Late to blogging today. Sick in bed with another variation on the upper respiratory nonsense. Another x-ray, another visit to the doctor tomorrow. I suppose I should be glad I'm insured.
Maybe that's why I'm in such a dreary mood.
I've had the Barry McGuire version of PF Sloan's great (and I mean it) folk-protest anthem running through my head as I think about the flat-earthers who deny the obvious facts about climate change and our hand in it.
This is a great version from the sixties, and it's not lip-synched. McGuire had graduated from the New Christy Minstrels (you can hear his voice cutting through that folk-choirs, otherwise-sanitized versions of folk classics).
It was the first protest song to break into the top ten. And it made it to number one in certain parts of the US and across the globe. Billboard lists it at no higher than two.
PF Sloan, who wrote a number of sixties pop hits, claims the song ruined his career, for political reasons. He re-recorded it for an album he put out last year, and toured for the first time in decades to promote the album.
McGuire never had another hit, but he still is touring the song in 60's folk revival shows (of the type "scene on PBS." Apocryphal stories say that Dylan hated the song, claimed it was a ripoff (he should talk), but that he was really most angry because Like a Rolling Stone, (a far more brilliant song in many ways), was struggling to make it to the top of the charts when Eve of Destruction did. Dylan never reached the number one spot.
About a dozen years ago, I played my beat up 45 rpm single version of it to start my folk show, and the hip hop DJ who did the all-night shift asked to borrow it for a week. The next week he came back with a mash-up version of it that was brilliant. I wish I had a copy
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