For one thing, he has a HUGE base of musical knowledge and a lot of his between-song comments refer to things happening in the song that you might not even have thought to listen for. More generally, his trivia fill-ins are drawn from an equally encyclopaedic familiarity.
And he always plays music -- for two hours -- related to a theme. Recently, for example, the theme was artists best known by one name, so the music was by people like Elvis, Sting, Ringo, Cher, Celine, and so on and so on. (I thought he was reaching a bit when he played a Neil Young song, and said that to the whole world he is just "Neil". Well how many times have you heard a DJ introduce a song like "Heart of Gold" by saying "Here's a classic by Neil"? If you're like me... not very often.)
Anyway, to make an incredibly long blog post even longer, Mr Bachman regularly invites "Vinyl Tap" listeners to submit suggested themes and even playlists. So being the very antithesis of "concise", I decided to go him one better and even throw in a whole bunch of taking points.
My suggested theme was Songs with Stories – that is, songs either about real events, or which take real events / settings / people as their starting point to make a social comment... or (as with "Snoopy vs the Red Baron") just to have a bit of fun.
I also stuffed it with You Tube links to some fascinating video versions of the songs -- some of them "official videos"; some are tributes by fans but with the original music, and still others are images from the event / era in question with the original music underlying it.
And there are about 30 of them in my proposed show -- because Mr Bachman said he requires about 26 to fill two hours, so I thought I'd give him a couple bonus options in case he didn't like something I'm suggesting for one reason or another.
I also suspect he gets about a jillion of these things and I rate its chances of getting to air right up there with the proverbial snowball in Hell. But it was a heck of a lot of fun to write and as I searched out either the videos or some relevant facts, I found myself just wallowing in the nostalgia of it all. So I thought why just take that ride myself? Why not inflict it on the Baby Ducklings?
You're welcome. :-)
So if you're an old fart like me, hopefully, you'll find some recollections popping into your head as you wade through this. And if you're on the younger end of the age spectrum, well maybe you'll just enjoy the discovery.
A final note before I cry havoc and let slip the songs of yore, You Tube links are notoriously fickle. The vast majority of fans simply upload things willy nilly with no regard for copyright or ownership, and there are vast corporate search engines out there who seek out unauthorized versions that have been put into cyberspace. So if you do hit a vanished link, just enter the song title into the You Tube search box.
It's the box right at the top of this page.
You won't always get the version I chose, but you'll at least get the enjoyment of the music. (Oh... and there are a lot of gawd-AWFUL cover versions out there by people who think the only thing separating them from Eric Clapton is that he has a more expensive guitar. So if you can seek out both the title and the artist, you're more likely to re-link to the one I used if it's been taken down from the link in this blog entry.)
Have fun. I know I sure did! It's a big gulp so don't swallow it all at one sitting. (It took days to write; so take a few to read and listen.)
Mike
1. “Sink the Bismarck” by Johnny Horton
About the hunt and eventual sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in the early days of WWII. The fight, which took place over several days, featured a combination of extremely accurate naval gunnery on both sides and blind luck on the part of the British when a torpedo dropped from a Swordfish aircraft jammed Bismarck’s rudder and sent her in an endless circle, preventing her escape. The song also makes note of the battle’s most devastating setback for the British, the sinking of one of her foremost battleships, HMS Hood, when one or more shells from Bismarck simultaneously detonated Hood’s ammunition and torpedo magazines, blowing the ship to pieces and killing all but three of her 1418-man crew.
2. “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace
Loosely based on Chicago in the “Dirty 30s”, the song is not so much about a single event as it is about the atmosphere at the time in the City, whose Prohibition-era night life was dominated by ruthless gangs of bootleggers, thugs and murderers, each gang with its own “turf” or section of the City from which they drew enormous profits supplying illegal booze to a public that demanded it. The most famous of these gangsters, of course, was Al Capone and the event that most infamously represents the period was the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. The song, however, is not specifically about that event, for the simple reason that the song places its shootings “In the heat of a summer’s night” and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre took place on Valentine’s Day, February 14, when it was still winter in the Windy City. The song, however, does capture some of the sense of the fear that must have been felt by wives and families of police officers every single time they went out on duty in that violent era.
