This song was recorded in 71 and released on the album Harvest in 1972. The least interesting connection is that it’s been stuck in my head most of the day. Well, it’s a bit interesting to me; nothing provoked it.
I bought the album in 72, I was twelve. I know, weird right? But the internet was used for ‘borrowing’ music in 72. In the US is was used to communicate things like troop movements, the army had internet. Perhaps if it hadn’t looked like an IRC room and there was music and porn … I don’t know, maybe we wouldn’t have lost 50, 000. The story I always heard was that some guy who retired from army intelligence just gave away the protocols once consumer computer were a thing. When anyone tells the story there shock point is that he didn’t charge anything for it. It’s the main philosophy of pirates andf hackers, or it used to be; the net should be free.
It’s a paragraph later and I was still twelve in 1972 and I still bought the album. The formula of a perky little tune with dark lyrics in a self-conscious voice and a lone acoustic guitar crops up every few years. Neil Young was really good at that sort of thing. I didn’t actually know a junky until four years later and twelve years after the album came out I was working as a counselor in a methadone clinic. Still, if I wrote songs I don’t think I ever would have written that one.
Most of my twelve year old peers owned or knew that album. Some of them, I’m sure, never met a junky or never met someone they knew was a junky. We grew up in a sheltered town but the world stage was right there on Grand River, the main street separating the town from the University. By 1972 I had seen riots, here they were mostly anti-war demonstrations gone awry, in Detroit they were race riots. Neil Young had written several protest songs before 1972.
It’s not that we were overly sheltered or naïve, I can’t help but think our parents were. After HIV hit the headlines I don’t think a song like this would have been released. The song itself doesn’t romanticize IV drug use, but you can’t take the song out of cultural context, more importantly you can’t put it into any cultural context you want.
If you can pick up a copy of Johnny Get Your Gun by Dalton Trumbo that was published after 1968 the forward sort of lays that out. I don’t think when he wrote the forward his intention was to make a point on cultural context, but it does just the same. The book was pulled from the shelves when we entered into WWII, Korea and Vietnam. It was not published again during WWII or our conflict in Korea. It was published again during our conflict in Vietnam, with a new introduction.
In some small part that’s kind of what I meant by asking for songs y’all liked in the past five years. We’ve been engaged in the longest wars in our history, they don’t make the news, they occasionally make the movies, songs, where are the songs? I mean, it’s ok, I guess, except that it’s not. Music Radio is built on the idea that popularity is fleeting so it’s always been a great forum for topical art because, frankly, there’s a whole lot more songs than there is art; the medium is not flooded with high art, though, in the last fifty years one song can bring instant celebrity. It can, in theory, say something. It doesn’t even have to say it directly, like, say, the needle and the damage done.
When I sat down to type I was planning on being articulate. The best laid plans of mice and men … heh, those plans are always getting laid. At any rate I might have just typed that song out of my head. I’d apologize for putting it in yours, but I wouldn’t sincere, though, I know a way to get it out … Pick up a later edition of Johnny Get Your Gun.
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