Sixties Folk Rock’s Greenest Songs: #40–36
The Top 40 Countdown begins
(Part 6 of a seventeen-part series on 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. Here I start a countdown of the top 40 enviro songs of the folk rock era.)
Introduction to the Top 40:
What follows (here and in the next eight posts) is a countdown of my personal top forty “green” songs of the era between the publication of Silent Spring in 1962 and the first Earth Day in 1970. What criteria led to my rankings? One consideration was the popularity of the song, and so the extent to which it was reaching and possibly affecting the values of the young generation. But I gave more consideration to the degree to which the song foregrounds environmental themes, and most of all I took into account the inherent and long-lasting interest of the song both musically and lyrically. Especially lyrically. After all, besides being a dyed-in-the-denim old folkie, I spent thirty-plus years working as a literary critic. Now I get to put those skills to use in regard to the words that have risen from the page and made their way, by virtue of rhythm and melody, to my ears.
To give an example of how these criteria work together, I’ll point out that a great song like George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness” makes the list in large part because of its great closing line expressing the idea that we can learn from nature: “And weeping Atlas cedars / They just grow and grow, grow and grow.” But as much as I admire the song, and the lesson, it doesn’t make the top thirty because the song is not consistently focused on the natural world or environmentalist themes. Other songs, like John Mayall’s “Nature’s Disappearing” or The Turtles’ “Earth Anthem,” certainly have an environmentalist heart in the right place but didn’t make the list because the lyrics simply didn’t seem as artistically interesting as others — and truthfully they never made much of an impact. P. F. Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction” is more concerned with the effects of nuclear apocalypse on the human realm rather than the natural world. Other songs like Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” or It’s a Beautiful Day’s “White Bird” employ nature imagery, but mainly for metaphorical or symbolic purposes that seem to subsume their interest as fully-appreciated or rendered natural images. And while in general I try not to get too hung up on categorization, at least not in determining if a song is folk or rock, a song like Joe Raposo’s “It’s Not Easy Being Green” (1970) seemed neither folkie nor rockin’ enough to fit anywhere on the folk rock spectrum.
All that said, there is surely a great deal of subjectivity in my judgments — which would be the case in anyone’s list. But these are the songs that continue to speak to me musically and lyrically, and that have something valuable to say about the need to care for the world we live in.
Oh, and yes, I admit to a total cop-out in having a four-way tie for #40 (so there are actually 43 songs listed). I pared the list down as much as I could and still found that I had a few too many to fit in my top 40. I could have grouped the first three of the songs tied at #40 into “honorable mentions,” I suppose. Or I could have called it a top 50 and then added some others, but that whole notion of making it a “top 40” was irresistible. The “top 40,” of course, is a reference to the AM radio format of playing only the top 40 most popular songs. That too was a Sixties thing. Ironically, quite a few of these folkie and folk rock songs were not necessarily big hits — and so would not have been in the top 40 back in the day. The deficiency, though, may have been in the format and the public taste, not necessarily with the songs.
40. (Tie) Tom Lehrer, “Pollution,” 1965
Admired by the likes of Randy Newman, Dr. Demento, and Weird Al Yankovic, Tom Lehrer wielded pointed satire that spoke to the political Left of the Sixties — though Lehrer himself did not find himself much in sympathy with counter-cultural lifestyles. By the mid-Sixties, environmental degradation had made its way into the news often enough to attract the attention of Lehrer’s parodic pen. His targets were the most commonly discussed environmental issues of the day — water and air pollution — but he manages to bring a fresh verbal verve to the discussion. If you “turn on the tap,” he says, “you’ll get hot and cold running crud.” We “have halibuts and sturgeons / Being wiped out by detergents.” (You have to admire the audacious rhyming of “sturgeons” and “detergents”!) After using “the latest toothpaste,” you can “rinse you mouth with industrial waste.” The garbage we “throw into the Bay, / They drink at lunchtime in San Jose.”
On the topic of air pollution, Lehrer says that if you “go out for a breath of air,” then “you’ll be ready for Medicare.” In the face of all that pollution, “you should wear a gas mask and veil, / Then you can breathe, long as you don’t inhale.” It’s like a lot of Lehrer, delightfully hyperbolic and wickedly snarky. But yeah, the music’s pretty schmaltzy, more lounge act parody or Broadway light musical than either folkie or rockin’.
