Before the summer slips away and yet another musician commits perhaps the most egregious rock ‘n roll fashion faux pas, it’s time we address shorts.

For everyday summer activities, shorts are fine, even recommended. I’ve seen Europeans snicker at American tourists in their shorts. With all due respect to our European Townspeople, bite me and my July tourism shorts! This is not the time or place to examine this side question, but what is the beef Europeans have with shorts? It’s not a matter of modesty, as would be the case for tourists trying to enter the Vatican in shorts. The cameras on European shampoo commercials, for instance, pan back enough so that you can see soapsuds washing down a woman’s bare breasts. It’s not about a sense of rock ‘n roll cool, because most continental Europeans can’t make rock ‘n roll music to save their lives. (I’m leaving our friends in the UK out of this completely. They wear shorts with high dress socks and ties and jackets, don’t they? That’s another kind of weird, but I bet our rock ‘n roll capable UK brethren don’t snicker at their US visitors wearing a comfortable, utilitarian pair of cargo shorts.) If the hang-ups my friends in Italy, Hungary, and France have with us wearing shorts were centered around a sense of rock ‘n roll cool I would understand completely, because…