181: Thanksgiving Special: Protest Songs

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Hey, welcome back to Sophomore Lit for another one of our patented Thanksgiving Day episodes, which we are... Absolutely recording on Thanksgiving and not at all a week ahead of time because we aren't going to be in the same city for Thanksgiving. Isn't that right? Of course. Correct. Look at you, all fleshy and such. So once again, it's my brothers, Rob, the older one. Say hi. Hi. And Dan, the younger one. Hello. And so as before on these Thanksgiving episodes.

I always think to myself, what can I what can I pick that will annoy Dan the most? And I feel like I, you know, with these Thanksgiving Day episodes, the the premise has always been let's look at some sort of bit of American culture. And I've run out of. I've run out of long fellow poems, at least ones that I want to do. And as you may recall, last last.

Thanksgiving for no reason at all. I was not feeling particularly psyched about doing anything having to do with America. So we did our comfort. And this year, for no reason at all, I am still not feeling particularly psyched about doing something about America. So I thought, let's do something about protest songs. So... I thought back to my dad's copy of Great Songs of the 60s, which he had on the piano all the time growing up. Milton Okun's major work.

He continued to do those. He did great songs in the 70s and the 80s and 90s. I think he did one of the 2000s. I don't know if he did the 2010s. I don't know if he's still alive. I don't know. I don't even know who this is. All I know is that sometimes dad's tastes are mystifying to me because I have like sort of a sense of like who.

Dad is in my head and then something comes along to confuse it, like him having, you know, played apparently Alice's Restaurant a lot when you were kids or what I learned. In Chicago, just this last weekend when I was there doing live shows and seeing family, which was that apparently he made mom watch The Proposal. Four times in like the last week or so, the Ryan Reynolds, Sandra Bullock romantic comedy. So he contains multitudes. Yes. Now.

This time we we're doing these protest songs and they are protest songs I remember from my childhood. I was a kid in the 70s and that meant that I I had to listen to a lot of crap from the 60s on radio. And I want to address something here to the younger people in my audience out there. First of all, I want to address Generation Alpha. You guys should go off and do your homework. Now I want to address the millennials and Gen Z out there. Stop conflating.

Gen X with the boomers, because you have to understand, we were the first ones who had to bear the brunt of boomer scorn back in the back in the early 90s. We were the original generation that was. The boomers said we're out of touch and apathetic and poor workers. What was that? Lazy. Lazy. Yes. So, you know, it's not just that it's inaccurate. It hurts because, you know, we should all be...

We should all be unified in our opposition to boomer culture. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, except for then, like, apparently our generation and I'm on the tail end and Rob's at the other bleeding edge. Our generation turned out to not be so great either, based on our voting record recently. Well, it's true. All people suck in their own way. Which brings us back to the songs this time.

Anyway, I am focusing on these songs because they were still that you would still hear them on the radio from time to time when when when Rob and I were kids. Believe it or not, you could still hear like Alice's Restaurant sometimes playing. I feel like that's what you need to explain to the younger generation, that there used to be sort of a continuity of culture where you were.

you were forced to like experience the culture of the generation before you. Unlike now when it's all just fragmentary. Yeah. Yeah. I don't recall any of this, but okay.

You don't recall any of this? I recall Dad's book, which I did not look at that carefully because I had no musical inclination, although I could plunk out a few of the tunes at that time. And I remember...

Radio in the 70s, it was more like Rhinestone Cowboy or I Write the Songs. Well, there was that, too. There was definitely that, too. So. I thought we would do three of the best known protest songs of the Vietnam era, starting with a song that was actually written slightly before the Vietnam era. Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Written by Pete Seeger in 1955, recorded by everyone and their grandmother.

I know that Joan Baez had a popular version of the song. I know that Peter, Paul and Mary had a popular version of the song. I think the big version was the Kingston Trio's version. And the Kingston Trio was definitely a group that Dab listened to. I don't I don't know what it was about folk music.