40. (Tie) “Hungry Planet,” The Byrds, 1970
Co-written by Roger McGuinn, Byrds’ bassist Skip Battin, and Battin’s friend, record producer Kim Fowley, “Hungry Planet” gives a voice to the Earth itself, as it complains of human depredations and threatens retribution. People have been “chopping down all my finest trees,” says the Planet, and been “poisoning my oxygen, digging in my skin / Takin’ more out of my earth than they’ll ever put back in.” The Earth had a “blue sea” and a “youthful face,” but now it threatens to “shake and quake and make their houses burn.” (Nice tripled internal rhyme there!) The song has a bit of a psychedelic surge to it with a Moog synthesizer and McGuinn’s always sparkling twelve-string Rickenbacker — but this being from the country rock iteration of the Byrds, there is also a lovely folksy quality as well, especially in Clarence White’s acoustic guitar picking.
40. (Tie) Quicksilver Messenger Service, “Fresh Air,” 1970
The lyrics — by Chet Power, aka Jesse Otis Farrow, aka Dino Valenti — are a little slight, and you really can’t even be sure whether the song is about the pleasures of the natural world or about the pleasures of smoking a joint. There are certainly a couple of lines that seem to be about nature — the urging to “have another hit” of both “fresh air” and “sweet California sunshine.” OK, so it seems that this is about nature as a kind of drug that makes us feel good, right? And that’s a much-worked metaphor in a lot of songs of the Sixties. Where better to get a natural high than in nature? But much of the song is clearly addressed to a “sweet thing,” who is encouraged to “have another hit of sweet love.” So it could be that the urging is all about smoking some homegrown (the “sweet California sunshine”) and letting it all hang out, and not about getting outside at all. Perhaps it need not be an either/or situation: pot is a product of the natural world, so to inhale its smoke is to inhale nature. Have another hit.
40. (Tie) Iron Butterfly, “Slower than Guns,” 1970
Because of “In-a-gadda-da-vida,” Iron Butterfly may seem almost synonymous with the beginnings of heavy metal — and may not make you think of anything either folksy or environmental. But the band name itself pairs a product of the industrial revolution with a symbol of nature’s fragile beauty — perhaps with the suggestion that even a butterfly could be as tough and long-lasting as iron. It all makes me think of Basho’s literary dictum that poetry should focus on nature as the realm of the “unchanging and the ever-changing,” which seems pertinent to the album on which “Slower than Guns” appears: Metamorphosis.
The song itself features lyrics by Robert Woods Edmonson and a lively interplay of acoustic guitars with a sitar. The main target here is air pollution, creating a “manmade mist / As it starts to twist your lungs / Slower than guns.” A layer of smog, “golden brown . . . circles round your town,” and “gasoline fumes” hang “in the air like transparent tombs.” All of these pollutants are the product of “Smokin’ stacks on industry’s backs / In this land of a cigarette pack.” These are the forces of capitalist enterprise and environmental despoliation that result in the “Town coming down.”
39. The Yardbirds, “Shapes of Things,” 1967
In general, the things whose shapes seem to cause the speaker’s concern in this catchy song are pretty vague, but whatever they are, they “teach” the speaker “to despise,” and to wonder “Will time make men more wise?” The only specific concerns described, though, are about deforestation. The speaker wonders about the trees, now “almost green, / But will they still be seen?” The fear of environmental apocalypse sparks the plea regarding what today we would call desertification: “Please don’t destroy these lands / Don’t make them desert sands.” But the song seems almost wistful in wondering what to do about it all, simply expressing a wish to “be bolder than today” in acting in a way “That won’t disgrace my kind.” The song does not really address, though, what anyone can do, or who is responsible for the unseen trees, or why we should be concerned.
38. George Harrison, “Beware of Darkness,” 1970
For the most part “Beware of Darkness” seems unconcerned with the natural world. For the first three and a half verses, the speaker warns about the forces, internal and external, that lead us to experience “darkness,” “sadness,” and “maya” — the world of illusion that we may mistake for reality. These are unhappy states of mind that “each unconscious sufferer” — that would be most of us — may tend to dwell on (and in). The dark moods are inspired by “falling swingers,” “thoughts that linger,” “soft shoe shufflers / dancing down the sidewalk” (perhaps referring to superficial and unthoughtful people?), and “greedy leaders” who would “take you where you would not go.” (We should have listened to George’s warning.)
But while the song seems preoccupied with the sources of our all-too-human suffering most of the way through, in the last verse we hear of an alternative, something that could nurture our psyche rather than lead us into darkness: “But weeping Atlas cedars / They just want to grow / Grow and grow.” In nature we find a message of hope and a model to follow. As I always tell my writing students, “final positions are prominent” — meaning that what you put at the end of a paragraph or an essay (or a song) tends to stick with the reader (or the listener). George takes advantage of that principle to succinctly suggest the means by which we can fend off our suffering: it is the main thing that living things do — keep growing.
