Music in the Air and the Elements under Fire
The Politics of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air in Sixties Folk Rock
(Part 4 of a seventeen-part series on Sixties folk rock and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Specifically, the series tracks the influence of environmentally themed songs from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in late 1962 to the first Earth Day in the spring of 1970. Here I start discussing the common themes of those songs.)
Earth water fire and air
Met together in a garden fair
Put in a basket bound with skin
If you answer this riddle
You’ll never begin.
— Incredible String Band, “Koeeoaddi There”
(An interesting tidbit of info before I begin: The weird name of the Incredible String Band song “Koeeoaddi There” comes from random rolls of a die with six letters — A-E-I-O-D-K, apparently — instead of numbers. The song consists of six different melodic snippets strung together, with the “Earth water fire and air” bit appearing twice as a sort-of chorus.)
Following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, environmental concerns made their way into popular music of the Sixties slowly but surely at first, then exploded at the end of the decade. Of course, liking trees and clean water was no guarantee that a songwriter could come up with something noteworthy to say about the natural world, but there were quite a few songs that featured lyrics so interesting as to rise to the status of poetry. Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” for instance, was in fact first published as a poem before it was recorded as a song.
At the other extreme are songs that, however rhythmically or melodically catchy they may have been, or however much their tree-hugging heart was in the right place, are pretty lame lyrically. But regardless of the lyrical quality, it is fascinating to see how the themes of the environmental songs of the mid and late Sixties reflect — or perhaps were influencing — the growing environmental consciousness of the time. The most frequent environmental issues surfacing in the songs are air and water pollution, pesticide use, deforestation (and the habitat loss that accompanied it), concerns about nuclear power, and littering. More generally, there is a recurrent critique of modern civilization and its attendant consumerism and industrialization, contrasted with a yearning for the natural world as retreat and escape. Accompanying that critique are apocalyptic warnings about the losses we are incurring. The critique of modernism I’ll save for the next post. Here I’ll focus on the issues-focused protests that can be conveniently categorized as concerns for the classical elements of earth, water, fire, and air.
EARTH
Given that the modern environmental movement is marked by the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring, it is no surprise that pesticide use comes in for critique in the songs of the Sixties. Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” dedicates a verse to pesticide use, urging farmers to “put away your DDT / Give me spots on my apples / But leave me the birds and the bees.” You’ve got to admire the “birds and bees” line, obviously invoking the common euphemism for the life-giving act of sex. And it’s all natural, too! So the line puts the protestors against pesticide use on the side of life and nature and fun — while the pesticide users (and producers) are agents of death and destruction.
The line also neatly echoes Carson’s concerns about the effects of pesticides on bird populations. An added attraction of the line is that it (unknowingly, of course) anticipates concerns about the more recent crash in bee populations, for which a class of agricultural pesticides called “neonicotinoids” has been blamed. Iron Butterfly also had something to say on the subject of DDT, pointing out in “Slower than Guns” that it’s “in your food like poison tacks.” While Joni and the Butterfly don’t deserve all the credit, it’s worth pointing out that both songs came out in 1970, bringing the issue to public attention, and within two years DDT was banned for agricultural use in the US.
Perhaps the least effective (and least interesting) of ’60s enviro songs tackle the topic of littering. This may well have been in response to Lady Bird Johnson’s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign of the second half of the Sixties — which made the planet’s well-being the responsibility of the citizenry without requiring any change from the corporate sector. Spirit’s “Fresh Garbage” tells us, a few times over, that “The world’s a can for your fresh garbage.” John Mayall’s “Nature’s Disappearing” picks up the same theme: “Garbage going nowhere / Soon the dumps will spread to your front door.” More interesting — if also more on the bizarre side — are Frank Zappa’s intriguingly titled (but lyric-less) “Nine Types of Industrial Pollution” (1969), inspired, not surprisingly, by a drive on the New Jersey Turnpike, and “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask” (1970). But all in all, just as we might find it unsatisfying if an environmental practice went no further than deciding not to throw a candy wrapper on the ground — while ignoring the larger-scale effects of industrial production and public consumption — the songs about littering seem pretty superficial.
