The Musical Aftermath of Earth Day
Or, “Look at Mother Nature on the Run in the 1970s”: With Songs by the New Riders, Marvin Gaye, Randy Newman, John Prine, John Denver, and Tom Rush
(Part 17 in an eighteen-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 can learn a lot from a song. Or a poem. It was from a poem, actually, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Aftermath,” that I learned what the word “aftermath” literally refers to. It’s a second cutting of a crop, a second harvest, not quite as bountiful as the first, perhaps, but still a time of productivity.
You can probably guess already where this metaphor is heading. If environmental song of the Sixties led up to the harvest of that first Earth Day, well, there was still more harvest to come, a second cutting of the green vinyl, in the next couple of years.
And so too the culture-wide enthusiasm for environmentalism in the Sixties. Catching folk rock up in its current, the so-called “ecology movement” culminated but also did not end with the nation-wide environmental teach-in that was the point of the first Earth Day in April of 1970. That year also marked the formation of the EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency). Perhaps even more crucial to environmental protection, though, was the passing of the National Environmental Policy Act, requiring federal agencies to write an environmental impact statement in advance of taking any actions. There was more important environmental legislation to follow throughout the decade. A decade after Carson’s Silent Spring, warning of declining bird populations due to pesticide use, the Endangered Species Act was passed, with the objective of saving species from extinction. It’s almost like we began to realize that we humans are not the only species living on the planet — and that maybe, just maybe, out of either self-interest or ethical concern, we should avoid taking actions that wipe out other species.
The 1970s also saw updates to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and, during the Ford administration, the passing of the 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act. In the Carter administration, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, regulating strip mining, was passed in 1977. And at the turn of the decade into the 1980s, Carter promoted and signed Superfund legislation to ensure cleanup of toxic spills and hazardous waste contamination — the costs covered with federal funds when the responsible private industries would not or could not do so.
Though folk rock was past its heyday, the music of the day continued to reflect — and to energize — the culture’s concern for the natural world. If 1970 was a culmination of the growing greening of Sixties folk rock (that year accounted for fully half of my Top 40 environmental songs of the decade), the music of the next couple of years, perhaps spurred on by the publicity and energy generated by the first Earth Day, continued the trend. In 1970 (but after Earth Day), the Guess Who‘s “Hand Me Down World” — which actually had more to say about the environment than the promisingly titled “Share the Land” — asked if we could “see the sky weeping tears for the ocean,” helping to set the scene for the updates to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. In 1971 and 1972 there were several songs that would make it into the top ten or twenty of the best, or at least most interesting, environmental songs of all time. Without further delay or to-do, here I offer a top five of the best environmental songs of the ’70s, and you will notice that all appear in 1971 and 1972.
1. New Riders of the Purple Sage, “Last Lonely Eagle,” 1971
Several songs from the first album by the country-rockin’ New Riders of the Purple Sage reflect environmental concern. “Dirty Business” took the coal mining industry to task, for both despoiling the land and mistreating its workers. “Garden of Eden” chastised us for spilling blood on the ground we live on, and filling the air with smoke. To top it off, “the cool clear water . . . ain’t quite as cool and clear as it ought to be.” “We live in the garden of Eden,” they sang, “don’t know why we want to tear the whole thing down.”
Perhaps the best of the New Riders’ earth songs was “Last Lonely Eagle,” which poignantly evokes the feeling of “solastalgia,” a term coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht referring to the grief we feel in the face of environmental despoliation. It’s a homesickness we feel even though we are still at home — because the environment of our home planet has changed, is changing, so radically. In the NRPS song, they refer to the “gas-powered flatland / Where most of the people just think that they’re free.” That would be us, living in a world where concerns about oil prices preoccupy our thoughts more than, say, something like habitat loss or the biodiversity crisis or climate change. If we go to the “gas-powered flatland,” we are urged in the song to “Remember the peace that you had on the mountain / Come back to the love that you had here with me.” And what might we do if we could get back to that mountain? The chorus tells us what to do:
Take a last, flying look at the last lonely eagle
He’s soaring the length of the land.
Shed a tear for the fate of the last lonely eagle
For you know that he never will land.
Those lines would have been especially powerful in the decade after the publication of Silent Spring because the bald eagle — you know, the bird on the dollar bill and our national symbol — was in such decline that it was one of the first species offered protection under the Endangered Species Act. The problem, a result of pesticide use, had to do with egg shells being so thin as not to be viable.
