Turning on, Tuning in, and Dropping Out
The Critique of Modernity and the Pastoral Retreat in Sixties Folk Rock
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(Part 5 of the 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. Here I track one of the key recurring themes of those songs.)
If “Mother Nature” was “on the run in the 1970s,” as Neil Young succinctly puts it in “After the Gold Rush,” the songwriters of the day were clear in their assessment of what had been taking over in its place in the 1960s. The environmentally-themed songs of the folk rock era offer a chorus of critiques on the forces of modernity, seeing it as the fire wreaking havoc on our earth, water, and air. At the same time, the songwriters of the day almost universally expressed a yearning to retreat from the modern world. In the Sixties that retreat was called the “back to the land” movement, but the ancient Greeks called it pastoral, the place removed from the hubbub of the city and civilization, a place where we could live more simply and peacefully, close to the life-nurturing land.
Few songs expressed the debilitating effects of modern progress more effectively than Cat Stevens’s “Where Do the Children Play?” In the first stanza of the song, Stevens (born Stephen Georgiou, now Yusuf Islam) keeps the critique of modernity relatively low key, saying that he thinks “it’s fine, building jumbo planes / Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.” These technological wonders indicate that “we’ve come a long way” — but there seems to be no answer to the song’s key (and titular) question: “where do the children play?” Are the attractions of the modern era worth the sacrifice of childhood innocence, wonder, and exploration?
In later stanzas the critique becomes more sharply focused on skyscrapers that “crack the sky” and “fill the air.” Stevens wonders, “will you keep on building higher / Till there’s no more room up there?” Tied in with the physical artifacts of modern technology is the loss of personal agency: “Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?” Like Emerson, Stevens suggests that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind.” Modern progress, it seems, which we like to envision as an upward-aspiring movement, also brings with it authoritarian control and conformity. And as we “switch on summer from a slot machine,” our way of living substitutes electronic gadgetry for an authentic life lived in connection with the natural world. The assessment is not so different from that offered in the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1970: in “A Fable for Our Times” (the title riffing on the introductory chapter of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), the anonymous writer identified love of technology — and our belief that “it could do no wrong” — as the “fatal flaw” that had led not only to the Viet Nam War but to the despoliation of our own country: “The air was mostly foul, the water putrid, and most the land was either covered with concrete or garbage” (16).
But it wasn’t just the forces of modernity that the left-leaning folk rock singers of the day saw as the source of environmental ruin. Their prime targets were materialism and the forces of capitalism. Anticipating calls for recycling that would not become the norm till decades later, John Mayall in “Nature’s Disappearing” urged his listeners to:
Make manufacturers uncomfortable
Boycott at the market
Containers that are non-returnable
Aluminum, glass, and plastic
Eternal waste that’s not destructible.
That’s not exactly the height of lyricism, but the message is clear and emphatic. In a similar vein Iron Butterfly’s “Slower than Guns” attacked “Smokin’ stacks on industry’s backs / In this land of a cigarette pack,” forging a connection between our materialistic habits and the pollution from manufacturing processes. The tawdriness of capitalist consumerism and its stultifying effects on us come in for critique in Bill Steele’s “Garbage” as well: “We’re filling our minds with garbage,” says Steele, “While the kids do the homework with the TV in one ear / While Superman for the thousandth time / Sells talking dolls and conquers crime.” Pollution of our air and water, litter along our highways — those things are bad, but worse yet is the dehumanization involved in making each of us dumb and compliant consumers, mere cogs in the consumption machine.
In a system where the workers are taken advantage of and given lousy pay and worse working conditions, where the consumers who participate in the system become mindless robots programmed to buy buy buy, and where all suffer the conditions of environmental despoliation, then withdrawal from it all — turn on, tune in, drop out — becomes a logical response. So sing Quicksilver Messenger Service in “What About Me?”:
Cause your rules and regulations
They don’t do a thing for me.
And I feel like a stranger
In the land where I was born
And I live just like an outlaw
And I’m always on the run.
And though you may be stronger now, my time will come around.
You keep adding to my numbers, and you shoot my people down.
“What About Me?” introduces another key theme of the era’s greening of folk rock: the estrangement induced by the modern world, and its debilitating and dehumanizing effects on the (too many) people who have to live in it. The modern world, with its “rules and regulations” have us “on the run.”
