Sixties Folk Rock’s Greenest Songs: #20–16
The Top 40 Countdown Continues — And Now, Folks, We’re Getting to the Really Good Stuff! Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Pete Seeger, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Gordon Lightfoot
(Part 10 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.)
20. Joni Mitchell, “Urge for Going,” 1966
In what she called her only protest song — protesting the arrival of winter — Mitchell makes no overt environmental argument in “Urge for Going.” But the song is rich in appreciative, metaphor-laden, sense-appealing description that speaks to her attentive engagement with the natural world and seasonal change. Perhaps, as in “Chelsea Morning” and “Winter Lady,” the consciously poetic lyrics here owe something to her Chelsea Hotel affair with Leonard Cohen while she was still an up-and-coming talent. Much of the song relies on personification: the “sun turns traitor cold” and “shivering trees are standing in a naked row”; “Bully winds” push leaves “face down in the snow”; “the warriors of winter . . . give a cold triumphant shout”; summertime is not just leaving but “falling down”; the blanket-hugging speaker would “lock the vagrant winter out” and “bolt my wandering in.” The frost, though, is envisioned not as a person but as something like a bird of prey: “It hovered in a frozen sky / then it gobbled summer down.”
The descriptive language is so interesting and fresh that, however much the speaker may protest, we get in this song a vivid picture of winter in all its cold and piercing glory. The speaker may yearn for the return of summer, but she certainly has taken careful notice of winter (“see the geese in chevron flight”) — leaving listeners, too, with new ways of perceiving and appreciating the onset of winter.
19. Nick Drake, “River Man,” 1969
Like everything Nick Drake did, “River Man” is moody, haunting, a bit mysterious, and utterly beautiful. And the guitar work is impeccable and extraordinary. Unlike most of his songs, “River Man” is in standard tuning, but even so Drake finds different voicings in his unusual chords. And the song has an unusual time signature — it’s in 5/4 time, like Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.”
There are three characters in the song: the speaker himself, a friend named Betty (who has “a word to say / About things today / And fallen leaves”), and the River Man, who is a sort of genius loci, or spirit of the place. Betty has prayed “for the sky to blow away,” but the “thought of summer rain / Calling for her mind again” has led her to have “lost the pain,” though she has “stayed for more.” Nature, it seems, redeems her from the psychic pain she is feeling from the daily news.
Interspersed with the four verses about Betty are four verses about the speaker’s planned conversation with the River Man. He intends to tell the River Man all he can “About the plan / For lilac time” — an apparent image of spring renewal — and “About the ban / On feeling free.” That societal ban “on feeling free” seems very much at odds with the spirit of the river. But whereas Betty seems to have found in nature a source of redemption, at least enough to stay around a little while longer, the speaker moves the other way. If the River Man tells him “all he knows / About the way his river flows,” then, says the speaker, “I don’t suppose / It’s meant for me.” Presumably what the river has to say would have something to do with freedom and grace and renewal and pure being — the lessons of the spirit that nature teaches every day. But for someone in the speaker’s depressive state, what the river has to say offers insufficient balm to make the speaker want to make it through another day.
One can’t help but think, of course, of Nick Drake’s sad end, an apparent suicide (from drug overdose, but perhaps accidental) at age 26. He was reportedly distressed that his three albums — now much admired, to the point of reverence — hadn’t yet caught on. Among the great songwriters of the era (or of any era) — a group that would include Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell — Nick Drake is the least well-known. Note to reader: if you don’t know this song, go listen to it now. Then listen to a dozen or so more Nick Drake songs. You can thank me later.
18. Pete Seeger, “My Dirty Stream (The Hudson River Song),” 1966
Here is a song that made a measurable difference in the world. Released on God Bless the Grass, an entire album of environmental songs written by Seeger and Malvina Reynolds, “My Dirty Stream” marked Seeger’s entry into the environmental battle to clean up the Hudson River. In few environmental battles has one person had such a definitive impact. The song came out around the same time that Seeger began working to commission the sloop Clearwater, and within a few years the Clearwater was sailing up and down the Hudson bringing Seeger’s environmental message — and his songs — to the people of the Hudson Valley. When Congress was debating the Clean Water Act (passed in 1972), Seeger sailed with the Clearwater to Washington, D.C., to bring his message from the Hudson shorelines to the capital. The bottom line is that it all worked: a river so polluted and oxygen-deprived that fish could suffocate in its water, the Hudson now, while a long way from pristine, is swimmable and fish can live in it. Most of our rivers, lakes, and streams, in fact, are much cleaner now that they were in the Sixties — hurray for environmental legislation. And hooray for the environmental awareness — brought to you, perhaps, by a favorite song or two — that made the legislation possible.
The opening and closing verses of “My Dirty Stream” make Seeger’s vision of the future apparent: that the “Hudson River will once again run clear.” The four verses in between trace the river’s path from its headwaters in the Adirondacks to the sea, noting the ever-increasing pollutant load along the way. It starts “with just a few floating wrappers of chewing gum / dropped by some hikers to warn of things to come.” Next there is the paper plant in Glens Falls, where “five thousand honest hands” — Pete clearly does not want to lay the blame on the workers — produce “five million gallons of waste a day.”
