Sixties Folk Rock’s Greenest Songs: #10–6
Hitting the Top Ten in the Top 40 Countdown with Neil Young, Traffic, Fred Neil, Dylan, and Van Morrison
(Part 12 of an eighteen-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. Happy listening!)
10. Neil Young, “After the Gold Rush,” 1970
With imagery of medieval knights in armor (stanza one) and silver space ships flying (stanza three), “After the Gold Rush” does not exactly maintain a steady focus on environmental issues. But it does have a classic line that sums up a generation’s sense that we’re not treating the Earth very well: “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.” It may seem the song is a series of three separate set pieces, with a dream of knights in armor in stanza one and a dream of spaceships flying in stanza three, with a cargo of “chosen ones” apparently departing Earth for a new home on a different planet. In the middle stanza the speaker is “lying in a burned-out basement,” wanting to get high as he thinks of something disturbing that a friend had told him.
But amid these disparate scenes there is a common motif of the sun. In the first stanza there is a “fanfare blowing to the sun / that was floating on the breeze.” In the second stanza the speaker is feeling low “when the sun burst through the sky.” And in the final stanza the spaceships are “flying / in the yellow haze of the sun.” The sun, then, could well be the “gold rush” of the title. These are all moments remembered after the rush of excitement from encounters with the sun, which of course is the source of life on our planet. (Thank you, photosynthesis.) It’s another song in the “nature appreciation” vein, but accompanied by that one repeated line of distress reminding us that the best part of our life on this planet — our relationship with the natural world — is under threat.
9. Traffic, “John Barleycorn Must Die,” 1970
This is a traditional song — even Robert Burns had written a version of it — that Traffic gives modern folk rock treatment to. It’s an allegory about the production of whiskey — personified as “John Barleycorn” — reminding us of the ways in which our most cherished products can be traced back to its sources in the natural world. The barley is planted, and with the summer rains “little Sir John sprung up his head,” and then he grows “a long sharp beard / And so become a man.” Wielders of scythes are sent out to “cut him off at the knee,” and then poor John Barleycorn is rolled and tied about the waist, pricked with pitchforks and hauled around in a cart. At the barn he is flayed skin from bone by workers wielding “crab tree sticks,” and then the miller — who serves John Barleycorn “worst of all” — has ground him between two stones.
In the final stanza John Barleycorn triumphs over the “brandy in a glass” because the common folk cannot get by without his assistance:
The huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox
Nor loudly blow his horn
And the tinker he can’t mend kettle nor pots
Without a little of the barleycorn.
Centuries ago, it is not likely that people needed to be reminded of the natural origins of our everyday products. But we do today, and Traffic seems to anticipate the ecocritical turn in the last couple of decades to what Scott Hess has called “everyday nature” — where the concern is not with wilderness as the site for solo adventuring but with the ways nature is the unrecognized but essential source of the products that we encounter in our daily lives. In this case, it is also a product that can inspire high spirits — all the more reason to sing its praises.
8. Fred Neil, “The Dolphins,” 1966
Much admired as the folksinger’s folksinger, Fred Neil was much more than the guy who wrote “Everybody’s Talkin’.” If Dave van Ronk was the “Mayor of MacDougall Street,” Neil was the King of Greenwich Village in those early-Sixties days of the New York City folk scene, nurturing young talents and writing catchy songs — and singing them in an unmatched baritone — that never seemed to win him much acclaim but were much praised (and much covered) by others.
“The Dolphins” is slight in terms of lyrics, but it’s a neatly constructed song. In the first couple of stanzas there are complaints about “this old world” — that it “may never change” and “all the ways of war can’t change it back again.” He’s “not the one to tell this old world how to get along,” but he can say this: “I only know that peace will come when all hate is gone.” OK, these are pretty generic complaints about the state of modern life, but what’s really interesting is how those verses are balanced by refrains that shift away from the way things appear on the evening news and toward his “searchin’ for the dolphins in the sea.” He also wonders, in regard to an unspecified “you,” “do you ever think of me?” We might read that as some nostalgia for a lost love — a human one, that is — but given dolphins’ reputation for high intelligence, we might also consider that the dolphins are the “you” in question. Do they think of him, as he thinks of them?
The final stanza seems to leave aside complaints about contemporary human society as the speaker thinks “about the times when we were running wild.” Again, we could take this as a memory of shared experiences with someone he has cared about, or he could be thinking about the past of our whole species, when we too, like the dolphins, were running wild. Of the time before we managed to so thoroughly disconnect our lives from the natural world.