And where did the youth of the Sixties yearn to run to? In the face of the forces of modernity, capitalism, consumerism, and materialism, the dropout generation saw the natural world as a safe (for the moment) place to retreat to. As Adam Rome puts it in The Genius of Earth Day, “the degradation of the environment became a powerful symbol of the exploitive character of capitalism”; in contrast to “the soul-deadening artificiality of consumer culture, nature became a source of authentic values” (38–39). The Paul Williams song “Out in the Country” is perhaps the best known — mainly via Three Dog Night’s hit version — celebration of rural retreat:
Whenever I need to leave it all behind
Feel the need to get away
I find a quiet place
Far from the human race
Out in the country.
The theme is reiterated in the next stanza as well: “When life becomes too fast / I find relief at last / Out in the Country.” It’s the place we want to head to “Before the sun is just a bright spot in the night time.” For Joni Mitchell, in her 1970 song “River,” the retreat from the craziness of the world that is too much with us late and soon is a frozen river: “I’m going to make a lot of money / Then I’m going to quit this crazy scene / Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on.”
In Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou,” the retreat to nature is associated with childhood innocence and freedom from societal mores as the speaker remembers a childhood of “running through the backwoods bare” — naked as a jaybird, as the saying goes, which is a way of saying that the nakedness returns us to a natural state of being. For the Incredible String Band in “Log Cabin Home in the Sky,” the retreat is to the idealized Thoreauvian hut dream: “winter is nigh / let us fly to my / log cabin home in the sky.” Perhaps it is in the sky because the hut dream is just that, a dream, and one unlikely to be achieved no matter how devoutly it may be wished.
These songs of retreat are obviously invoking the pastoral, which David Ingram calls “the main mode by which the eco-utopian potential of music has been articulated in popular music since 1960” (52). Some of the most effective environmental songs of the folk rock era were those that eschewed any overt argument, diatribe, or apocalyptic warning and simply sang the praises of the natural world. By expressing deep appreciation for the simple and familiar attractions of the natural world, they helped create a cultural climate in which those things were valued. That approach — not necessarily devoid of rhetorical purpose — is compatible with psychologist R. B. Zajonc’s “mere exposure” hypothesis. That is, simply expressing the appeal of something tends to make us want to act on its behalf. Familiarity pleases us rather than breeding contempt. And so a song like George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” need do little more than follow up the sun’s approach with a sprightly “do-do-do-do,” and say “It’s alright,” and we’re sold. Yup, the sun — and the clear skies that allow it to touch us — we’re familiar with it, and we’re all in favor of it.
Remember that it was not just the long-haired politically-engaged radicals of the day who supported the era’s cornucopia of environmental legislation; it was also people who tuned in to the songs but who did not necessarily drop out. They may even have remained committed to the materialistic bent of American (and Western) culture even as they supported clean water and clean air legislation. These people included the majority of Congressmen necessary to pass the legislation — and even Richard Nixon, the antithesis of hip, who signed off on it.
One such praisesong was The Band’s “Whispering Pines” (1970), which reminds us of such ordinary beauties as “Whispering pines, rising of the tide.” And they tell us what to make of a diminished thing like a city-light-infested night sky: “If only one star shines / That’s just enough to get inside.” The nature images set the mood of the song as the speaker remembers a lost love, but those images are sharp and detailed enough that they are never reduced to becoming “mere” metaphor.
The Turtles in 1968’s “Earth Anthem” offer more generalized praise, speaking on behalf of our whole planet; it is “but an island in an ocean. / This is our home, third from the sun. / Let it be evergreen.” Others sang the praises of water. For Van Morrison in “And It Stoned Me,” water — as rain, lake (“we looked at the swim and we jumped right in”), and spring (“get it myself from the mountain stream”) — provides a natural high. In “Green River” Creedence Clearwater Revival yearn to go “back down where cool water flows.” Among the attractions of being “Out in the Country,” sang Paul Williams (and then Three Dog Night), is to be “where the rivers like to run,” where we can “stand alone and take back something worth remembering.” In “River Man,” Nick Drake says he’s “Going to see the river man / Going to tell him all I can / About the plan / For lilac leaves.”