3. “The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence
The song is set in the “backwoods southern” United States and its lyrics make direct or oblique references to corrupt judges and lawyers, as well as lynching, reflected in the speed with which the accused in the song, once convicted, is promptly hanged that same night. The reference to the judge “patting the sheriff on the back with a smile” even recalls one of the most infamous photos in civil rights trial history, of Longdale, Mississippi Sheriff Lawrence Rainey – who had been charged with conspiracy in the 1964 case of three murdered US civil rights workers – grinning and plugging a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco into his mouth during the trial proceedings. (Rainey must have known the system – he was eventually acquitted of all charges. The case became the basis of the Hollywood movie, “Mississippi Burning”. While the song is not about that case, its references are very much of the period.)
4. “I Wanna Be In the Cavalry” by Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans
With its infectious drumbeat and unusually literate lyrics for a country song, this all-Canadian song – despite the fact that its accompanying video places it among the US horse soldiers of the 19th Century – also has a real resonance among members of modern units of the helicopter-borne US Air Cavalry. Even though it has only been out for a relatively short time, it already is frequently cited, along with the US 7th Cavalry theme, “Garry Owen”, at or near the top of lists of the most popular cavalry-related songs. (Which, it might surprise you to know, is not as short a list as you might imagine, but I digress.)
5. “Billy Don’t be a Hero” by Paper Lace
An anti-war song that many people in its 1974 release year took to mean the Vietnam War. The band had actually intended it to refer to the US Civil War, even going so far as to perform it live in period Federal blue uniforms, and posed for the album cover art around a smoking campfire while wearing the same (a lyric also refers to the “soldier blues”). But because it was released as the Vietnam War was winding down, it struck a chord with wives and girlfriends who, as they had been for almost a decade, were still saying good bye to their “soldier blues” as they left for the Asian War.
6. “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition
As movies like “Coming Home”, “Heroes” and “Born on the Fourth of July” began to cast a sharp spotlight on the psychological and physical damage inflicted by the Vietnam War, some of the songs took a similar tack with their own messages. This song is sung by a severely wounded Vietnam veteran pleading with his wife not to go out and presumably cruise the bars looking for what he is no longer able to provide for her. The extent of both his physical and mental wounds are summed up in the song’s one shocking line, “If I could move, I’d take my gun and put you in the ground”.
7. “Billy I’ve Got to Go to Town” by Geraldine (Dodie) Stevens
“Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town” made such an impact that it actually led to an “answer song” delivered from the wounded vet’s wife’s point of view in which she expresses deep hurt at his accusations of cheating, and says she has to get out of the house just to get away from his rage and jealousy. “Have some faith in me,” she pleads.
8. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot
A song that really “needs no introduction”, this is the quintessential Canadian storytelling song about a catastrophic November 1975 Lake Superior storm so violent it smashed the hatch covers of a fully loaded Great Lakes ore carrier and sent her to the bottom like a rock, taking the entire crew of 29 to their deaths. Like many profound tragedies, however, the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald led to some positive regulation changes for Great Lakes shipping, including carrying mandatory survival suits for Laker crew members, and more frequent structural inspection of vessels.
9. “Ringo” by Lorne Greene
Keeping with Canadian content, “Pa Cartwright” released this song, or more accurately a spoken-word story set to music, while at the height of his television fame as the head of the Ponderosa ranch family on “Bonanza”. "Ringo" has the universal theme of a bad character who shows a spark of good at a pivotal moment in the story. There was a real western outlaw named Johnny Ringo but this song’s narrative has nothing in common with his life and death. Johnny Ringo ran for a time with Ike Clanton but was not present at the famous Gunfight at the OK Corral, where Ike’s brother Billy and two others of his gang were shot and killed by Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday. Ringo’s death wasn’t anywhere near so dramatic and, in fact, was eventually ruled a suicide when his body was discovered “in the crotch of a tree” with a single gunshot wound to the head.
