Ecology Songs 1964-1987
With all the various realisations about climate change, the earth’s carrying capacity, the implications of our lifestyle, over-population etc I thought I’d go back and see how musicians past and present have dealt with ecological themes. This is a first-time trawl through the topic, noting that – for all the vitriol slung their way over the last thirty years – the hippies had an active ecological critique and that this found its way into late 60’s and early 70’s music.
One marker of the way that the topic came into public consciousness was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. That year Malvina Reynolds wrote The Rain to protest nuclear testing in the earth’s atmosphere. Two years later, the Searchers recorded a version of Reynolds’ song as What Have They Done To The Rain. The lyric is fairly vague but the Searchers give it their customary sweet, emotional treatment: it made the UK top 20 in late 1964 and you can see it on youtube:
From early 1966, the Yardbirds’ Shapes of Things is a key High Sixties record: a huge UK hit with Keith Relf’s gothic vocals, a super-hot Jeff Beck solo, and the following lyrics: ‘now the trees are almost green/ But will they still be seen?/ When time and tide have been/ Fall into your passing hands/ Please don’t destroy these lands/ Don’t make them desert sands’. They continued this theme on their 1966 album, particularly on Farewell.
The Doors second epic, When The Music’s Over is not overtly ecological – Morrison has a lot to get off his chest – but it does contain the following, haunting section: ‘what have they done to the Earth/ What have they done to our fair sister?/ Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her/ Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/ And tied her with fences/And dragged her down’.
As early as 1967, there was a powerful ‘back to the land’ movement, away from technology and consumerism and the money machine. For more, see Lisa Law’s book Flashing In The Sixties (US) and the work of Donovan and Vashti Bunyan in the UK (Kieran Evans’ recent film, From Here To Before, is an excellent introduction). Songs about going back to the country are plentiful in late 60’s rock, from Quicksilver’s Shady Grove to Canned Heat’s Going Up The Country to the inevitable Woodstock. (see Guardian blog here).
One of the earliest and most incisive was Neil Young’s Here We Are In the Years, a stand-out track on his excellent (and much under-rated) first solo album. Young relates all the ills of a youth-obsessed, reified consumer society to a lack of respect for the natural world: ‘while people planning trips to stars/ Allow another boulevard to claim/ A quiet country lane/ It’s insane’.
Ray Davies’ concerns about the modern world burst forth on Apeman, a big 1970 hit for the Kinks. ‘I’m no better than the animals sitting in the cages in the zoos, man’, he sings in this catalogue of woes: ‘over-population and inflation and starvation’. Ecology raises its head in the memorable section: ‘I look out my window, but I can’t see the sky/ ‘Cos the air pollution is fogging up my eyes/ I want to get out of this city alive’. Fogging sounds suspiciously like fucking.
‘They paved paradise, put up a parking lot’, begins Joni Mitchell on one of her most upbeat songs, Big Yellow Taxi; ‘with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot’. The lyrics are straight out of Silent Spring: ‘hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT/ I don’t care about spots on my apples/ Leave me the birds and the bees – please’. Her quicksilver laugh at the end is a classic moment.
Written by Skip Battyn, Kim Fowley and Roger McGuinn, the Byrds’ Hungry Planet (from their patchy Untitled double) is even more explicit – and prescient: ‘I’m a hungry planet/ Orbiting in the sky/ The things they did to hurt me/Pass on by and by/ Now here I am all alone/ They never ever learn/ Well I had to shake and quake/And make their houses burn’.
It doesn’t stop. There’s Danny O’Keefe with his toxic smog melt-down, 3.10 Smokey Thursday – which you can hear on Meridian 1970. Then there’s Spirit’s Nature’s Way, from The 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus: ‘it’s nature’s way of telling you, summer breeze/ it’s nature’s way of telling you, dying trees…it’s nature’s way of telling you/ Something’s wrong’.
The New Riders of the Purple Sage tackled their topic on their classic first, city-to-country album: ‘Hey look at the green, green tree/ It ain’t quite as green green as it used to be/ And hey, look at the cool clear water/ It ain’t quite as cool and clear as it ought to be/ And we live in the Garden of Eden, yeah/ Don’t know why we want to tear the whole thing to the ground’.
The Beach Boys echoed these sentiments on Don’t Go Near The Water, from 1971’s Surf’s Up, albeit tinged with their habitual postivism: ‘don’t go near the water/ Don’t you think it’s sad/ What’s happened to the water/ Our water’s going bad/ Oceans, rivers, lakes and streams/ Have all been touched by man/ The poison floating out to sea/ Now threatens life on land’.
Hawkwind, as was their wont, took everything further and fashioned an epic 12 string drone to condemn Western society on We Took the Wrong Step Years Ago: ‘take a look around and see the warnings close at hand/ Already weeds are writing their scriptures in the sand…The morning sun is rising, casting rays across the land/ Already nature’s calling, take heed of the warning’.
On the classic What’s Going On album, Marvin Gaye added ecology to his list of what is/ was wrong with America on Mercy Mercy Me: ‘radiation in the ground and in the sky/Animals and birds who live nearby are dying/ Oh, mercy mercy me/ Oh, things ain’t what they used to be/ What about this overcrowded land?/How much more abuse from man can you stand?’
With the teen/ ballroom/ gender preoccupations of Glam rock, ecological songs fell out of favour somewhat – although Sparks delivered a vague warning with Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth: ‘when she’s on her best behaviour/ Don’t be tempted by her favours/ Never turn your back on mother earth/ Towns are hurled from A to B/ By hands that looked so smooth to me’.
Despite all the rhetoric, many first wave punks had been hippies, or had been influenced by hippies. The most preoccupied with consumerism and materialism were X-Ray Spex, whose The Day The World Turned Dayglo is a fabulous, totally art-i-ficial dystopia: ‘the X-rays were penetrating/ Through the latex breeze / Synthetic fibre see-thru leaves/ Fell from the rayon trees’.
Fast-forwarding well into the next decade, R.E.M.’s Cuyahoga took its title from the famously polluted Cleveland, Ohio river that caught fire several times during the 20th century, most notably in 1952 and 1969. In calling for a new national vision, the lyrics relate this environmental disaster to the country’s industrial past: ‘Our father’s father’s father tried, erased the parts he didn’t like’.
And from around the same time, Mr. Fingers had this super-graceful vision of another world, a Distant Planet where they can be free from racism as well as environmental and economic degradation: ‘you can eat the food around you, you will hunger never more’. Yet they know it’s a pipe dream: ‘distant planet, distant planet, far far away’.
I’m sure there are many more examples with the rise in environmental consciousness. Any thoughts?