Mods: I don’t think this is sexist, do you? Hope not!
Okay, so I was doing the dinner dishes tonight and switched Spotify from the complete Haydn string quartets to The Association channel, because I needed more organ and recorder for the ordeal. Midway through scrubbing the wok I caught myself singing along to “Windy.”
Wow, blast back to when I was seven years old and played this on the jukebox alla time. Who WOULDN’T want to spend their life with a girl who has wings to fly, above the clouds?
Most of my girlfriends since the 70s have been hippies. I married a hippie. My 31 year old daughter and 25 year old son are hippies.
How many 60s-70s and beyond songs have enticed boys and girls to embrace lifelong hippie companions for years of connubial bliss and swirling to psychedelic rock?
The Association: “Windy;” “Along Comes Mary” (the latter is as much a weed love song as a hippie love song)
The Grateful Dead: “The Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion”
Edison Lighthouse: “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes”
I can’t think of a song that’s exactly about marrying a hippie, but does Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” count? Hey, at least it has the line “I wanna live with a Cinnamon Girl, I could be happy the rest of my life with a Cinnamon Girl”.
I just put “marry” in the title so mods wouldn’t come down on me like a ton of bricks. “Fuck” may be substituted. Although I’m expecting you to be allured into a longer relationship with this hairy patchouli-scented male or female.
In this case, I think Richard Thompson’s great “Beeswing” also counts. It’s a nostalgic homage to a hippie girl, though wanting to marry her is exactly what destroys the relationship. I as a listener always fall in love with the woman in that song:
Pure Prairie League has a whole album about loving hippie girls. Bustin’ Out came out in 1972 and I remember listening to it over and over, dreaming of a hippie life in the Colorado mountains.
Boulder Skies
Sew your skirt lace out of time While I write the words to rhyme Just what I am thinking, and just what I should say If I have to go, I’d rather stay Colorado canyon girl who set me free Brown eyes in the morning looking back at me
“Jennifer Juniper, rides a dappled mare
Jennifer Juniper, lilacs in her hair
Is she dreaming? Yes, I think so
Is she pretty? Yes, ever so
Whatcha doing, Jennifer, my love?”
I would’ve sworn the titular cinnamon girl was supposed to be heroin. The last verse certainly does make the singer sound like a desperate junkie in need of a fix;
Pa, send me money now I’m going to make it somehow I need another chance You see your baby loves to dance
I honestly never thought about any interpretation other than that it is a song about a girl, maybe a groupie (“ten silver saxes, a bass with a bow, the drummer relaxes and waits between shows for my Cinnamon Girl”). I don’t see any connection to drugs, let alone heroin, which never was the drug of choice for Neil Young anyway.
It’s “waits between shows for his cinnamon girl”. I got the impression that the drummer needed his fix between sets just like the singer does.
Young is on record as having never used the stuff, but “The Needle and the Damage Done” is explicitly about heroin, so it’s not as it’s something he wouldn’t write about. Cinnamon Girl is easily one of Young’s proto-grunge songs, and most of the guys who took inspiration from songs like that were definitely on heroin, as were Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, the only other people around that time who were making songs that sounded like that, which I feel influences the subtext.
FWIW, a Google search found this thread from another board where a number of people also think it’s about heroin;
I know that, and that’s exactly the point: all his songs about heroin (another one being “Tonight’s The Night”) don’t celebrate it, but condemn it like “The Needle And The Damage Done”, that’s why I doubt that “Cinnamon Girl” is a song celebrating heroin.
I wouldn’t say it’s celebrating heroin. I’d say it’s sung from the perspective of a junkie who only feels good when he’s with his “cinnamon girl”, but he’s running out of money and he’s convinced that everything will be alright if he can just hang on for long enough even it means begging his dad for cash. He’s headed for a bad end and he doesn’t realize it because all he can think about is the next fix.
