OCD Chronicles: Diesel - Sausalito Summernnight

Plagued with an unmemorable name and best remembered for a minor hit with an even more unmemorable song title, I finally purchased the song that resides in many radio station libraries as one of their “Wow” tracks.

Wow tracks are those songs that didn’t or barely reached the Top 40-some of which are merely regional hits-that are played sparingly to generate a “Wow! I haven’t heard this song in ages!” feeling from the listeners.

In this case, the song is “Sausalito Summernight,” an infectious, new wave-y tune from the early 80’s from the band Diesel.

You can barely understand, let alone hear the song title in the chorus. It’s there; underneath the bigger exclamation of “All Aboard!” you can hear some deep voiced dude mumble “Sausalito Summer Night.”

How I found the song was by typing in the lyric about driving around in a Rambler. From that, Yahoo brought up this curious song title from an unnamed band located overseas.

I didn’t know that they had Ramblers in the Netherlands, or that fixing these relics was relatively cheap (“And $80 dollars on repairs”).

I always assumed that the Euro’s value was higher than the dollar.

“Sausalito Summernight” has a clever guitar riff, off-kilter and reminiscent of new wave flavors of the day. What the search for this record did for me is provide Diesel’s follow up attempts, ones that evidently discarded any evidence of new wave undertones for a firm adult alternative, almost country flavor.

Whatever the band’s future direction, it became clear that “Sausalito Summernight” would be the band’s only brush with the American charts. It’s a tune that was catchy enough for me to throw down a buck for an impulse purchase, even though the band should send me a dollar for the time it took in figuring out what the song title actually was.

Since acquiring this song, I’ve been muttering my own chorus to this song and it works much better. Sadly, my own lyrics to the song-“All aboard! The excrement express!”-was incredibly well received by my song, particularly after explaining what the word “excrement” meant.

The new lyrics, however, were not well received by my wife.