrid, the architect of social websites Buddytown and Last Night’s Shoes, interjected that he thought this summer was actually the Summer of No Panties. Austin Wilkinson of Jensen Sportag, who was standing nearby, insisted this was in fact the Stoner Summer. This amiable banter went on for a few moments—probably not entirely dissimilar to how those Algonquin Round Table kids got started—until Seth Graves, perhaps better known as the one-man laptop-rock outfit Casio Casanova, came forward. He was immediately enlisted to be the definitive argument settler. Would this wacky, devil-may-care summer—so clearly ripe for the reaching of limitless goals—be deemed the Summer of No Panties, Stoner Summer or the Summer of Dreamz? The fate of the season hung in the balance.

“Summer of Dreamz could actually encompass all of those dreams,” came Graves’ reply. And thus, the Summer of Dreamz was born. It was quickly determined, I might add, that a “z” should be used immediately in place of an “s.” Why, you ask? Raw youth.

We blogged about it on Nashville Cream soon after it happened, and the corresponding manifesto, written by local pop-culture blogger Trashley, started making the rounds on MySpace. There was a logo with rainbows and unicorns, because that’s the sort of thing people can get behind with little reservation. And the message? Brilliantly simple, really: the summer of 2007 is the Summer of Dreamz. All dreamz are possible. All dreamz created during the summer of 2007 have the right to be alive. Dreamz are real, or something. Soon, people began changing their MySpace user names and headlines to some version of Summer 2007 Dreamer. Bulletins trickled out in astonishing support. Had we stumbled onto something that our local rock community needed more than even it knew?

Flash-forward a few weeks more, and I’m happy to report that it’s taken on a life of its own. That’s how grassroots movements start, I guess. Take a simple platitude, toss in a universally accepted theme, and you’ve got a bona fide cultural revolution on your hands. Summer of Dreamz has now been blogged, referenced, co-opted and internalized like a hot new catchphrase. It seems people are dreaming unafraid, no longer paralyzed by the fog of fear that prevents us from really grabbing life by the balls. And they’re doing it the only way musicians know how: with house parties and shows and good graphic design skills.

DJ Bawston Sean has a Summer of Dreamz Dance Party scheduled for Aug. 3 at The 5 Spot. We’ll provide details soon on the Nashville Cream One-Year Anniversary Party at the Mercy Lounge on Aug. 25, of which the Summer of Dreamz is undoubtedly a sponsor. Local Honey, in a nod to hosting the genesis of the whole business, is planning a Summer of Dreamz party at the end of September as a close to their series of outdoor summer shows.