Sixties Folk Rock’s Greenest Songs: #30–26
The Top 40 Countdown Continues with the Ones Under Thirty (Which Presumably Can Be Trusted): The Incredible String Band, The Kinks, Richard Farina and Mimi Baez, Bill Steele, and The Beatles
(Part 8 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 helpful since there, in an introduction to the top 40 countdown, I lay out the criteria underlying my admittedly subjective selection process.)
30. The Incredible String Band, “Log Cabin Home in the Sky,” 1968
Robin Williamson, who along with Mike Heron wrote the songs and played many of the instruments, has been very articulate about the artistic intent of the Incredibles. They were after a naive kind of musicianship, playing many instruments from around the world that they weren’t necessarily trained in or skilled at playing. Their experiments with alternate modal patterns and discordant effects gave a bizarre, acid-tripping quality to many of their songs — and prevented them from achieving much more than cult status in the Sixties. But the tuneful simplicity of “Log Cabin Home in the Sky” seems to hark back to people making simple music on the front porch. It sounds downright Appalachian, despite Williamson’s Scottish roots, and that fits with the song’s theme that the natural world provides a retreat from modernism. That idea is neatly expressed in the final verse:
There comes a time in every man’s life
When he must walk away from the crowd,
When the glare of the lights gets much too bright,
And the music plays too loud.
When a man must run from the deeds he has done
Recalling those days with a sigh.
Oh, winter is nigh let us fly to my log cabin home in the sky.
The many internal rhymes here, like the four in the last line that provides an internal refrain for each verse, give some indication of Williamson’s interest in the words to his songs — not too surprising considering that before becoming a musician his aspiration, after reading a lot of Jack Kerouac, was to be a writer.
29. The Kinks, “The Village Green Preservation Society,” 1968
While “The Village Green Preservation Society” seems on the surface to be a sincere paean to “preserving the old ways from being abused,” in truth this is most likely satire on those who get caught up in quaint causes while resisting modernity. One example would be the (fictional) “Draught Beer Preservation Society” cited in the song, a nod to the rise of Britain’s “real beer” movement that has now spread to the craft beer craze in America in the last twenty years. Among other satirized groups are enviros, as members of the “Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliate” and the “Office Block Persecution Affinity.” But for environmentalists to be subject to satire, that’s an indication that their presence in modern society was recognized. They were a force to be reckoned with — and for Ray Davies, many of whose songs are in the voice of an untrustworthy narrator, that meant to be dealt with via satire.
28. Richard Farina and Mimi Baez, “Swallow Song,” 1965
Adapted from a Mexican folk song called “Los Biblicos,” with new words supplied by Farina, the poetic quality of this song should come as no surprise, since Farina was a writer. His novel Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me, complete with backcover blurb from his college pal Thomas Pynchon, came out in 1966; Farina died, in fact, in a motorcycle accident after a publication release party at the home of his wife Mimi’s sister, Joan Baez. “Swallow Song” eschews proselytizing, but it makes an environmental appeal in its attentiveness to natural detail without reducing the natural world to convenient metaphor. Much of the song is about listening — to the wind, to the sky — and to hearing things like “the calling of a hundred thousand voice,” “the trembling in a stone,” “the angry bells ringing in the night,” “the swallows when they’ve flown.” The swallows themselves are described mainly in aural terms; there is “no sorrow like the murmur of their wings” and “no choir like their song.” And just what do those swallows represent? Beauty, for one thing, and presumably the beauty of the natural world — but especially the beauty of the ephemeral in the natural world, the things that come and go, providing solace with each return. And yes, it is possible that Farina may have had in mind the return of the swallows each spring to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano.
Farina’s songs typically featured his hard-driving dulcimer playing, surprisingly rhythmic and rockin’, along with Mimi’s exquisite finger-picking on acoustic guitar. He probably deserves more credit for shaping Sixties folk rock than usually is given. In addition to the two albums with Mimi released when he was still alive (Celebrations for a Grey Day and Reflections in a Crystal Wind, both from 1965), he was at least part of the influence that led Bob Dylan to the merger of acoustic folk and electric rock that lay at the heart of the folk rock movement. The connections to Dylan began with Farina’s short-lived marriage to folkie Carolyn Hester. Dylan’s first appearance on record was on a Carolyn Hester album. Later, of course, Farina and Dylan were dating the Baez sisters — subject of David Hajdu’s terrific four-part biography Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina. According to Hajdu, on a carousing stay in London with their mutual friend Eric von Schmidt, Farina spoke to Dylan of his dreams of merging folk with rock, and music with art. Dylan’s first amped-up and juiced-up songs, on Bringing It All Back Home, came out almost concurrently with Mimi Baez and Richard Farina’s similar attempts at blending acoustic and electric instrumentation on two albums from 1965.
27. Bill Steele, “Garbage,” 1970
With scenes from ordinary suburban life — eating a meal at a restaurant, driving to work in the morning — Steele makes the democratic we (as opposed to the “Royal We”) the target of his satire. The bone and gristle from a steak, the skin from a potato — that ends up in the garbage along with “coffee grounds and sardine tins,” and that garbage ends up dumped in the Bay. The Cadillac he drives to work joins “lots of smaller cars all sending gases to the stars” in a “hydrocarbon haze” that “turns to smog . . . and ends up in our lungs.” Steele’s condemnation of the guilty parties echoes Walt Kelly’s famous cartoon character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he is us” — a line drawn from a panel, drawn as a poster for the first Earth Day, that shows Pogo the possum picking up trash left by people.
In Steele’s song, it’s not just our waters, earth, and sky that are being filled with garbage but, in the second half of the song, our minds as well, via commercialized trash on TV. Ironically, Steele in his critique singles out Superman — you know, the Man of Steel — because he sells “talking dolls and conquers crime.” Incessantly ingesting garbage, metaphoric and otherwise, surrounded by it and environed in it, we end up trash ourselves: “there’s nothing left to be but garbage.”
Here’s a version by Pete Seeger:
26. The Beatles, “Here Comes the Sun,” 1969
The term wasn’t invented yet, but George seems to be writing about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in “Here Comes the Sun.” The “long cold lonely winter” at last gives way to hope and renewal in the spring as the ice begins “slowly melting” (after seeming “like years since it’s been here”) and the sun arrives. You can hear the joy and relief in the “Sun sun sun here it comes” chant that we should all use to welcome in every new spring. There is no explicit conservation message here, but it’s a glowing appreciation for sunshine and “smiles returning” to all our faces. It’s a simple but effective message packaged in glorious music.
Work Cited
Hajdu, David. Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina. New York: Picador, 2001.