The second verse is also an interesting one, presciently addressing the issue of “light pollution” — overuse of outdoor lighting affecting our ability to see celestial objects in the night sky — long before such concern became a talked-about thing. (OK, maybe only talked about even these days by those of us who like to look dreamily at stars, nebulae, and distant galaxies.) The song speaks of the civilized world as a place “where the lights push the night time / Back far enough that you can’t feel the fear.” So our excessive use of lighting is a reflection of our fear of the dark — and our fear of the wild things that may be out there beyond the lit-up range of the built world. What is lost as a result of those fears? Ask the boy “on the mountain / Who’s sitting alone with the stars in his tears.” Nice turn there on the phrase “stars in his eyes”; because streetlight has drowned out the night sky, the stars in this boy’s eyes are only the glitter of the streetlights off his tears for the whole universe out there that has been shut out.
“Last Lonely Eagle,” “Dirty Business,” and “Garden of Eden” were actually all written in 1969, before the first Earth Day. But NRPS’s eponymous first album — the name, by the way, except for the “New” part, came from a Zane Grey novel — did not come out until 1971. So while these songs couldn’t be said to be much of a direct influence on the first Earth Day, they were certainly reflective of the milieu leading up to it. In those early days of the band, Jerry Garcia (on pedal steel) and Mickey Hart (drums) from the Grateful Dead would sit in with the New Riders. Interesting tidbit: Jerry Garcia also played the pedal steel intro on Brewer & Shipley’s 1970 “Tarkio Road,” which among a series of more generalized complaints also bewails “fifty-five years of pollution . . . / But can anyone recall the solution?”
2. Marvin Gaye, “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” 1971
Soul comes to the environmental movement in this classic song that taps into several of the recurring themes of the era’s environmental concern. There’s the yearning for an idyllic past in the chorus: “Things ain’t what they used to be.” Concern about air quality in verse one: “Where did all the blue skies go? / Poison is the wind that blows.” Concern about water quality in verse two: “Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas / Fish full of mercury.” About nuclear radiation in verse three: “Radiation underground and in the sky / Animals and birds who live nearby are dying.” And overpopulation and general disregard for the earth in the final verse: “What about this overcrowded land / How much more abuse from man can she stand?” All that and a great sax solo and Marvin’s silky sweet voice too.
Gaye also deserves a lot of credit for bucking trends on the whole What’s Going On? album, bringing social protest to Motown over objections from producer Berry Gordy that he would risk his career by being too “political.” In regard to “Mercy Mercy Me,” Gordy was apparently unfamiliar with the very concept of ecology.
3. Randy Newman, “Burn On,” 1972
The subject of this song is the infamous fire on the oil-slicked, trashed-up Cuyahoga River near Cleveland in 1969 — an event that served as a wake-up call suggesting to even the most bling-blinded skeptic that, hey, maybe there’s something to this environmental concern stuff. The song starts out seeming to prevent a river idyll of sorts in the first few stanzas, with “a red moon rising” and then an “oil barge winding” down the river, “Rolling into Cleveland to the lake.” Then the bridge sings the praises of Cleveland, as a “city of light, city of magic.” But the shift comes at the end of the bridge, when the speaker says the river “goes smokin’ through my dreams.” At that point we might wonder how a river goes “smokin’,” and we might consider that the craft winding down the river is not a canoe or sailboat or anything romantic but an oil barge. With the emphasis on oil. Barging its way into Eden.
The chorus answers the question about how a river could be seen as smoking: “Burn on, big river, burn on.” Then comes the devastating final verse:
Now the Lord can make you tumble,
And the Lord can make you turn,
And the Lord can make you overflow,
But the Lord can’t make you burn.
Yeah, only we could do that to a river — that’s not the Lord’s work. We’re messing with the sacred, with Creation itself. And if we had any sense of shame or respect for any sort of almighty other than the dollar, maybe we’d take a careful look in the reflective surface of a river to see who’s responsible. As the famous Walt Kelly Pogo caption has it — created in fact for an Earth Day poster back in 1970 — “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
4. John Prine, “Paradise,” 1971
Like The New Riders’ “Dirty Business,” this is an anti-coal classic — and another exercise in solastalgia — as John Prine suffers a kind of Paradise lost. His Paradise is in Western Kentucky’s Muhlenberg County, along the Green River, where the speaker recalls being a boy out hunting “where the air smells like snakes” — but “empty pop bottles was all [they] could kill.” I’m reminded of a section of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature like a Professor, where Foster notes that if you see a snake in literature, think Garden of Eden. In this case the devil takes the form of the coal company. “Mr. Peabody’s coal train” (the Peabody coal company) has gone into Paradise and “hauled it away.” There’s no sense trying to go back to the paradise of youth because the land has been devastated, presumably by the practice of mountaintop removal.