10. “New York Mining Disaster 1941” by the Bee Gees
The May 2012 death of Robin Gibb saw a resurgence in airplay of several of the Bee Gees’ classic songs, including this one set amid the underground ruins of a collapsed coal mine in which a pair of trapped miners are swapping stories and sentiments that seem to indicate neither is holding out much hope for rescue. Although the song’s title refers to a 1941 “mining disaster” in New York State, no such cave-in occurred and notes for the 1990 box set release of re-mastered Bee Gee hits said the song had actually been inspired by a 1966 disaster when, after several days of heavy rain, a catastrophic landslip on a mountain of coal mine debris slammed into the village of Aberfan, Wales and killed 116 adults and 28 children.
11. “Snoopy vs the Red Baron” by The Royal Guardsmen
The “Red Baron” was Germany’s most famous flying ace of World War I. Baron Manfred von Richtofen’s Flying Circus, led by him and his signature brilliant red Fokker Dr1 triplane, dominated the Western Front’s skies from 1916 right up until almost the end of the War. He personally was credited with shooting down no fewer than 80 British and French aircraft. His own death in April 1918 has been the subject of dispute ever since over whether he was brought down by Canadian pilot Roy Brown, a native of Carleton Place, Ontario, or an extremely lucky shot fired from the ground by an Australian infantryman. Charles Schulz, the creator of the comic strip "Peanuts", was inspired one day to draw an old leather flying helmet on the head of his famous cartoon dog, Snoopy, setting off a years-long storyline whose frequent punch line, “Curse you, Red Baron!” has entered the world’s slang. The Royal Guardsmen parleyed it into two successful songs, this one and a Christmas-themed follow-up, “Snoopy’s Christmas”, in which the Red Baron spares his canine foe’s life in the “true spirit of Christmas”.
12. “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats
In January 1979, 16-year old Brenda Anne Spencer opened fire on an elementary school playground in San Diego, California, killing two adults, and wounding eight children and a police officer. She was reported to have offered as an excuse, “I don’t like Mondays; this livens up the day.” Wire service reports of the story resonated with the Boomtown Rats’ lead singer, Bob Geldof, who penned this song and its unforgettable opening line, “And the silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload”. The song was a hit everywhere but, out of respect for the shooting’s victims, was not played on a single San Diego radio station until years later.
13. “Indian Reservation” by The Raiders
In 1830, the United States government passed something called the Indian Removal Act. Eight years later, the entire Cherokee Nation was forcibly yanked from its ancestral home in the southeastern US (where coincidentally, gold had been discovered a decade earlier) and marched to a desolate and dehydrated section of land in present day Oklahoma called the “Indian Territory”. Some historians estimate that as many as 4,000 of the 15,000 relocated Cherokees died during the march along what today has come to be called The Trail of Tears. The ancestry of The Raiders’ lead singer, Mark Lindsay, is part Cherokee and that march and those deaths are what the band is commemorating in “Indian Reservation”, a song that ends with the somewhat ominous warning, “Maybe someday when we learn, Cherokee Nation will return.”
14. “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple
A lot of people credit Deep Purple’s “Machine Head” as being the first-ever “heavy metal” album. And the opening guitar notes of “Smoke on the Water”, which progressively swell with bass and organ rolling in, are among rock music’s most famous song openings ever. The fire described in the song was a real event, and it happened pretty much as described in the lyrics. During the 1971 Jazz Festival on the shores of Lake Geneva in Montreux, Switzerland, during a theatre concert at the Montreux Casino featuring Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, someone in the crowd fired a flare gun into the ceiling, which was covered in rattan. The entire casino complex was completely destroyed in the resulting fire, and no doubt many lives were saved by festival organizer Claude Nobs (the “funky Claude... running in and out” in the song), who helped steer many audience members to the exits.
15. “Abraham, Martin and John” by Dion
The 1960s saw no fewer than three political assassinations collectively burned into North Americans’ psyches with the shooting deaths of US President John F Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, the Reverend Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee and John Kennedy’s brother Bobby just two months later in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968 during a campaign stop in Los Angeles. Singer Dion DiMucci’s gentle lament for the three links their collective loss with the death of another prominent agent for social change – US President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated in Washington DC on April 15, 1865 just days after the end of the US Civil War.