Trees found their spokespersons in Donovan, who in “Sun” complains that “love is the access” to the earth’s “turning round . . . But they chop the tree down.” George Harrison ends “Beware of Darkness” by citing, as exemplar of how not to be overtaken by darkness, “weeping Atlas cedars” that “just want to grow, grow and grow.” Traffic saved their admiration, in their version of the traditional song “John Barleycorn Must Die,” for the growing things from which we make whiskey, as they trace the progress of the growing, harvesting, gathering, and milling of barley. Even supposedly barren grounds found their defenders, as America, in “Horse with No Name,” said, approvingly, “The desert is an ocean with its life underground / And a perfect disguise above.” In sum, the songwriters of the folk rock era painted their sound palettes with the colors of nature. Like James Taylor on “Sweet Baby James” they could say, “Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose.”
Related to the appreciation for nature is its use as metaphor in the time-honored literary tradition by which nature becomes the familiar vehicle to help us understand something else — a “something else” usually located in the human realm. One can certainly object that such a use of nature is dealing with it in an utterly anthropocentric way, as a means to reinforce a human moral lesson rather than dealing with nature on its own terms. That is the case with songs such as Donovan’s “Catch the Wind.” There, the wind is merely the objective correlative by which we are to understand the speaker’s sense of difficulty in trying to make it into the “warm hold” of the beloved’s mind. It’s a great song — whether you see it as either ripoff of or homage to Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind” — but it really doesn’t focus on the attraction of any actual wind, gale, breeze, chinook, scirocco, or zephyr. Similarly, “White Bird” by It’s a Beautiful Day is more symbol than flesh-and-feather bird: it is a “white bird / in a golden cage,” who, alone and unknown, “must fly / Or she will die.” This is symbol of purity and innocence kept in a cage — but it’s not, say, an albatross, egret, or gull. Again, it may be a great song, but it’s not a great song about nature. These are the types of songs that, catchy as they are, could stand as examples of songs that use an image from nature to convey a point about something else — usually human nature or the human situation.
But there are songs where the nature imagery, while still serving as metaphor, is complete and compelling enough in and of itself to suggest a compelling pastoral alternative to the humdrum or helter-skelter way of life. In Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” the theme is the passing of time, emblematized through the changes of the seasons. But there is plenty of imagistic detail that reveals lively attention being paid to the natural world, from birds leaving “Across the evening sky” while the speaker is dreaming “before the winter fire,” to the sad, deserted shore” whose “fickle friends are leaving.” The song also offers poignant treatment of the passing of time, saying that we should no more fear it than the birds fear the time when they must leave. What we can do to pass the time is “count the storms of winter / And then the birds in spring again.” Like the best uses of metaphor, the nature imagery works on its own account and it helps convey a point beyond itself.
Perhaps the most interesting metaphoric nature songs of the era feature metaphors provocative enough that they portray a fully realized scene while also staying mysterious enough that we are left wondering about the metaphoric significance. Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” does that. What, we may be wondering, is the significance of the tea “with oranges that come all the way from China”? And what is it exactly that we can see in the river “among the garbage and the flowers” and the “heroes in the seaweed”? Both images suggest something glorious somehow present in an admittedly despoiled natural world. So too the Byrds’ “Chestnut Mare” spins a delightful narrative without spelling out for us just what the elusive horse — the “prettiest mare I’ve ever seen,” spotted on and almost caught on “Stony Ridge” — might represent.
This is just to say that best songs of the folk rock era, among them many songs dealing with environmental issues, take full advantage of a range of poetic techniques, including metaphor and intentionally wielded ambiguity. Along with its frequent preoccupation with social issues of the day — like the environmental crisis — this incorporation of poetic techniques remains one of the great contributions to music from the folk rock era. Of course, some might argue that songs that simply expressed appreciation for nature, or blunted an environmental agenda by leaving metaphors somewhat ambiguous, were really shying away from direct challenges to the status quo. That’s actually a discussion I’ll take up in a later post (on enviro rock as a “commodity fetish”). For now I’ll simply point to the result: whether vehement in their attacks on the powers-that-be or gentle in singing the praises of the natural world, it worked. The songs succeeded in bringing attention to environmental issues. And that led to significant environmental legislation being passed — and environmental consciousnesses being raised.
Works Cited:
Ingram, David. The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010.
Rome, Adam. The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation. New York: Hill and Wang, 2103.
Zajonc, R. B. “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9.2, Pt.2 (1968), 1–27.