In general? I've never quite understood folk music in general as a phenomenon of the 60s and everyone being like, wow, how deep. I like traditional... forms of music but as like a protest um you know as a medium for protest i've never quite understood it because like well can we just be a little more direct rather than putting it in like

Little like acoustic ditties, but that's a very modern stance, probably. Yeah, I didn't understand as well this kind of manufactured folk because I, where have all the flowers gone, was based, I understand, on some. folk elements, but it was a made-up song by Seeger. All songs are made-up, Rob. Yeah, I know. True. Yeah, man. It just blew my mind. I'm drinking, by the way, the traditional bourbon that I have here, although this...

This is cheap enough to be to not be labeled a bourbon on the label, but to be a sour mash whiskey. But I think I should probably be doing an edible or something right now. Bourbon myself, which I purchased because it needed to go into a bourbon sweet potato maple pie that I am making. But then I had bourbon in the house. And I have tap water straight from Lake Bloomington. Well.

I remember how that tap water tastes. Delicious. OK, so where have all the flowers come? Let's we're going to examine these primarily from a lyrical standpoint. But I considered at first putting into this. little excerpts from the songs and I thought

Kids out there on the Internet, they can just look these damn things up themselves. So, you know, if you want to go listen to where have all the flowers gone, I'll put it like a little beep in here and you can pause the recording, go listen to it and then come back. we'll be discussing it here. Choose whichever version you want. Pause here and play song. So, what does everyone think? Um... I mean, of the three we'll talk about, this is my favorite song. I think it has a pleasant melody and it...

It is simple and to the point. I mean, it is couched in, you know, it is not a totally direct protest, but it is clear what it is talking about in a way that. Some of the other stuff is a little more circumspect, and I don't mind it, is a very surface thing, I will say about it. I find it marginably tolerable. I think that the tune is pretty, but as a protest song, I think it's awful because it's, you know, inevitable flowers go away, the flowers come back.

Men Die War. It just seems like, you know, this circular motion and there doesn't seem to be any real anger or movement for change or even the possibility of change within the song. Well, it's very like a folk song like There's a Hole in My Bucket in that it's a circular song. in which one thing leads to another thing. And as you say, it does seem kind of inevitable. And it's kind of unclear.

what the what the singer wants us to do about the situation you know i mean i i you could you could you could like it i guess at one point you could interject and like pick the flowers yourself. And maybe that would break the cycle. It is hard for me to separate this song in my brain from the answer is blowing in the wind. It just, you know, it's. There's nothing other than, you know, resignation or, you know, a sort of feeling of sadness. No, I see your point. It is.

kind of defeatist there's a way in which i look at it i'm like well that's probably accurate like it's probably more accurate to like sing a song about The inevitable cycle of people forgetting and continuing to send people off for perhaps pointless conflicts. But if we're going to look at it through the lens of a. protest song, I also see the point that that's maybe not the most useful attitude to take. Well, it's a simple song and anyone can play it with a few...

Guitar chords. I think that has a lot to do with folk music's popularity as a protest thing. You didn't really have to learn a lot of chords and you could do it. with acoustic instruments. So, you know, you could just set up wherever you want and sing it, you know. And it doesn't really have a chorus. It just is a bunch of verses.

Yeah, it's got four cords here, and they all just sort of cycle. They're cowboy cords, as you might call them. They're easy to play open at the top of the neck. There you go. Well, I will say when I was looking at this, I was trying to figure out what was the version that I remembered the most. And I think... The one that I personally remember the most was the Peter, Paul and Mary version. But if you look at like the the Kingston Trio version, it's like about it's about.

two and a half minutes long. And if you look at the Peter, Paul and Mary version, it's like six minutes long. And that comes down entirely to the fact that they play it half as slow. And I never had more contempt for Mary for Peter, Paul and Mary than when I saw that. Wait, that they played it. Faster? No, no, no. They played it slower. They stretched it out. They stretched it out. Sorry. Yeah. No, it's a kind of a maudlin thing. As much as I do like it, kind of.

