up tension toward an eventual release: "I was going for the scary, minor chord, hit-the-road-Jack chord sequence that doesn't warn you of what's coming in the chorus." He later compared his resulting first verse to the tension established in Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, which he knew from the 1940 film Fantasia. He incorporated into the verse a riff session player Artie Schroeck had played between takes during their sessions for the What's Up, Tiger Lily? soundtrack. While recording the song, the band determined that a bridge or middle eight was needed to complement John's "tense" and "free-swinging" parts, prompting bassist Steve Boone to suggest a "jazzy figure", a "piano interlude" which he later said "sounded a little bit like [American pianist] George Gershwin". Lyrics and music While most songs about summer romanticize warm weather, the lyrics of "Summer in the City" lament the heat of the daytime. The combined unpleasantness of the daytime heat and noise are directly contrasted with the relief offered by nighttime, whose cooler temperatures allow for city nightlife to begin, consisting in dancing and finding dates. Sadness returns again when the singer complains that the days in the city cannot be like the nights. The song opens with two descending notes (a flattened or minor sixth followed by a perfect fifth degree of a minor scale) played three times. This intro is played in octaves by the lead guitar, bass and electric piano. On the fourth beat of each bar, a snare and bass drum smash. While the two note descent establishes the song in a minor mode, the verse suggests a Dorian mode. The vocal of the verse is entirely minor-pentatonic. John's arpeggiation on the major V (heard at "[5] all around, [7] people lookin' [2] half dead", as noted by Everett) confirms the mode is minor before immediately shifting back to major when his voice is joined in harmony (heard at "hotter than a matchhead"). In contrast to the verse, the next section, which Everett writes "ought to be called the bridge", is a major mode, suggestive of the "different world" of the night described in the lyrics. It repeats IV–VII four times before breaking with the ii–V–ii–V chord progression suggested by Boone. The bridge further functions to emphasize the dorian quality of the next verse. The song alternates between verse and bridge again before a second break transitions to an instrumental