One of the biggest hits recorded by The Monkees is “Last Train to Clarksville,” which was released in 1966. Many of us grew up singing along to the song without realizing it was written as a protest against the Vietnam War.
Take the last train to Clarksville And I’ll meet you at the station, You can be here by four-thirty, ‘Cause I’ve made your reservation, don’t be slow, Oh, no, no, no, Oh, no, no, no.
If you listen closely to the lyrics sung by Micky Dolenz, you can hear that The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville” is actually in the voice of someone frightened about going off to war.
Now I must hang up the phone, I can’t hear you in this noisy railroad station, All alone, I’m feeling low. Oh, no, no, no, Oh, no, no, no, And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.
The song does not specifically mention the war, but songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart explained that they kind of “snuck in” the Viet Nam references. They noted, “We couldn’t be too direct with the Monkees.”
Steve Earle and the Dukes are celebrating the anniversary of the release of the album Copperhead Road, including a 30th Anniversary Tour. Uni Records released Earle’s third album on October 17, 1988.
Steve Earle made a conscious effort with the album to reach rock radio. And the songs rocked harder than Earle’s previous two excellent albums, Guitar Town (Remastered)(Bonus Track) (1985) and Exit O (1987).
You can hear Earle making a name for himself from the first chords on the opening and title track. “Copperhead Road” tells the story of a Vietnam vet returning home to grow marijuana.
Copperhead Road also featured one of the greatest songs ever written about guns, “The Devil’s Right Hand,” which was covered by Waylon Jennings.
George Stroumboulopoulos of The Strombo Show from CBC Radio 2 recently talked to Earle about the album. Check out the insightful interview where Earle recounts making the album and the music’s legacy.
What is your favorite song on Copperhead Road? It is hard for me to name one song, but I do love “Even When I’m Blue.” Leave your two cents in the comments.
One of the late Glen Campbell’s greatest recordings is of the Jimmy Webb penned classic, “Galveston.” Although it has been called one of the best anti-war pop songs (even bordering on sedition), the anti-war elements are so understated that I had heard the song many times without ever recognizing its references to war. Rolling Stone has noted how Webb originally wrote the song as a protest song during the Viet Nam era. Don Ho first recorded the song and introduced it to Campbell. Then, Campbell made some small changes to the lyrics to make it a bit more ambiguous.
The ambiguity is increased by the soaring music and the fact that Campbell wore a uniform in the official video.
The Lyrics to “Galveston”
Yet, it is the ambiguity that makes the song so great. The singer thinks back to the town of Galveston and the love he left there: “I still see her dark eyes glowing./She was twenty one, when I left Galveston.”
The listener hears the first verse and has no idea why the singer left Galveston. But then in the second verse, there is a reference to cannons and the wonderful line, “I clean my gun, and dream of Galveston.”
Yet, to find any anti-war message, a listener must look to the next verse and the song’s final lines. “Galveston, I am so afraid of dying, Before I dry the tears she’s crying, Before I watch your sea birds flying in the sun, at Galveston, at Galveston.”
One may still view the song as a soldier looking back on the love he left behind. In that sense, the song is similar to Bing Crosby’s recording of “White Christmas.” Or one may take the line about the fear of dying as a reminder of the horrors of war, which takes the lives of so many young people.
Original Lyrics
Webb was a great writer, but it is hard to argue that the ambiguous verse Campbell added to replace Webb’s more anti-war verse was not an improvement. In fact, when Webb recorded his song in 1972, he sang it with Campbell’s tweak to the lyrics. What did Campbell change?
According to Wikipedia, the original second verse as sung by Don Ho was:
“Wonder if she could forget me; I’d go home if they would let me; Put down this gun, And go to Galveston.”
The video below of someone’s trip to the beach in Galveston features these original lyrics in the Don Ho version.
Campbell replaced that verse with the verse about cannon’s flashing and cleaning his gun. Gone was the reference to the fact that the soldier would leave the war if he could. Instead, we just know he thinks of Galveston and his love while he cleans his gun.
Still, there is not much difference in meaning. And Campbell also left in the line about the fear of dying.
Webb and Campbell
In the video below, Webb and Campbell discuss the song before playing a slower, soulful version with Webb on the piano.
Webb himself has been a bit ambiguous about the meaning behind the song. In a Sound Observations interview, he claimed: “If there was a statement, and obviously I was saying something, I prefer to say it wasn’t anti-war – that it was more about an individual getting involved in a war and realizing that he’d rather be somewhere else.” He then went on to explain that it was not to be a “hit-you-over-the-head” protest song.
Yet, Webb’s comments did reveal there was a message that became hidden in Campbell’s version: “But a lot of people didn’t get it anyway. Because, Glen pretty much cut it up-tempo. It was kind of like a march. It was kind of happy. It sounded almost patriotic.”
Either way, it is a beautiful song, likely made more beautiful by the clash of the anti-war writer and the more conservative singer who supported the Viet Nam War. One can hear that tension in the beautiful song about a soldier longing for his Texas home, made more beautiful by the wonderful voice of Glen Campbell. What is your favorite anti-war song? Leave your two cents in the comments.