Far more effective were the songs of the era that focused on deforestation. After all, the hippie generation had seen the extensive paving of paradise in the decade before the Sixties via the interstate highway system, an initiative of the Eisenhower administration. The “pave paradise” line, of course, so you can “put up a parking lot,” is also from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.” Another classic green song of the era, Cat Stevens’s “Where Do the Children Play?,” takes up the same theme:
Oh, you roll on roads over fresh green grass;
For your lorry loads, pumping petrol gas.
And you make ’em long, and you make ’em tough,
And they just go on and on till it seems that you can’t get off.
I wonder: was Stevens making a sexual pun with the “getting off” idiom? Literally, the line says that there’s so much highway there is seemingly no end to it, but metaphorically perhaps the comment is about all the highway building not being conducive to the natural act of procreation — it’s a big turnoff. Except once you’re on the highway, you can’t get off.
In Spirit’s “Nature’s Way,” the “dying trees” are nature’s way of telling us something that is actually never spelled out in the song — but we can conjecture that it’s something like “we’re headed down the wrong path.” As the Beach Boys would do in 1971’s “A Day in the Life of a Tree,” Jefferson Airplane played with the idea of a sentient and talking tree in 1969’s “Blue Eskimo Day”: “oh, redwoods talk to me / Say it plainly / The human name / Doesn’t mean shit to a tree.” The Yardbirds in “Shapes of Things” chirped up on the topic of deforestation as well:
Now the trees are almost green
But will they still be seen?
When time and tide have been
Fall into your passing hands
Please don’t destroy these lands
Don’t make them desert sands.
The country rock sound of the New Riders of the Purple Sage seemed to lend itself quite naturally to environmental concerns. Several songs that the band’s John Dawson wrote in 1969 expressed concern about what we are doing to the planet (though they did not appear on record until their first album in 1971). Among these is “Garden of Eden,” which tells us that we “live in the Garden of Eden,” but we seem hell-bent to “tear / the whole thing to the ground.” In presenting the evidence, they sing, “Hey, look at the green, green tree / It ain’t quite as green green as it used to be.” There’s a clever bit of allusion there, as the New Riders are echoing a 1963 hit from the New Christy Minstrels (co-written by Barry McGuire). Specifically, they’re alluding to the unbelievably catchy chorus of “Green Green”:
Green, green, it’s green they say
On the far side of the hill
Green, green, I’m goin’ away
To where the grass is greener still.
But those days of innocence seem long gone. Now the green things just aren’t as green as they used to be, and there’s no greener place left to go.
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Keeping in mind that this was an era that saw the beginnings of urban sprawl and the growth of the suburbs, you can imagine that the songwriters of the Sixties were witness to deforestation first hand. Not that there has been any let-up since, but in the Sixties the visible shrinking of the natural world would have been seen as something of a new phenomenon and so still quite a shock to the system.
The main cause of the rapid deforestation and urban sprawl, of course, was the rising population. It was in 1968, after all, that Paul Erlich had published The Population Bomb, warning—in the direst terms—of the overpopulation crisis in a world of finite resources. As the Kinks, in their usual witty way, put it in “Apeman”: “. . . everybody’s multiplying / And they’re walking round like flies, man.” Erlich’s book warned of a coming apocalypse due to human greed and our growing numbers. That sort of gloom and doom projection into our future became a central motif of the green songs of the Sixties. As John Mayall says in “Nature’s Disappearing,” “Man’s a filthy creature / Raping the land and water and the air / Tomorrow may be too late.”