It does not need to be stretched out any further. This is not actually this is not actually associated. It just makes me think of how like Happy Birthday to You is a song that somehow. inevitably ends up being sung as if it's a dirge. Everyone tries to match everyone else's slower tempo. And likewise, yeah, this doesn't need to be.

Kind of stretched. Yeah. I will give points, though, to Peter, Paul and Mary because they did Buff the Magic Dragon. And it is as maudlin a song as you'll ever find. But it was part of my childhood. So.

Okay, let's move on to the second song here, which is One Tin Soldier, which is, I don't remember what year that was. 67, 68, 69, 69. I was completely wrong. And this is by a Canadian group. Well, I mean, it was written by two guys that nobody remembers, but it was. originally recorded by the Canadian group called The Original Cast, but it's cast spelled C-A-S-T-E. And I want to just point out here that this is, there are lots and lots of puns out there for band names.

This is a terrible pun because it doesn't, you know, with the Beatles, that's a dumb pun, but it makes sense. You know, it's like, oh, beat beat beat Beatles. Yeah, whatever. It's like this makes no sense. It's like the if you if you if you if you. just say the original cast that has nothing to do with with uh music and and then you put the e on the end you're like is this

What is the original cast? I feel like you have to have at least two casts for there to be a cast system at all. So what's the first one? Probably the Untouchables. settle down after they built the city and the sewer system. And then you had the Brahmins last. Well, in any case, you know, once again, Go out, you know, listen to the song if you aren't familiar with it, and then come back here. Pause here and play song. So...

So I can see Dan has got his brow furrowed with so much. He's shaking his head so hard. Were you aware of the song before I suggested it? No, I remember this. You know, I remember this song from when I was a kid. I think I must have heard it some... In some way that was associated with church, like not necessarily church itself, but maybe like a youth group or something. I remember thinking that, like, at least musically. I found the chorus a little catchy, but...

Yeah, I maybe I'm too literal minded for a lot of this stuff. I'm almost certainly too literal minded for some of it, but I can't. When a song is presented in the form of a story, I can't help to some degree taking the story seriously on its own terms. And I'm like, OK, well, what's this? What's this war that got started over a treasure that they didn't know what it was? And at the end, they were like, oh, man, it was peace on Earth. Oh, we screwed that up.

The mountain folk were really asking for it. That's exactly what I thought, Rob. I thought, you know, the mountain folk could have stopped this at any time. They were just sitting around like saying. Hey, we got this great, we got this great, you know, treasure up here under this rock. Like, so they have to, they have to take some responsibility for this. They could have, they could have stopped us at any moment.

Well, they do say they say we will share the secrets of the mountain. And then the valley apparently was like, that's not good enough. We want it. So. It would have taken him five seconds to share that secret. Yeah. I have to say, though, of all these songs, I like the production of just the engineering of the song has, you know, this one isn't like just straight acoustic. It's got like a whole.

orchestration going on here. And I thought that, you know, I've got the little, little fife at the beginning, the little military drum playing, you know, it kind of takes you places, you know, if you just listen to the instruments. Yeah. I know. I mean, I again, I don't know how I think about it now. It's been forever since I've listened to this song. I remember, you know, not minding it musically on like the very basic level of like, oh, you know.

I'm enjoying listening to this song. I'm just thinking about how this was written in 69 and it was written as part of the protests in the Vietnam War. I don't think that like analogies need to be one-to-one in any sense. Like, I think that that's very limiting. But if you're looking at it as a Vietnam song, I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, I mean, this does sort of reduce the whole idea of war down to.

greed, I guess, and competition. You know, the Vietnam War, whether or not you... Greed with it or not, it was basically a proxy war between the states and the USSR. And it was fought over. And, you know, you I don't know that this that just kind of make it that the the whole problem is like people not sharing. Sure, sure. We all always fought to prop up French colonialism, but. Well, you know, this song, not the not the the the original cast version.