Note that George’s choice of tree species to serve as nature symbol also reverberates with pertinent suggestions. A weeping Atlas cedar, like a weeping willow, droops, so both its name and shape suggest defeat and despair. But out of that despair, and despite it, the tree manages to continue to grow. The tree is native to the Atlas mountains of North Africa, but of course there the name comes from the myth of the Greek titan Atlas, who held the sky (or in some versions the Earth) on his shoulders. That is the sort of strength we need to overcome our suffering and see through the material world of illusion.
37. Don McLean, “Tapestry,” 1970
The title song of his first album, McLean’s “Tapestry” is one of the few songs of the era to express a recognizable awareness of the ecological principle of interconnectedness. McLean may have gained his ecological education while working as a crew member on the Hudson sloop Clearwater, traveling up and down the river with Pete Seeger to bring public attention to water quality issues, pointing out that what we do upstream affects the river — and the lives dependent on it — downstream.
In the song McLean explores the theme of interconnectedness through the metaphor of an “earthly tapestry hung from the skyline,” in which “every thread of creation is held in position / By still other strands of things living.” There are other nice lines and metaphors in the song as well — a breeze in the “blue diamond heaven” is as “gentle . . . as the hands of the healer, / As soft as farewells whispered over the coffin.” And: “We’re poisoned by venom with each breath we take, / From the brown sulphur chimney to the black highway snake.” And it’s a pretty melody accompanied beautifully with fingerpicked acoustic guitar, very much, as we would expect of a Pete Seeger protegé, on the folkie end of the folk rock spectrum.
But despite some really interesting lines, McLean’s songwriting was not yet as impeccable as it would be on his next album, with classic songs like “Vincent” and “American Pie.” There are some lines in “Tapestry” that make one cringe at the preachiness of some unfortunate (and unpoetic) word choices. “Smoldering cities so gray and so vulgar” are “not to be satisfied with their own negativity.” And “every dawn that breaks golden” (which is a fine image that gets spoiled by what follows) “is held in suspension / Like the yolk of the egg in albumen.” If the awkward rhythm doesn’t stop you, then surely the rhyming of “suspension” with “albumen” will — or the far-fetched comparison of a rising sun to the yolk of an egg. The end of the song delivers the misanthropic and simplistic moral: “You’re now just a stagnant and rancid disgrace / That is rapidly drowning the whole human race.” And this: “if man is allowed to destroy all they need / He will soon have to pay with his life for his greed.” So, not a perfect song, by any means. But it’s a pretty thing, and it does have some fine moments.
36. David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Paul Kantner, “Wooden Ships,” 1969
Crosby, Stills, and . . . Kantner? No Nash or Young? Yes, for this song, at least, inspired by an excursion on Crosby’s schooner Mayan. Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane was responsible for most of the lyrics, Crosby for the melody, and both the Airplane and Crosby, Stills, and Nash recorded the song. It’s about a post-apocalyptic world, the apocalypse coming in the form of a nuclear war. The only safe place to be is in a wooden ship (not metal, as metal would also become radioactive) “on the water very free and easy.” An intro published on the Airplane’s lyric sheet (but not sung) sets the scene: “Black sails knifing through the pitchblende night / Away from the radioactive landmass madness.” The survivors at sea are “Free happy crazy people naked in the universe,” and they “speak Earth talk” and “ride the music.” They are of the Earth, then, and in (musical) harmony with it — in contrast to the forces of modernity that unleashed the “radioactive madness.”
The freedom of the sea quite literally offers the best chance of survival. On their wooden ship, they can “Sail away where the mornin’ sun goes high / Sail away where the wind blows sweet and young birds fly.” Meanwhile, the land is described as “barren,” and the people there are “silver-suited” in anti-radiation garb. One line suggests some hope for nature’s renewal on the land, as one of the land-dwellers speaks of “purple berries” that have kept him alive for weeks. Possibly this is a reference to LSD tabs, or to iodine pills that would fend off the effects of radiation. If they are berries, perhaps they turn out to be poisonous or irradiated, because it is after this in the song that the sailors say, “Horror grips us as we watch you die / All we can do is echo your anguished cry.” That is followed with “We are leaving,” heading back to sea to “ride the music” — and the waves.
In addition to being a sci-fi-like fantasy of post-apocalyptic survival, the song also speaks to the era’s desire to tune in and drop out of mainstream America. On the mainland lie despair and death in a poisoned landscape — but out to sea lies the hope of a new beginning.
