It's only been 40 years; explain "Wooden Ships"

[Bossy Monkey]

Poll question: It's only been 40 years; explain "Wooden Ships"

(Note: I know they weren't really thrown out of The Byrds, The Buffalo Springfield and The Hollies; it might be one of those joke things.)

[graywarrior]

1. It's whatever your acid drenched mind thinks it is

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. that is heavy, man. Some interesting comments here

http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/90836/

one comment:
If that is what it means to superfreakz202, that is fine, but it isn't what it really is about. Its about the dream of getting on a wooden ship and sailing away to another world - physically sailing their. If you don't believe me, read the liner notes on their box set. Crosby says it himself. After Jackson Browne heard the song, he asked "What about everyone else" and wrote For Everyman in response to it. If you ever listen to the intro before For Everyman on his new Solo Acoustic album, this is what he is alluding to.


and here:
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Crosby-Stills-Nash-and-Young-lyrics/0283DBAC7024404748256D99002C8D6B

also found this:
http://www.airplane.freeserve.co.uk/interviews/comments.htm
where Paul Kantner says this:
WOODEN SHIPS" -commentary by PAUL KANTNER
So there we are in the middle of Big Blue, Atlantic style...on
Crosby's boat, the Mayan. Grace and I had flown in, via seaplane,
with pontoons and everything, and met David in some cove of some
atoll somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas all]. Just off tour, we had a stash of acid-laced, chocolate chip
cookies that Crosby just had to eat. He didn't know they were laced.
The dose was benevolent and minor, we saw no need to inform the
"cookie monster" that he was heading for another alternate quantum
universe. Later in the day we found him face down in the sand, fully
conscious...communing...happy.
So David had this piece of music--water music to my ear--that he
had been unable to write lyrics to...and he loved the water and wooden
ships so much that I put together the pieces and out came "Wooden
Ships".
Originally entitled "Positively Negative", it related, in an
apocalyptic kind of science fiction way, to making a good thing out of
nuclear holocaust... it combined hippie dreams and taking care of
business.

I purloined the Jefferson Airplane intro from my first ever
songwriting attempt called "Fly Away", written in my college years:

"Fly away where the mornin' sun goes high
Fly away where the wind blow sweet and young birds fly"...

impressed by at the time of the writing (circa 1962)]...

"Take a sister by the hand
Lead her far from this foreign land
Let her see where you go, how high you fly."

Stills, ever Stills, added the morbid and dark, "Horror grips
us..." verse that I mildly disagreed with. In my utopian concept I
had no' horror', no 'anguished cries', no 'human feeling dying', only
hippie optimism and a sweetly naive idealism
childlike hope for the future, whatever it held, and no particular
reflection on the past.
Crosby added some ocean stuff for the CSN ending..."fair winds
blowing off and lee shores" kind of musing, while, for the Airplane
ending, I used a phrase the came from my mishearing of the Byrds "Go
Ride the Lear Jet." With McGuinn and Crosby, et al,
mumble-harmonizing that lyric, it dyslexified into my brain as, "Go
Ride the Music" and as it often is, a new lyric was born.
And so we sailed...

[SidneyCarton]

3. It's about the fact that the unbridgable divides between us are created by our leaders.

That if the men actually called up to do the killing were able to talk to each other, they would find they had more in common than that which divides them.

[PVnRT]

4. Say, can I have some of your purple berries?

[pokerfan]

5. According to the liner notes to the boxed set

Crosby says this cryptic, apocalyptic, anti-war song was "written in the main cabin of my boat, the Mayan. I had the music already (and Jefferson Airplane's) Paul Kanter wrote 2 verses, Stephen wrote one and I added the bits at both ends." He goes on to say that the songwriters "Imagined ourselves as the few survivors, escaping on a boat to create a new civilization."

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=7663

[FarLeftRage]

6. Other, Man...

All I know, is that I thought it sucked when I first heard live... and yes, I was there.

[Xipe Totec]

7. Hevia - Naves (Wooden Ships)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONihk5-wJrM

[struggle4progress]

8. It's an anti-war song, from the height of the anti-VN-war protest era.

It contrasts simple normal human interaction ("If you're smilin at me, I will understand, cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language ... Say, can I have some of your purple berries? Yes, I've been eating them, six or seven weeks now, haven't got sick once") with the futility of war ("I can see by your coat, my friend, you're from the other side. There's just one thing I got to know. Can you tell me please: who won?") and the psychological ruin caused by the machinery of death ("Horror grips us as we watch you die. All we can do is echo your anguished cries, stare as all human feelings die"). It asks the listener to refuse to cooperate ("Go, take your sister then, by the hand, lead her away from this foreign land, far away, where we might laugh again") and offers the promise of a calmer and less destructive frame of mind ("Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy, easy, you know the way it's supposed to be") which the song finally says the listener should find convincing ("And it's a fair wind, blowin warm, out of the south over my shoulder, guess I'll set a course and go")