Sixties Folk Rock’s Greenest Songs: #25–21
The Top 40 Countdown Hits the Halfway Point: Zager and Evans, The Band, Otis, Canned Heat, and Sandy Denny
(Part 9 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. You may find Part 6 especially helpful since there, in an introduction to the top 40 countdown, I lay out the criteria underlying my admittedly subjective selection process.)
25. Zager and Evans, “In the Year 2525,” 1969
Written by the Evans (Richard Lee) half of the one-hit-wonder duo, “In the Year 2525” was a #1 hit in both England and America. Early verses focus on complaints about modernity: lines like “Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today” and “Your legs got nothin’ to do / Some machine’s doin’ that for you” anticipate the world of the 2008 film Wall-E. The song also exemplifies the apocalyptic note of much the era’s environmentalist songs. Warning that “it’s time for the judgment day,” Evans — along with quite a few other songwriters of the era — strikes the note of the Jeremiad that is common to much environmentalist rhetoric, warning that our lack of care for the natural world will lead to our demise:
In the year 9595
I’m kinda wonderin’ if man is gonna be alive
He’s taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain’t put back nothing.
This is the climax the song builds to, the key changing and the voices rising to accentuate the apocalyptic note. It’s none too subtle, but the song does take a basic environmentalist premise — we need to think not just about the economic present but our ecological future — and works that premise out to its logical conclusion. Don’t just think about our children’s children, or the seventh generation, but think about where we’re headed in the next eight thousand years — unless we change direction now.
And, yes, I did make sure “2525” came in at #25. How could it not?
24. The Band, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” 1969
Robbie Robertson’s haunting “King Harvest” owes part of its ear-appeal to its unusual reversal of typical song structure, with a moody subdued chorus sung in lower and softer tones than the energetic, higher-pitched verses. The quieter choruses highlight an attentiveness to the natural world. I say “choruses,” plural, since it’s actually a variable chorus, with different lyrics offering three variations on the nature theme, each variation focusing on a different sensory appreciation of autumn fields and crops ready for harvest. In the first chorus, “Corn in the fields / Listen to the rice when the wind blows ‘cross the water,” the emphasis is on what we can hear in the fields. The lines cleverly make use of lots of sound devices, too, in the assonance of the long “o” sounds (corn, blows) and the short “I” sounds (in, listen, wind) and in the alliteration of the “n” and “w” sounds (corn, in, listen, when, wind, and when, wind, water). In the second chorus, scent is the sense of the moment, with “The smell of leaves / From the magnolia trees in the meadow,” with a nice internal rhyme of leaves and trees, and the alliteration and assonance of “m” and “o” sounds in magnolia and meadow. In chorus three, sight comes to the fore in the image of a “Scarecrow and yellow moon.”
Between the choruses — focused almost exclusively on images of the natural world — we hear from a human speaker, sung with piercing desperation by Rick Danko. The speaker is a sharecropper, and a member of the sharecropper’s union, thankful for the harvest — and moreso for the pay from “the boss.” He has spent time on Skid Row, he has lost his own barn to fire, and he “can’t remember things bein’ so bad.” He is dependent on the harvest to make it through the year, and dependent too on the rain (“Hey rainmaker, can’t you hear my call?”) and on the union man “with a paper and a pen” who is “Tellin’ us our hard times are about to end.” But the union man is also all too ready to lead a strike that the workers cannot afford. The speaker is a man on the edge, financially, and we are left to wonder if the moments spent looking (and listening and smelling) at the fields are a kind of solace from the stresses of a life without enough — and the stress of the mournful anxious yearning for the harvest time to arrive. Though the hardships of a life lived close to the land are hardly glossed over, and the scene is anything but romanticized, somehow the beauty of the land — and of the hard life dependent on it — comes through.
23. Otis Redding, “Dock of the Bay,” 1968
Granted, there is no overt environmentalist message in “Dock of the Bay,” and yes this is the height of the pathetic fallacy at work, with nature functioning to express (and share in) the mood of the speaker. He’s in a state of stasis, spending the day watching the ships come and go, and the tide is rolling away — just like everything else in the speaker’s life seems to slip away. To reduce the natural world to a means of reflecting a speaker’s emotional state is, sure, anthropocentric in the extreme. But on that score it’s worth reading Neil Evernden’s essay, “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, & the Pathetic Fallacy,” which makes the case that having nature reflect a human emotional state begins with a sense of connection between self and place. Admit it, can you ever set foot or butt upon a dock without this song coming to mind? And it does give “voice” to the bay in the way the rock of the waves helps set the rhythm of the song. And there is a neat ambiguity to it all as well in the last stanza. The speaker is feeling lonely, for sure, with the two thousand miles of traveled continent at his back, but the dock is now “home,” and he’s looking outward at a bay that opens up to an expansive sea, objective correlative for a future unknown but full of possibility. Perhaps the “wastin’ time” spent on that dock is not lost time but a moment of recuperation and relaxation, until the tide of life shifts once again.
22. Canned Heat, “Going Up the Country,” 1968
This catchy Canned Heat song, a “rural hippie anthem” (Planer) that was a highlight of the Woodstock festival and film, is based on an old blues song from 1928, “Bull Doze Blues,” by Henry “Ragtime” Thomas, which featured quills, an African American version of panpipes, instead of Canned Heat’s flute riffs. The song expresses two common environmental themes of the era. First, in the grand old pastoral tradition, is the idea of the country as a necessary retreat from the hustle and bustle, the “running . . . screaming and crying” of the city: “I’m gonna leave this city, got to get away. / All this fussing and fighting, man, / you know I sure can’t stay.” To make his escape, though, the speaker suggests that we might have to leave the country to go up the country: “We might even leave the USA.”
The second theme is related to the trope of nature being a kind of natural high, though in this case the drug of choice is alcohol: “I’m going where the water tastes like wine / We can jump in the water, stay drunk all the time.” The lyrics may not be all that deep, but it’s a perfect marriage of music and words, with the upbeat melody expressing much of the song’s argument about the appeal of life in the country.
I’ve always wondered, by the way, if there was an ironic dimension to the song. When they sing that they might have to “leave the USA” to go “up the country,” it’s possible that they are referencing the expression used in the Sixties by troops deployed to Viet Nam: they were said to be “in country.” Of course, there is a key difference in the pronoun shift from being “in country” versus “up the country,” but it would make for a wicked irony to think that to go up the country to get away from it all meant getting sent to Nam. But truthfully, that reading of the song is not really in keeping with its tone.
21. Sandy Denny, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” 1968
Written by Denny in 1967 but first recorded by Judy Collins in 1968, then released in a more rocking version by Denny as part of Fairport Convention on the Unhalfbricking album in 1969, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” circles around the theme of time — time passing through the seasons. Birds depart “across the evening sky” while the speaker sits “dreaming” “before the winter’s fire.” The birds, our “fickle friends,” leave winter’s “sad deserted shore.” But the seasons will continue circling, through “the storms of winter / and then the birds of spring again.” The speaker aspires to have “no thought of time,” to “not count the time,” perhaps yearning to be in tune with the natural world, where time is more a cyclical than a linear thing. All in all, it’s a moody, wistful song that blends evocative natural images with a sense of mysterious wonder at the nature of time and the transience of all things.
Works Cited
Evernden, Neil. “Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, & the Pathetic Fallacy.” North American Review 263.4 (Winter 1978): 16–20.
Planer, Lindsay. “Canned Heat: Living the Blues.” Album review. All Music. http://www.allmusic.com/album/living-the-blues-mw0000006464. Retrieved 13 May 2019.