The third stanza, of four, makes the nature of Prine’s complaint clear:
Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
One can’t help but mourn how beautiful states in Appalachia like Kentucky and West Virginia have been sacrificed at the altar of coal. And yet it is so plain to see that the people who live in those places have hardly been the beneficiaries of the coal industry. Poverty, ill health, and ruination of the landscape — all for someone else’s benefit. And the sickest part of it all is that the people who suffer the consequences feel they have no other choice. No wonder Prine sounds angry. But it’s also an incredibly catchy tune, with a tremendously fun chorus to share in a large group (even when people switch things around for fun and sing that “Mr. Coalbody’s pea train has hauled it away”).
5. John Denver and Mike Taylor, “Rocky Mountain High,” 1972
Admittedly, “Rocky Mountain High” has been played to death over the years, to the point where I have a guitar-playing friend who refuses to take requests out of fear that someone will ask for a John Denver song. (Though in truth he is particularly venomous with regard to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”) But you have to admit that “Rocky Mountain High” is catchy as all get out, the lyrics are in fact a step or two above the usual run-of-the-mill, and it certainly captures the feeling of exultation you feel in mountain wilderness, relying on the Sixties’ familiar trope of nature as drug.
Actually, the pun on being high in the mountains seems to echo one of Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain poems, his translations of poems by the ninth-century Chinese poet Han Shan. In the third Cold Mountain poem, Snyder writes, channeling Han Shan, “here I am, high on mountains / Peering and peering but I can’t even see the sky.” Snyder’s Cold Mountain poems were first published in the Evergreen Review in 1958, then in Japan a year or two later, but more likely Denver might have encountered the poems in the 1969 Counterpoint Press edition of Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. And yes, it is also possible that coincidentally Denver and Snyder arrived independently at the same punning metaphor. Of course, when there was a court case that threatened to curtail the radio airplay of “Rocky Mountain High” — on the grounds that it promoted drug use — Denver denied that he meant to imply anything other than high in the sense of geographic altitude. (Yeah, right.)
But whether the song hints at marijuana high or mountain high, it clearly accentuates the positives to be found in wilderness. The opening verse proclaims that the subject of the poem was “born in the summer of his 27th year,” because he hadn’t really known what it was to be alive until he found himself in the Colorado Rockies. That’s an interesting bit of hyperbole. And there are lots of fresh imagistic descriptions of mountain scenery. A sunset is “rainin’ fire in the sky.” There’s some interesting synaesthesia in saying that “The shadow from the starlight is softer than a lullabye,” the light described in terms of sound. When “he walks in quiet solitude the forest and the streams,” there is “grace in every step he takes.” And there is a kind of richness in knowing such a place: “I know he’d be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly.”
For all the glowing description, though, there are complaints about the mountaintop removal that is too often part of the process of surface mining. Though the subject’s “life is full of wonder,” there is still a thing he fears and that he does not comprehend: “Why they try to tear the mountains down to bring in a couple more, / More people, more scars upon the land.” But there’s a neat and rhetorically effective structure to it all. First we are shown the beauties of the Rocky Mountain landscape and then, briefly, we are warned of the threats to it. And then it’s back to emphasizing the positive side, so we’re left feeling good about the experience of the place brought to us in the song.
Though his songs could be a bit saccharine at times, Denver’s commitment to the environment was deep and sincere. In the ’70s he founded the Windstar Foundation to promote renewable energy, and the proceeds from his 1975 song “Calypso” supported Jacques Cousteau’s research in marine biology.
Mike Taylor, by the way, the song’s co-author, was a guitar player in Denver’s band, and is likely responsible for the music, or at least the basic riff that got Denver working on the words.
But Wait, There’s More
Beyond these top five, there were plenty of other notable environmental songs in the first couple of years after the first Earth Day. The Beach Boys’ 1971 Surf’s Up album contained several socially conscious songs, two of which tackled environmental issues. “Don’t Go Near the Water” offers pretty simplistic ecological understanding (and rhymes) in telling us that we should be “sad” because the water is “bad.” That said, you have to admire the verbal stretching in a line — maybe a little tortured — like “Toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble bath / So let’s avoid an ecological aftermath.” In case we miss the point, they spell it out for us: “To be cool with the water / Is the message of this song.”