WATER
If water had not been on the collective American brain before then, it would be in June of 1969 when one of the most laughably sad disasters in environmental history took place. I’m referring, of course, to the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio (and the subject of Randy Newman’s 1972 song “Burn On”). How, you well may ask, does a river catch on fire? The answer: when it’s so full of sewage and garbage and spilled oil that not even a riverfull of water can douse the flames. It was also around that time that Lake Erie was declared “dead” because of the industrial pollution load that led to numerous fish kills. In truth, there was evidence of concern for water quality issues throughout the decade. There were amendments to the 1948 Federal Water Pollution Control act passed in 1961, then the Water Quality Act and the Clean Water Restoration Act were passed in 1965 and 1966.
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Water quality issues surfaced not only in the news of the Sixties but in the songs as well. In “And It Stoned Me,” Van Morrison reminds us of the glories of water — rain on our faces, a lake to swim in, and clean water to drink “when our throats [are] gettin’ dry.” “Get it myself from the mountain stream,” says the “man from across the road / with the sunshine in his eye.” But if Van reminds us of the pleasures or water, there were also plenty of songs to bewail the many ways we mistreat it. John Mayall in “Nature’s Disappearing” speaks of “Lakes and rivers stagnant.” Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Jesse Otis Farrow (a.k.a. Dino Valenti, a.k.a. Chet Powers) in “What About Me?” tells off the older generation — a.k.a. “The Establishment” — by complaining that “You poisoned my sweet water.” In a Boston-area classic — you can still hear it at Red Sox games — the Standells complained in 1965 about the “Dirty Water” of the Charles River and the Boston Harbor. But like Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town,” the song ends up being part celebratory — yes, the water is dirty, but they love the grit of the place anyway.
While my focus is only on songs up to the first Earth Day, it is worth noting that several classic environmentally-themed songs that appeared within the next year or two after that also dealt with concerns about water. In 1971 the Beach Boys warned us, “Don’t Go Near the Water.” “Oceans, rivers, lakes and streams,” they tell us, “Have all been touched by man / The poison floating out to sea / Now threatens life on land.” And further: “Toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble bath / So let’s avoid an ecological aftermath.” Though that rhyme seems a little tortured, given the musical history of the Beach Boys in celebrating the wonders of the surf, the warning carries extra weight coming from them. “To be cool with the water / Is the message of this song.”
In 1972, well, I’ve already mentioned Randy Newman’s “Burn On,” with the great chorus:
Well the lord can make you tumble
And the lord can make you turn
And the lord can make you overflow
But the lord can’t make you burn
Burn on, big river, burn on.
That year also saw another environmental classic, Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” part of which speaks to water quality issues in concern about “Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas / Fish full of mercury.” It seems not at all coincidental that it was in 1972 that earlier water quality legislation was strengthened in the more extensive Clean Water Act. Congress, it seems, may have been listening. For once.
FIRE: The Nuclear Threat
For the most part, concerns about nuclear war and nuclear testing in songs of the Sixties stress, not surprisingly, the impacts on human life. Examples in this regard would be The Fugs’s savagely ironic “Kill for Peace” or the Byrds’ “I Come and Stand at Every Door,” the latter told from the point of view of a seven-year-old boy killed by the Hiroshima blast. Death “turned my bones to dust,” says the boy from the grave, “And that was scattered by the wind.” P. F. Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction,” best known from Barry McGuire’s version of it, captures the sense of impending apocalypse engendered by nuclear proliferation: “If the button is pushed, there’s no running away.” That’s just one of the many reasons enumerated in the song why we are now on the “eve of destruction.”
But there were several anti-nuke songs that recognized that the devastation wrought by nuclear weaponry could extend to the natural world as well as the human realm, and a couple of these appeared very early on, Malvina Reynolds’s “What Have they Done to the Rain” (which I discussed on my earlier “Prelude” post) and Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Both were written in 1962, though “Hard Rain” first appeared on Dylan’s breakthrough 1963 Freewheelin’ album.