These were apparently not idle questions for Neil. He thought so highly — and so deeply — of dolphins that he essentially dropped out of the music scene and founded the Florida-based Dolphin Research Project in 1970, hoping to stop trafficking in and exploitation of dolphins. While he did an occasional benefit for the Dolphin Project, playing with old friends like John Sebastian, and duetted with Joni Mitchell on “The Dolphins” at a Whale Day celebration in 1976, he devoted most of his remaining life to dolphin conservation. According to his former manager, he also apparently used to bring his guitar down to a lagoon to play for the dolphins (Hann).
7. Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 1963
Composed in the summer of 1962 and first appearing on 1963’s Freewheelin’ album, “Hard Rain” is typically read as an early entry in the anti-nuke movement. But Dylan denies that he had nuclear contamination in mind. Rather, he was just critiquing the way the whole world — or at least contemporary civilization — seems headed for disaster. It’s one of his great songs built on his reading of French symbolist poets like Rimbaud, the “chain of flashing images” method that he would later claim as his technique for songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Chimes of Freedom.”
It’s a technique that bespeaks his familiarity with (and in turn mutual influence upon) Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg. It was “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” in fact, that first signaled to Ginsberg (interviewed in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home) that Dylan was a kindred spirit who had taken the ethos of Beat poetry into the musical realm. What’s notable about the particular “chain of flashing images” in “A Hard Rain” is how many of those images have to do with the natural world. But Dylan is a master of ambiguity — which is one of the things that makes his lyrics so successful as poetry; after all, W. H. Auden once described poetry as “the clear expression of mixed feelings.” So in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” nature is not always presented in rosy romantic hue such that all things natural are pure and wonderful, while everything threatening to nature is evil and corrupting.
Certainly some of the lyrics bespeak natural beauty and express concern about unnamed threats to it: The speaker has “stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,” which sounds pretty, but then there is the odd verb — in what way has he “stumbled” on those mountains? That he has somehow taken a misstep? Later in the song, the mountains seem to be the good place, an untainted space where one can occupy the moral high ground and can speak hard truths: “And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it / And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it.”
There is concern for nature, it seems, in references to “seven sad forests” and “a dozen dead oceans.” 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” — perhaps echoing Carson’s then-recent exposé of pesticides in Silent Spring. The forest is a place “Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison.” Human presence, it seems, inevitably contaminates and turns nature into something like Ewan MacColl’s “dirty old town.”
But Dylan is not going to be simplistic in giving us a romantic view of nature. Throughout his oeuvre, images of storms are the sort of natural imagery he relies on most often, and in “A Hard Rain,” too, nature can seem not just like the part of the world under threat, but as itself the threatening, disquieting force. The speaker sees “a black branch with blood that kept drippin’,” and he has heard “the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’ / Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.” Again, it is this ambiguity — and the clear expression of mixed feelings — that makes this, like many of Dylan’s lyrics, so rich and interesting. It’s a less clear, or at least less overt, environmentalist statement than we find in many of the songs of the Sixties that would follow, but it’s one of the richest songs of the era in making natural images central to its themes.
6. Van Morrison, “And It Stoned Me,” 1970
Employing the “nature as drug” trope that surfaces regularly in green songs of the era, what gets Van the Man high here is water — rain in the first verse, a lake inviting him in for a luxurious dip in the second (“let it run all over me”), and cold drinking water from a mountain stream in the third. These are the things that the speaker says “stoned me / Right to my soul / Stoned me just like jelly roll.” (“Jelly roll” is slang for heroin.) The song is a narrative of a day-long excursion with a friend, highlighted by their encounters throughout the day with water. First, they sitt out a rainstorm that delays a day of fishing. Then they hitch a ride to the lake and jump in (“not to mention fishing poles”). And finally they sing a song “on the way back home” till their dry throats are relieved by a “man across the road” who offers two gallon jars of water, “one for me and you.” It’s not a protest song, but it’s not a stretch to sense that its appreciation for clean, clear water flowing through the hydrologic cycle might have created some public impetus for the Clean Water Act of 1972.
Works Cited
Hann, Michael. “The Dolphins: Fred Neil’s Song Is as Fathomless as the Ocean.” Financial Times 4 May 2020. https://ig.ft.com/life-of-a-song/dolphins.html
Hess, Scott. “Imagining an Everyday Nature.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.1 (Winter 2010): 85–112.