More interesting, lyrically at least, is “A Day in the Life of a Tree,” where the tree speaks on its own behalf, essentially laying down its branches and its life in the face of the contaminants we’ve managed to load up in the earth’s air and waters. There’s a clever stanza near the end where the chorus in the form of a prayer is intertwined with a verse:
Trees like me weren’t meant to live
(Oh Lord I lay me down)
If all this earth can give
(My branches to the ground)
Is pollution and slow death
(There’s nothing left for me).
Also in 1971 Bo Diddley, in “Pollution,” echoed Lady Bird Johnson’s “Beautify America” crusade of the mid-1960s by railing against trash — but putting it to a funky beat (and not his customary chukka-chukka rhythm): “Some of you people don’t understand . . . / About throwing your garbage in the street and use your can.” Such sentiments led Bo to the anticlimactic conclusion that “We gotta stop pollution,” which he seems to take as a synonym for littering.
Stephen Stills in “Ecology Song” is more scathing in identifying the real culprit when it comes to environmental despoliation: not our carelessness but our greed: “while the earth is dying / It’s a shock they won’t stop because of the money / America is lost, figurin’ the cost.” Sounds like he’s objecting to the same sort of stuff we hear these days in regard to our reliance on fossil fuels — we fear the cost of change. Not the costs of climate change, but of paying a nickel more for gas if we were to institute, say, a carbon tax.
If 1970 was an annus mirabilis for environmental song, coinciding with the first Earth Day, 1971 runs a close second. Few songs evoke the ambiance of the desert more memorably than America in “Horse with No Name.” Like Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain, America (the band, not the country) portray the desert not as an empty place but as a place “full of sound,” where there are “plants and birds and rocks and things / There was sand and hills and rings.” It’s a place for finding yourself, where it feels “good to be out of the rain” and “you can remember your name / ’Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.” Even in these underappreciated and apparently barren places, we find the sacred earth; in fact, it’s under our feet everywhere: “Under the cities lies a heart made of ground / But the humans will give no love.” They also slip in an interesting defense of another undervalued feature, the ocean, which they describe as “a desert with its life underground / And a perfect disguise above.” But if the ocean can seem like a desert, so too can the desert be “turned to sea,” presumably in the form of a mirage.
Another noteworthy song from 1971 is Frank Zappa’s wonderfully absurd “Billy the Mountain,” about a “regular picturesque / Postcardy mountain” and his lovely wife Ethel, who is a tree “growing off of his shoulder.” One day a man in a checkered suit driving a Lincoln Continental shows up with a bulging envelope — full of royalty payments for all the photos Billy had posed for in the background over the years. When Billy realizes he’s rich, his jaw, a cliff, drops in disbelief. Which crushes the man’s Lincoln Continental. Billy and Ethel decide to take a vacation, but because he’s a mountain, they end up crushing every place they go — Las Vegas, Denver, Columbus, Ohio. The powers-that-be try to draft Billy into the armed forces, but hell no he won’t go, not even when they threaten that he will be nothing more than “fill dirt / In some impending new jersey marsh reclamation.” When Billy laughs at the threat, the recruiter falls down Billy’s throat hundreds of his feet to the rubble below. And then we get the moral of the story: “Which only goes to prove / A mountain is something / You don’t want to fuck with.”
There’s an ecological lesson somewhere in there, I’m sure. If nothing else it’s reassuring to know that environmentalism does not have to be all doom and gloom; there’s room for a discordant chuckle or two.
The cavalcade of environmentally-themed songs continued in 1972. In addition to three of my top five from the decade listed above, Tom Rush’s “Mother Earth” is another excellent song worthy of note. From ocean to mountaintop to grasslands, Rush sings, “Though I treat her carelessly / Mother Earth provides for me.”
But as they say, all things must pass, and the times they were a-changing. The folk rock era was coming to a close in the 1970s, and the environmental movement was also about to undergo radical changes. But that’s a story for another post — the final one in this series on folk rock’s influence on the rise of the modern environmental movement.
Works Cited
Albrecht, Glenn. “’Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Human Health and Identity.” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3.1 (2005): 44–59.
Foster, Thomas C. How To Read Literature like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines. New York: Quill, 2003.
Snyder, Gary. Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1969.