But another version was used as the theme song for the movie Billy Jack. Yeah, and I think the song is just as confused as that movie. Kick ass for peace. I mean, that film. You know, again, I'm going to speak to the younger members of the audience. If you have a chance to see Billy Jack. You owe it to yourself to just be confused by this film because and to understand that this film was actually a huge success in its day and a critical success in its day as well.

It's the story of a guy who goes around and rescues, you know, hippies and Native Americans by... Punching, punchy people. I have always sort of meant to check out this thing as a cultural artifact. I've never seen it, which is surprising for me. I'm looking on my Just Watch to see if it's available anywhere. I can only rent it, unfortunately. I look for it because I was curious to get it. But I think I've only seen clips in, you know.

We both read the Mad Magazine version of this about 500 times. Right. Well, we had just the three issues of Mad Magazine around the house. And you had the cracks that was a star Wars one. Well, that was, that was late. I came later. Um,

Okay, well, I think we've exhausted this rich vein. And we'll end up actually on the first song that I thought of when I was thinking of this concept, which is Alice's Restaurant, which is technically called... Alice's Restaurant Massacre. by Woody Guthrie. Or no, Arla Guthrie. Woody Guthrie is the dad. Arla Guthrie. And the reason this occurred to me first is this is ostensibly a Thanksgiving song.

It takes place at Thanksgiving. And now everyone go out there and find this and listen to it. And no fair stopping until the whole damn thing is done. And then come back here. Pause here and play song. Pause for half an hour. So this is the song that the dad used to play on the piano. He didn't do the actual talking. He didn't do the spoken word parts? That's strange. And, you know, this is apparently...

written about a real occurrence that happened in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which is over in the Berkshires. You know, as a Bostonian, I know about Stockbridge and apparently the... Church that is described in this in this song, or if you call it a song, every year has a celebration on Thanksgiving where they do like a free. charity Thanksgiving meal, which seems like the most Massachusetts thing ever.

I read the Wikipedia article about this and they went to pains of pointing out that the glossy, some of them were admittedly not colored glossies. And I thought that was the most goofs. Well, actually, the thing that I was interested in finding out is that the titular Alice... Kind of got her life ruined by the song because she was a she was a restaurateur who was kind of a hippie artist and she knew she knew Arla Guthrie and.

The song got written and then they made a movie in which she was presented as something of a free spirit who actually slept around or whatever. And she was very upset with the film. So, Dan, you're once again, very, very confused look. Well, I'm reading through it again. I read it earlier. I'm reading through it again. I had sort of missed that. I guess Alice was a bit of a... at least as depicted in this song, a bit of a hoarder. And so it was a nice gesture for them to take the garbage.

For her and like the inciting incident is that they throw out the garbage somewhere that they should not have thrown the garbage out and then they get arrested for it. And like I a nice thing. I'm sure the cops overreacted to it.

On the other hand, they did just, like, throw a bunch of garbage at the end of the hill. But, you know, I texted you about this, both of you, about this song beforehand a ways back, and I... said that it's a passably entertaining shaggy dog story but again as a protest song like this is the thing like it's hard to look at it from our current

Although our current standpoint, I guess, is a little more restrictive than the standpoint that I came up in. We're living through another time in which saying direct criticism could come along with. uh bad uh results even though we are ostensibly living in a place with uh the freedom of speech but this is such a roundabout way of getting to an idea of like

Oh, I'm a literar, so I'm not good enough to go to Vietnam and shoot a bunch of people is essentially the irony of this thing. And the degree to which this is. kind of a rallying song is just sort of surprising to me considering the long walk that needs to be taken to get to that point.

This is the one I actually like, and I think it's partly because it works for me as a bit of a protest song, because there is a call to action. It's a call to be absurd, but it's... parallels to what was happening in portland i mean there's yeah we're just going to act absurd in the face of kind of authoritarian thought or this kind of thought that war is okay uh and

It does it with humor, but there's some anger there, I think, hidden in that humor. And the other ones seem so disaffected to me. And this one, I thought it is funny to me. I don't support littering, but the point is. valid about, you know, this is a horrible crime compared to the massacre at My Lai. So it had a point. It had us a bite. I like the tune better. Yeah, I'll take that. I mean, the thing that struck me listening through is, you know, it's...

