Sixties Folk Rock’s Greenest Songs: #15–11
Have Another Hit (Or Five) in the Top 40 Countdown: Creedence, The Byrds, Joni Mitchell, The Kinks, and Three Dog Night
(Part 11 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.)
15. Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Bad Moon Rising,” 1969
It is easy to think of “Bad Moon Rising” as more of a comment on the social and political scene than it is an environmental song. John Fogerty himself said that the doomsday themes of the song owed something to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and he was proud that the song was adopted as something of an anthem for soldiers in Viet Nam. But note that the apocalyptic imagery — the “bad moon rising,” “earthquakes and lightning,” “hurricane a-blowing,” “rivers overflowing,” and finally the “nasty weather” that we are in for — is all drawn from the natural world. Fogerty said that the inspiration for the song was the 1941 film The Devil and Daniel Webster, not so much for the storyline as for the stormy images as the devil took his due. What seems to make the song ever-more-pertinent these days are the closing lines: “Hope you are quite prepared to die, / Looks like we’re in for nasty weather, / One eye is taken for an eye.” Sounds a bit like the contemporary concern about climate change as the much-abused earth fights back for its mistreatment Old Testament style — the justice of an eye for an eye.
14. Jacques Levy and Roger McGuinn (of The Byrds), “Chestnut Mare,” 1970
Co-written with Jacques Levy, the Broadway director who also co-wrote several songs with Bob Dylan on his Desire album, “Chestnut Mare” is a retelling of a scene from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt where the protagonist rides a reindeer. It was originally intended as part of a country rock musical to be called Gene Tryp, which, alas, never came to fruition. McGuinn and Levy transposed Ibsen’s Norwegian scene to an American landscape, with a horse substituting for the reindeer. The mare takes on symbolic dimensions, and like the richest symbols, the associative possibilities are many. The mare could be a drug; after all, “horse”is slang for heroin, which would account for some of the trippy imagery of the song and the speaker’s sense that he can never shake the desire to capture and ride the mare — they’ll be “friends for life, / She’ll be just like a wife.”
More broadly, though, the mare that can’t be saddled or tamed can be seen as a symbol of nature’s wild, free beauty. When the protagonist lassos her, the mare bolts, “running up onto the ridge / Higher than I’ve ever been before.” Spooked by a sidewinder, she jumps off the ridge, “me holding on / Above the hills, higher than eagles were gliding / . . . Straight for the sun we were riding.” They land in a pool at the bottom of a canyon, and the mare escapes. But the speaker vows to “get her again someday” and “catch that horse if I can / And when I do, I’ll give her my brand.”
So here’s the paradoxical relationship between man and nature suggested by the song: drawn by the mare’s wildness, attracted to its spirit of freedom, the man wants to capture and tame it. And he’ll never give up. In the hope of absorbing some of the mare’s free spirit, he seeks to control it — not seeming to realize that what will be lost in the process is precisely what he was seeking. It’s an interesting dilemma that the song leaves unresolved.
13. Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock,” 1970
Written shortly after the famous 1969 festival (which she did not attend but heard about from then-boyfriend Graham Nash), Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” stands as an anthem not only of the rock concert/hippie love-in/mud bath, but also as the era’s definitive expression of the “back to the land” movement of the Sixties. James E. Perone in Music of the Counterculture Era notes that the back-to-the-land movement was key to folk rock’s “return to the musical style (but not necessarily lyrical style) of traditional folk and country music” (5). In Mitchell’s song, that return is evidenced in the simple accompaniment of a piano — but then Crosby, Stills, and Nash added the rock elements to this folk rock classic.
In the song, the speaker meets with a “child of God . . . walking along the road,” headed for “Yasgur’s farm . . . to camp out on the land,” intending, he says, to “get my soul free.” The land, then, is associated with the spirit of freedom. For the speaker, who asks to “walk beside” the wanderer, it is also a retreat from the despoliation wreaked by the modern world: “I have come here to lose the smog.” At the festival, amid “song and celebration,” the speaker dreams of bombers “turning into butterflies.” That phrasing offers a neat twist on the classic economic metaphor used to explain supply and demand, but instead of “guns and butter,” it’s bombers vs. butterflies. Essentially, the choice of butterflies over bombers gives us a dream vision of the violence of civilization transmogrified into the fragile beauty of the natural world. “We are stardust / Billion year old carbon,” says the speaker, affirming a human connection to the natural world, in all its vastness, that goes back to the very origins of the universe (and also providing Carl Sagan with one of the catchiest lines in his 1980 book Cosmos).
Mitchell closes the song with one more oft-quoted line: “we’ve got to get ourselves / back to the garden.” That is the essence of the back-to-the-land movement, a return to a lost connection with Earth, with all the conscious echoes of Eden. The garden is the good place, where innocence and God’s plenty abide — before the fall into civilization and its discontentments.
12. The Kinks, “Apeman,” 1970
I can’t help but wonder if Ray Davies had been reading Desmond Morris’s 1967 bestseller The Naked Ape when he wrote “Apeman.” Morris makes the case that human behavior owes much to our animal nature. We are the hairless ape, and Davies’s song celebrates that status in singing “I am an apeman.” To return to our animal state is a consummation devoutly to be wished in the face of modern civilization, “with the overpopulation and inflation and starvation / And the crazy politicians.” The speaker says, “I don’t feel safe in this world no more / I don’t want to die in a nuclear war,” and so a retreat to a simpler life seems in order.
The speaker mocks the sophistication of civilized man; in the song’s spoken interlude he says, “In man’s evolution he has created the cities and the motor traffic rumble”; neither accomplishment seems worth boasting about. As a result, says the speaker, “give me half a chance / And I’d be taking off my clothes and living in the jungle.” That’s where we might truly feel at home. So the song expresses concern about nuclear war and air pollution and speaks of our yearning for a retreat from modern civilization into a simpler existence. And of course it’s all done with usual droll humor of The Kinks.
11. Three Dog Night, “Out in the Country,” 1970
Though the version by Three Dog Night is the one that hit the airwaves, “Out in the Country” was actually written by Paul Williams. The key environmentalist theme is in the “nature as retreat” mode, as the speaker goes to a quiet place in the country whenever “life becomes too fast” and he “feels the need to get away.” But in the catchy chorus, there is also a clever bit of hyperbole regarding air pollution:
Before the breathing air is gone,
Before the sun is just a bright spot in the night time,
Out where the rivers like to run,
I stand alone and take back something worth remembering.
Nature is a place of solace, then, but under threat from smog, and if we want to enjoy it, we’d better do so soon before it’s all just a memory. There is also the suggestion that defenders of the planet and its atmosphere are so few that the speaker feels alone. I’m reminded of the great line by Aldo Leopold: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds” (165).
Works Cited
Leopold, Aldo. Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Perone, James E. Music of the Counterculture Era. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.