16. “Ohio” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
On May 4, 1970, in the course of confronting student anti-Vietnam War demonstrators at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, a unit of the Ohio National Guard opened fire with live ammunition. Over the span of just 13 seconds, 67 rounds were fired and when the shooting stopped, four students – Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Schueur, Alison Krause and Bill Schroeder – lay dead on the ground, while nine others were wounded, including one victim who was left permanently paralyzed. The shootings sparked a nationwide wave of anti-war protests and, just days later, a massive demonstration by over 100,000 people in Washington, DC who condemned the shooting of unarmed protestors, none of whom was closer than 250 feet to the Guardsmen. Then-US President Richard Nixon was blasted for characterizing the anti-war protesters as “bums” and this song began receiving airplay across the US just two and a half weeks after the shooting.
17. “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield
“For What It’s Worth” is a song that became far more of a “message” song than was originally intended by Steven Stills when he wrote it in 1966. Buffalo Springfield had been the house band for the Whiskey-a-Go-Go nightclub on LA’s Sunset Strip. Their increasing popularity had led to the nightly assembly of crowds of noisy would-be patrons seeking to get in – who became even louder after they poured out of the club at closing time – leading to noise complaints from nearby residents. When the City passed a strict 10 pm curfew and anti-loitering laws, a protest by a large group of youths against the vigour with which the LA police enforced the new rules became a demonstration that was serious enough to be called a riot. It was that eruption that prompted Stills to write the song. For no clear reason, it became a generalized protest anthem and eventually came to be seen as an indictment against the war in Vietnam. Its place in the soundtrack of Vietnam War films like “Coming Home”, “Tropic Thunder” and “Forrest Gump” has only served to bolster that impression. Nowadays, it resonates with many children of the sixties as a symbol for that whole era and the clear divide between “rebellious” youth and the many forms of authority figures who were the targets of their protests during that decade.
18. “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City” by Artists United Against Apartheid
In 1985, Steven Van Zandt had just left Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band to work on his own music. He travelled to South Africa because he had an idea for an album that would draw parallels between the black experience under apartheid and the social divide between native Americans living on reservations and the larger US population. While there, he discovered the Sun City resort, a lavish, albeit inter-racial gambling complex, but which had been built in the middle of a deeply impoverished “homeland”, a part of South Africa that was supposed to be ruled by black Africans. He was so upset he persuaded his producer to go along with creating a musical artists’ collective – much like the hugely successful “We Are the World” group created for famine relief – whose members vowed never to play at the casino complex because to do so would have been to give tacit approval to apartheid. A lot of prominent musicians at the time, including U2, Miles Davis, Pat Benatar, Peter Gabriel, The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, and Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band saxman Clarence Clemens, joined the protest. “Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City” went on to become a major success in many countries including Canada (although not so much in the US where its message was deemed to be critical of President Ronald Reagan’s policies towards South Africa at the time), eventually anchoring an entire album called “Sun City”.
19. “American Pie” by Don McLean
When this song first came out in 1971, its enigmatic lyrics were the focus of everything from bar talk to entire university seminars. For a time, “the day the music died” was thought to be the November 22, 1963 date of US President John F Kennedy’s assassination, but eventually it was revealed to be referencing the aircraft crash on February 3, 1959 that killed rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. Now, thanks to the internet, the lyrics’ meanings – both subtle and crystal clear – have been explained for all to read by the simple step of entering the song’s title into Google. But in 1971, throwing a conversational bone into the room in the middle of a Friday night bar session or a Saturday night house party like, “So who are the Father, Son and Holy Ghost?” could trigger an hour-long discussion.
20. “Rasputin” by Boney M
In 1916, Alexandra, Czarina of Russia and wife of Czar Nicholas, had fallen under the strange spell of a bizarre figure who has come to be known as the Mad Monk – Grigori Rasputin. The Russian Royal family had a son who was a haemophiliac and Rasputin’s ministrations had on several occasions appeared to have stopped the child’s bleeding when nothing else in medical practice of the day worked. During WWI, while the Czar was away at the front, Rasputin’s influence over the Czarina increased to such an alarming extent that a group of court nobles are alleged to have crafted a plot to kill him on December 29, 1916. The man was not easy to kill, however. A subsequent autopsy when his body showed up a couple days later showed that he had been poisoned, shot and badly beaten but the presence of water in his lungs suggested that he had still been alive when dumped into the nearly frozen Neva River and had actually died by drowning! The 1978 song was almost as quirky as the man. Set to a thumping disco beat, Boney M’s celebration of “Russia’s greatest love machine” went to Number 1 in Germany and Austria and Number 2 in the UK.