Further downstream “one million toilet chains / Find my Hudson a convenient place to drain / And each little city says, ‘Who me? / Do you think that sewage plants are free?” Pete’s tactic here is akin to Dylan’s in “Only a Pawn in their Game.” There it’s not the individual racists who are ultimately responsible for killing Medgar Evers — not even the one who pulled the trigger. The killer — and the too-many people that look the other way and allow such killings to occur and go unpunished — are only pawns in a system, and it’s the system that should rightfully bear responsibility for the crime. And so Seeger in “My Dirty Stream” doesn’t so much blame the citizens whose toilets flush into the river but the cities that continue to make use of a befouling sewage system. And it’s not the workers at the paper mill who are responsible but the bourgeois owners who say “Why should we do it any other way?” It’s the system that needs to change, and the citizen’s role is not to shamefacedly accept the blame but to work to change the system. Yay, Pete.
17. Quicksilver Messenger Service, “What About Me,” 1970
It is the first verse of this “Jesse Otis Farrow” (aka Dino Valenti / Chet Power) song that offers a wide-ranging environmentalist critique. There are lines about water pollution (“You poison my sweet water”), air pollution (“the air’s not good to breathe”), deforestation (“You cut down my green trees”), and herbicide and pesticide overuse (“The food you fed my children / Was the cause of their disease”). And that first verse introduces the apocalyptic note common to eco-songs of the era: “My world is slowly fallin’ down.” All that in just the first eight lines!
The rest of the song is about the way societal institutions — the media, the “factory,” the schools, the military — the wars, the laws, the “rules and regulations” — have sparked the speaker’s disaffection. As a smoker of marijuana, he is a “fugitive from injustice,” and he says he feels “like a stranger in the land where I was born,” a line likely echoing Robert Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land, which was a big hit with the Sixties hippie set (who found pot an aid to grokking one another). The speaker also warns that times may be a-changin’, and “the revolution / Must be mighty close at hand.” Unlike many of the lesser songs of the era, “What About Me” lays the blame for environmental problems not on individual citizens — who need to, for instance, stop littering — but on a corrupt and wrong-headed system. Societal changes are required, not just to correct injustice but to save the natural world. And those who are in synch and in sympathy with the natural world are the outcasts and outlaws, “always on the run.” But if the natural world is what they are running toward, then they are the ones on the right path.
16. Gordon Lightfoot, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” 1967
There’s a Hudson River School painting by George Inness called The Lackawanna Valley that has earned a fair bit of critical discussion among art historians because it seems so clearly and utterly ambiguous about what it’s saying about the nature of progress. The painting was commissioned by the Lackawanna Railroad of Pennsylvania, and to some extent the painting seems to celebrate the railroad. There’s a shepherd-like figure lounging in the grass in the foreground as a locomotive approaches, and a misty mountain ridge in the background. In the center there are columns of smoke rising from both the roundhouse and a church. All of this seems to suggest that the railroad fits quite nicely into a pastoral American landscape. On the other hand, the foreground is full of stumps from the forest that was removed to make way for the railroad, and the smoke in the town below speaks, perhaps, of industrial pollution — affecting even the church. Had Inness taken the railway’s money and then created a painting that was actually — if subtly — critical of the railway’s effect on the American landscape?
Gordon Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” strikes me the same way. Commissioned by the Canadian Broadcast Company for the Canadian centennial of 1967, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” is full of the same sorts of ambiguities as we can see in Inness’s painting. On the one hand, there is a clear appreciation for the landscape, in this case the Canadian landscape, a place “Where the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun” before the railroads crossed them. Those mountains also serve as backdrop for glorious sunsets and night skies: “Behind the blue Rockies the sun is declinin’ / The stars, they come stealin’ at the close of the day.” The lands crossed by the rail lines are recited in energetic detail: “over the mountains and over the plains / Into the muskeg and into the rain / Up the St. Lawrence all the way to Gaspé.”
On the other hand, there seems to be just as much admiration expressed for the captains of industry who brought the downsides of civilization to the Canadian landscape, in the process displacing indigenous peoples and abusing the immigrant workers who actually lay down the rails. The managerial types, eager capitalists of industry, came to Canada and “sailed upon her waterways and walked the forest tall / Built the mines, mills, and factories for the good of us all.” They have a vision of the future with “an iron road runnin’ from the sea to the sea / Bringin’ the goods to a young growin’ land.” And their triumphant success is celebrated in the classic conquest pose:
On the mountain tops we stand
All the world at our command
We have opened up her soil
With our teardrops and our toil.
Well, bully for them.
So far this seems like the typical conundrum of frontier celebrations: the frontiersmen are so taken with the beauties of the land that they sing its praises even as they they pave the way (or lay the rails) for civilization to replace and destroy that land. But there’s more to the story in this song. For all the glorification of the rail magnates and their accomplishments, Lightfoot also talks about the plight of the railroad workers, the “navvies” (for “navigators”) who are “livin’ on stew and drinkin’ bad whiskey,” “bending their old backs till the railroad is done.” They are the ones associated with the wilderness itself, described several times as the “green dark forest . . . too silent to be real.” At song’s end, those workers are the many “dead men / too silent to be real.”
So it seems that the song is actually ambiguous about the effects of the railroad and the costs — human and natural — of progress. That ambiguity is reinforced by another line that comes up a couple of times, where the workers laying down rails across the country are told to “open her heart and let the lifeblood flow.” Is the railroad, then, the flowing lifeblood that gets the country up and running? Or is the land itself bleeding from the gashes made to accommodate the railroad lines? Gord, it seems, was pretty darn clever, taking the money for a song celebrating progress while at the same time, perhaps, undercutting the celebration with some lines that make us think twice about the price we and the land have paid for that progress.