On March 16, 1968, U.S. troops in Vietnam killed approximately 300-500 unarmed civilians in what became known as the My Lai Massacre. But it would not be until November 1969 before the incident became public knowledge in the United States.
Despite various charges being filed, only Second Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, would be convicted of any crimes. After being found guilty of killing a number of people in the village, he was sentenced to life in prison, although he would serve three and a half years.
When Calley’s trial began in late 1970, I was a little kid, absorbing various pieces about the war in Vietnam, as they filtered through various lenses of my childhood. I did not understand much about My Lai, but it became more prominent in my consciousness when after a trip to a local five-and-dime store, I picked up what looked like an interesting 45 RPM record called “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley.”
“The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley”
I did not know anything about the record, so I suppose I selected it because the title looked interesting. I thought it might be one of those funny records, popular at the time, that featured questions with humorous responses using song clips. So, with nothing else I wanted to buy that week with my allowance, I took “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley” home.
When I played it on my small record player, I became mesmerized by the song with the recognizable music of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I played it over and over again.
But the version I bought was the original by Terry Nelson and “C” Company. The recording featured Alabama disc jockey Terry Nelson Skinner, who would later write the Air Supply hit “Even the Nights are Better.” Studio musicians provided the music. The group sold over one million copies of the single, and it peaked at number thirty-seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in May 1971.
The flip side to “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley” was another song about the horrors of being a soldier in the war called “Routine Patrol.” I repeatedly listened to that song too, although it was more scary, documenting men killed on a “routine patrol,” counting down like “Ten Little Indians.”
The Real Story and Some Real Heroes
As “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley” illustrates, many sided with Calley in debates about what happened at My Lai. They claimed he was doing his duty in a land where one could not easily recognize the enemy.
Because my childhood understanding of the story came from the song, that would be my image for awhile. But as much as I liked the record, something always seemed off to me about the tale. Growing up as a kid during that time, we knew that Vietnam was complicated and an awful mess, whichever side you were on.
Hugh Thompson Jr.
Calley rarely spoke about the My Lai massacre. In 2009, though, he apologized for his part in the killings, although he continued to assert that he was following orders on that day.
Unfortunately, because I learned about My Lai from the song, I only knew the name of Calley. I did not know the names of those innocent people who were killed.
And it would be decades before I would learn that there were real heroes that day, including helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, Jr. and his crew Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta. The three men were flying in the area when they saw the massacre taking place. Backed by Colburn and Andreotta, Thompson intervened at the risk of his own safety to stop the slaughter and save the lives of many civilians. After people learned about what happened at My Lai, some Americans attacked Thompson instead of recognizing him as a hero.
It is a shame that it took so long before I learned about Thompson, Colburn, and Andreotta. Someone should have written a song about them.
On October 21 in 1967, one of the most significant signs of public disgruntlement with the Vietnam conflict began. Nearly 100,000 people showed up in D.C. to protest the U.S. role in the war.
The March on the Pentagon to Confront the War Makers started near the Lincoln Memorial, and approximately 50,000 of the protesters then went to the Pentagon, where many remained until October 23 and where some participated in acts of civil disobedience. Author Norman Mailer captured many of the events of the protest in his novel, Armies of the Night.
That year there were other protests around the country, as polls showed that the support for the war had dropped below 50%. All of those factors led President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to respond with a public relations campaign in support of the war.
But the protest, and complaints after the Tet offensive in early 1968, illustrated that many Americans would continue to raise their voices to end the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Music Reflects the Protests Against the War
At the time, one might have noticed from the music that something was in the air. The year 1967 began with the Rolling Stones appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show in January. At the show’s request, the band famously changed the title lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to the less sexy “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.” But by September, the Doors appeared on the same show after also agreeing to alter the lyrics to their song, “Light My Fire.” But Jim Morrison captured the growing youth rebellion by going ahead and singing the offending line “Girl we couldn’t get much higher.”
In other 1967 music news, Buffalo Springfrield released “For What It’s Worth” in January. In February, Aretha Franklin recorded “Respect.” In March, the Who performed for the first time in the U.S. In June, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Also in June, the Monterey Pop Festival brought young people together to hear such artists as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Otis Redding. Redding soon would write and record “(Sitting on) the Dock of the Bay.”
John Lennon in How I Won the War
Then, on October 18, three days before the Washington protest, the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine came off the presses with a cover photo of John Lennon from the film How I Won the War. The film was a comedy where Lennon first appeared with his famous round glasses.
Phil Ochs Declares the War is Over
Of course, there was music at the protest in D.C. too. One of the performers at the protest was Phil Ochs. He performed his recent song that imagined a future without the war, “The War is Over.”
In the song at the protest, Ochs proclaimed “This country is too young to die,” so “I declare the war is over.” He concludes, “You only are what you believe.”
Below is a video of a different live performance of “The War is Over.”
The U.S. eventually withdrew its troops from Viet Nam, but it would be nearly six more years before the war was actually over for the U.S. soldiers and their loved ones at home.
Steve Earle and the Dukes are celebrating the anniversary of the release of the album Copperhead Road, including a 
(1985) and Exit O (1987).
also featured one of the greatest songs ever written about guns, “The Devil’s Right Hand,” which was covered by Waylon Jennings.