21. “Hurricane” by Bob Dylan
Rubin (Hurricane) Carter was a powerfully built boxer in the 1960s, rising to become the number 3 contender for the World Middleweight title in 1964. It all fell apart for Hurricane in June 1966 when two men were murdered in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey by “two African American males”. A badly wounded customer died a month later. Despite very little physical evidence linking Carter to the murders beyond owning a car that looked the car driven by one of the suspects, Carter was “identified” by two witnesses (who later recanted) and convicted in a trial that, on later examination, raised a great many more questions than it answered. A series of appeals followed, and Carter’s case drew support from the likes of Muhammed Ali and the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted. Bob Dylan wrote “Hurricane” in 1975 with songwriter and theatre dance director Jacques Levy. Eventually, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case after Carter was freed by the US Federal Court of New Jersey in 1985 and no further action was prosecuted. Carter moved to Toronto and became Executive Director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted from 1993 to 2005. Besides the song, his story was the basis for 1999’s “The Hurricane”, a successful movie treatment starring Denzel Washington in the title role and directed by Canadian Norman Jewison.
22. “The Band’s Still Playing” by Lennie Gallant
April 2012 saw wide coverage of all things Titanic, marking the 100th anniversary of the ship’s sinking on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. The Canadian connections were also featured – everything from the wireless SOS calls being relayed through the receiving station at Cape Race, Newfoundland, to the dispatching of a Canadian ship and crew, the Mackey-Bennett, out of Halifax to recover as many bodies as possible, to the eventual laying to rest of 150 of the victims in three Halifax cemeteries. Without exception, the members of the ship’s small orchestra – who played almost to the very end – have been portrayed as heroes in the many movie and television versions of the story. Not one of them survived the sinking. In 1997, PEI’s Lennie Gallant penned this rocking tribute to the Titanic’s band. It was included on his album, “Lifeline”.
23. “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday
To sing a song like “Strange Fruit” in 1939 was a remarkable act of courage. It is, after all, a powerful indictment of racism and, in particular, the lynchings that even then were still happening in the old South. Almost from the moment of its release, the song took on a life of its own and has become almost as much of a controversy as its subject matter. It was the subject of a 2001 book (“Strange Fruit: the Biography of a Song”) and while Lady Day claimed she co-wrote the song, the book’s author shreds that claim. Whatever its provenance, however, there is no denying its impact. An online search of its influences, uses in popular culture and covers goes on for dozens of lines; Holiday’s version was inducted into the Grammy Awards Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Recording Industry of America and National Endowment for the Arts included it on their lists of “Songs of the Century” for 1900 – 2000.
24. “Dixieland” by Steve Earle
In most histories of the US Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg is characterized as the “high water mark of the Confederacy”. And most accounts of the battle portray the fight for a tree-covered knob of land called Little Round Top and the heroic stand there by the federal 20th Maine regiment as the turning point of the battle. Earle’s toe-tapping song makes a fictional member of that regiment (an Irishman named Kilrain) its storyteller. Kilrain describes with unabashed pride the honour of serving under Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a real historical figure who began the Civil War as a professor of rhetoric at a Maine College and finished it as one of its greatest heroes. According to Kilrain, the regiment is one that would follow Chamberlain to hell and back again – which most accounts of Gettysburg’s fight for Little Round Top pretty much agree summarizes the battle.
25. “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John
Two different generations know this song for two completely different reasons. In September 1997, just days after the August 31 car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales in Paris, Elton John released it as “Candle in the Wind 1997”, with the opening line, “Goodbye England’s Rose”, a tribute to the Princess. The song was a re-working of the original “Candle in the Wind”, which he wrote with Bernie Taupin and which first appeared on his 1973 “Good Bye Yellow Brick Road” double album. The original “Candle”, with the opening line “Goodbye Norma Jean”, was a moving tribute to another sort of “princess”, screen legend Marilyn Monroe, who died on August 5, 1962, also long before her time, the result of a drug overdose at the age of 36. “And I would have liked to know you, but I was just a kid. The candle burned out long before the legend ever did.”