“Hard Rain” is often read as a commentary on nuclear fallout, with many seeing radioactivity as the source of the “hard rain” referenced in the title. Dylan himself has denied that that was the point of the song, suggesting that the “hard rain” metaphor refers more broadly to all the societal ills that seem to threaten us. Whichever it is — and we might keep in mind that Dylan famously resists being pinned down to one version of reality when it comes to matters of his biography or his artistry — the song includes quite a few references to the impact of “hard rain” on the natural world. There are references to “seven sad forests” and “a dozen dead oceans.” And the cause of the sadness and death clearly seems to be humanity: In “the deepest black forest . . . the people are many and their hands are all empty.” In the forest “pellets of poison are flooding their waters” — a line perhaps echoing Carson’s then-recent exposé of pesticides in Silent Spring or perhaps suggesting the radioactivity from nuclear fallout.
A song from the end of the decade also portrays a landscape ruined by nuclear apocalypse. “Wooden Ships,” written by Crosby, Stills, and . . . not Nash, but Kantner . . . is a sort of sci-fi vignette in song. Recorded by both Crosby, Stills, and Nash and then Paul Kantner’s Jefferson Airplane, the song shows us the aftermath of an apparent nuclear war, where the land has been devastated but the sea offers a place of escape. The survivors live in “Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy.” Back on land, the survivors have to wear special suits to protect them from radiation: “Silver people on the shoreline, let us be.” A year earlier, in 1968, Kantner’s band mate Marty Balin suggested in “House at Pooneil Corners” that the dream of escape from nuclear devastation may be just that, a dream:
Everything someday will be gone except silence
The Earth will be quiet again
Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of violence
Left as the memory of men
There will be no survivor my friend
The “Pooneil” of the title references one of the most highly regarded (if relatively unheralded) musicians’ musicians of the folk rock era, Fred Neill, who reminded Grace Slick of Winnie the Pooh. Neill wrote, among other great songs, “Everybody’s Talkin’” and “The Dolphins” (more on that later), but he drifted away from the music scene after founding the Dolphin Research Project in 1970.
AIR
The focus on air pollution in the music of the day should not surprise us, as the issue had been receiving attention throughout the Sixties. The Clean Air Act was first passed in 1963, with amendments expanding its purview culminating in the greatly expanded and strengthened law of 1970. Not coincidentally, in that year the airwaves were also full of tunes expressing concerns about air pollution. “Have another hit of fresh air,” sang Quicksilver Messenger Service in “Fresh Air,” cleverly invoking the decade’s popular nature-as-drug metaphor. Take a hit of this fresh air, it’s really great stuff, man — quick, before it’s all gone. Three Dog Night strike a similar note in urging us to get “Out in the Country” (their hit version of the song written by Paul Williams two years earlier), and to get there asap, “Before the breathing air is gone / Before the sun is just a bright spot in the night time.” The Doors echoed their apocalyptic note, seeing in “Ship of Fools” a threat to our very survival in the suspect quality of our air: “The human race was dying out . . . Smog will get you pretty soon.”
When you can’t even trust the air you breathe — an act we repeat twenty-three thousand times a day, and something a singer would be especially sensitive to — then something it seems has gone very wrong with our world. Iron Butterfly in “Slower than Guns” envision what’s going on inside us when we suck in a breath of polluted (and possibly radioactive) air: “Can you feel the manmade mist / As it starts to twist your lungs? / Slower than guns.”
Bill Steele’s “Garbage” — probably best known via Pete Seeger’s Earth Day performance of it — tackles all sorts of environmental problems, but air pollution warrants a whole verse:
Mr. Thompson starts his Cadillac and winds it up the freeway track
Leaving friends and neighbors in a hydrocarbon haze
He’s joined by lots of smaller cars all sending gases to the stars
There to form a seething cloud that hangs for thirty days
While the sun licks down upon it with its ultraviolet tongues
Till it turns to smog and settles down and ends up in our lungs
Garbage, garbage
We’re filling up the sky with garbage.
Steele even singles out American automobiling culture as the prime source for smog, thereby implicating all of us and not just the industrialists who run the factories.
As my epigraph from the Incredible String Band has it, “Earth Water Fire and Air / Met together in a garden fair.” Sounds downright Edenic. But that paradise, alas, is lost, and there’s no blaming the snake this time.
