Yeah, but pretty much every rock and roll song has been interpreted to be about drugs or sex. (Only slightly exaggerating here. It feels like, growing up, any song with somewhat ambiguous lyrics was said to be about one of those two topics.)
For a counterpoint, Neil Young says, according to Wikipedia:
Young has said that he wrote the song “for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me through Phil Ochs’ eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife.”[5] The city girl playing finger cymbals is a reference to folk singer Jean Ray.[
Nothing in the “Lyrics” section suggests heroin, but rather an actual woman.
Now, I don’t trust what songwriters say about their lyrics, either. I personally think it’s purposefully vague, like many song lyrics, and there is no specific meaning, just an impression.
And usually I’d disagree with those assertions, but with “Cinnamon Girl” I absolutely think it’s about heroin. Maybe it’s because I’m a product of the grunge generation and it doesn’t sound too different from what Nirvana and Alice in Chains were playing when I was a kid.
OK, I think that’s really stretching it – that is, that the “sound” of a song implies that it’s about a certain drug. While I somewhat understand what you’re saying, I don’t automatically think, oh, it’s grungy, so it must be influenced by heroin or something like that.
Well, it makes more sense to me as a drug song than as a a song about a girl, and I’m not going to be able to objectively prove that im right about that, so I’ll drop the hijack.
Getting back to the OP, I submit “Boney Moronie”, originally by Larry Williams and covered by lots of people, including the Who, whose version i prefer.
Years later, Sublime met the same hippie chick. Just to gain her trust, he bought a microbus. They ended up selling drugs and getting chased by the police.
Huh. TIL the title of that song is “Windy” not “Wendy.” I just thought it was a dialectal pronunciation of “Wendy.” I guess, “Windy’s got stormy eyes” should have tipped me off. Heard that song all my life; never realized it until now.
And then there’s whatever’s going on in Tales of Brave Ulysses:
And you see your girl’s brown body dancing in the moonlight And her footprints make you follow where the sky loves the sea And when your fingers find her, she drowns you in her body Carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of your mind.
I heard a DJ on a classic rock station say once that “we all went through the 60’s…but Jack Bruce went through twice.”
Good choices here. I’ll dig a bit more down and add Year of the Cat. More of a Moroccan hippie, a bit more exotic and mysterious than a regular flower child, but there is incense and patchouli.
There’s no marriage, but “you know sometime you’re bound to leave her, but for now you’re gonna stay.”
Dean Friedman Ariel (WARNING: when I clicked on this video I got an ad specifically targeted to people on Medicare. That’ll kill the hippie vibe fast!)
In the spirit of equal time, there’s also the “Mamas don’t let your daughters grow up to be hippies,” vibe of Arizona.
Jeez, I can’t believe I forgot the lady with “scarlet begonias tucked into her curls.” Clearly a godsend, you don’t meet a hell of a lot of girls who are into the blues.
“Sugar Mag,” on the other hand, is the song all my college women friends particularly hated because of “head’s all empty and I don’t care,” and used to argue that Barlow and Hunter were horrible sexists. Along with “Jack Straw” and “we can share the women, we can share the wine.”
Unfortunately, it’s their prettiest song. So many really pretty songs in the 60s turn out to have sexist lyrics, the worst being Jack Jones’ “Wives and Lovers,” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David.
For a nicer song, I think Johnny Rivers’ “Summer Rain” hits all the buttons. It’s set during the Summer of Love, but the woman he loves want to leave for Colorado, which is where lots of hippies fled to for a more bucolic life. And it will be permanent.
She wants to live in the Rockies
She says that’s where we’ll find peace
Settle down, raise up a family
One to call our own, yeah
We will have a home
Can’t get more hippie than this album cover either.
I’m gonna find me a blonde-haired mama, In a Jeep with a German Shepherd by her side. I’m gonna find me a blonde-haired mama, With boots and a forty-four on her side. And if I ain’t too high or used up, I’ll have her take me for a groovy little hippie ride.