It is this long form storytelling that's supposed to be humorous. It reminded me of listening to a Lenny Bruce routine in that Lenny Bruce.

And that you're mystified. Well, the thing is, the comedy in the 60s and 70s was was full of these extremely long narratives.

You know, before we all found out what a monster Bill Cosby was, he was known for these routines that were basically just... long stories and everybody was kind of imitating that and it was it wasn't i think until like steve martin came along with anti-comedy that like that all got blown to hell but um but Like Lenny Bruce, it relies upon sort of shock, but in a way that...

Seems quaint now or or seems like, you know, he one of the things that's unfortunate about this is he uses derogatory language for for homosexuals a few times. It's just sort of like the very mentioning that there are gay people in the world is supposed to be a joke in this story. You know, that's the kind of level of humor that comes out sometimes. Yeah, I it is so hard to judge something that is comic from another time on in the one sense on the other sense, like.

I feel like there are multiple streams of comedy, and it doesn't mean that one is bad or one is good, but there are things that do... sustain at least for me like i would get mad at someone who was like i can't laugh at the marx brothers i'm like what is there not to laugh at uh and something like this feels tied to a time in a way that i have a harder time wrapping my brain around but that doesn't mean that it wasn't it didn't work at the time in the same way that like i don't know my

years at the daily show have been stripped from paramount plus uh robbing me of two cent uh residual checks but um i don't think any of that would necessarily be all that funny now and it's only like 10 years down the line or whatever. Yeah. But, you know, the thing about this song is a lot of the humor is based around. You know, blowing the minds of the squares, you know, it's like it's like we're going to tweak the squares and that I agree. I find that kind of tiresome. But then.

You know, just recently I watched with my wife, Marina, we watched we rewatched The Gold Rush, you know, the Charlie Chaplin film. And that is a film that is about in a large part about making fun of. the nouveau riche and about the pretensions of of class and you know it's about a lot of things but but there's a good part of it that's about that

And I still find that very funny. I don't know. Maybe it's easier to laugh at people making fun of Gilded Age robber barons than it is to hear them making fun of... I do think that there's something to do that, that, you know, it either has to be current or it has to be further removed. Sort of the middle ground is a lot more difficult. Well, I mean, you got to hand it to to him, you know, making a what was like an 18 minute recording, you know, at a time where.

songs for regularly three and a half minutes because that's what you could fit on a 45 single. You know, that always reminds me of something that occurred to me somewhere in the 90s. I was listening to like a Pink Floyd album and I thought to myself, you know, if CDs had existed. in the 1970s, we would have Pink Floyd songs that were like 90 minutes long. Yeah.

Well, again, we're running far afield from the... So any last thoughts about protest songs and where they've gone? And why aren't there any more at this time? I mean, I guess...

I guess Dropkick Murphys has that one. I am perhaps shamefully as... middle-aged white man i don't know a lot of hip-hop i think there's probably a lot more in the vein of protest and in that uh than you know the sort of junk that i listens to for years uh i i'm personally of a you know like i don't want it to be like so direct that it just feels didactic and and annoying But I would rather sort of know what a song is taking on than like you get too cute about it. But I also.

I don't know, like I'm torn between like despair at like art for being able to change anything and also recognizing that there are reasons why. There are crackdowns on art. There's reasons why, you know, fascists love AI, like because it is powerful in some way. So. My feeling on protest songs, I guess, is mixed. Rob, you're a lawyer. What do you think? I think the kids should put down the pie and write some better protest songs.

We are now more than ever. I do it, but I'm old and I can't carry tunes, so. Well, thanks again for being on another one of these dumb conceptual episodes of Sophomore Lit. And happy Thanksgiving, you guys. I'm sorry we won't be seeing each other, but we will all be together for Christmas. Yay. Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow. Okay, let's stop there. Okay. The Incomparable Podcast Network. Become a member and support this show today. TheIncomparable.com slash members