26. “Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde” by Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames
Returning to the “Dirty 30s” of Depression-era America, this song builds on the almost heroic images that were crafted around some pretty nasty people – the gangsters of the day. Perhaps because there were so few women who achieved fame for a life of crime, Bonnie Parker and her partner Clyde Barrow quickly became fodder for wide media coverage of their “exploits” as they rampaged across the southwestern part of the country, including Missouri, Texas and Louisiana, robbing banks and leaving a trail of dead and wounded victims behind them, including nine police officers believed to have been shot to death in gunfights with the Barrow gang. The two were finally ambushed and killed on a Louisiana country road on May 23, 1934 by a six-man posse of officers. Their story, and exceedingly violent death, was the subject of a hugely successful 1967 movie directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the title roles. "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde", complete with siren and gunfire sound effects, was a 1968 hit for British R&B singer Georgie Fame, reaching number 1 in the UK.
27. “Blue Sky Mine” by Midnight Oil
The Blue Sky Mine was the single-industry core of an Australian town called Wittenoom. The town is now a ghost town, but for more than 20 years it served the mine, the source of a product known as blue asbestos. Not surprisingly, the widening knowledge of the detrimental health effects of asbestos drove the mine – and the town – to close in 1966. Today, eight people are resident in Wittenoom. Since the mine closed, many of the thousands of workers who passed through its harsh job sites have been tested and were determined to be suffering from mesothelioma, a variety of asbestos-related illness. Midnight Oil’s hard-driving “Blue Sky Mine” is a slam at Australia’s asbestos industry and its push for profits at the expense of worker safety. Midnight Oil has often made powerful cases for social issues in its music and it is no coincidence that the band’s highly visible lead singer, Peter Garrett, ran for and won election as a Member of Australia’s Labour Parliament in an October 2004 by-election, eventually becoming Minister of the Environment and later, Minister of Education.
28. “Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton
In March 1991, Eric Clapton’s four-year old son, Conor, died when he fell from a 53rd floor New York City apartment window. Just seven months earlier, Clapton's manager had died in the same helicopter crash that killed Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan. “Tears in Heaven”, which he co-wrote with US songwriter Will Jennings, proved to be tremendously cathartic for Clapton; he credits the emotion of writing it with helping to pull him back from the depths of grief into which he sank after his son’s death. He stopped playing it in 2004, with the explanation that he has put the intensity of his sense of loss behind him and to try to perform it now would require him to reconnect with all that pain.
29A. “Woodstock” by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Or
29B. “Woodstock” by Joni Mitchell
Or
29C. “Woodstock” by Matthews Southern Comfort
Regardless of which version feels best for you, the song celebrates a seminal event in the history of rock music, one that to this day is widely recalled as the single concert that best represents the 60s music scene, indeed the whole so-called youth “counterculture” – with all its impromptu onstage happenings, the "free love" taking place in the fields all around the concert site, the free availability of just about every known form of recreational drug to be had at the time, and the chaos weathered by the crowds as food, water, medicine, and sleeping space all dissolved into short supply, then into crisis. When a pelting rain, thunder and lightning storm pounded the site in mid-concert and the crowds came up grinning after it was over, well, that was Woodstock. It is a tough choice deciding which version of this song best represents the “three days of peace and love” that took place at Max Yazgur’s Bethel, New York farm in August of 1969. The CSNY version is certainly the grittiest and rings more closely to a rock version than does either of the other two. But the MSC version is the one that got most of the Top 40 airplay when it came out, probably because it feels the “safest” and is more in tune with what Top 40 sounded like on mainstream radio at the time – lots of gentle harmonies and, once you’ve heard a verse and chorus, a predictable tune to the end. And Joni gives us the flower child version. As you listen to it, you can almost see the sunlight streaming through the fabric of her summer dress as she sways with the tune. That, too, was Woodstock.
No comments:
Post a Comment