"Green" Oldies

For anyone else, this would be a sole career peak, but for Marvin Gaye, "Mercy Mercy Me" was only one of a trilogy of hits pulled from his landmark 1971 LP, What's Going On: the title track, about generational strife, the closing (and self-descriptive) "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)," and this gem, which utilizes the exact same heavenly lamentations and jazzy arrangements of its brethren yet fades off into a choir of anguished moans, as if to signify that the Earth was already ready to give up her dead. It usually gets less play than the title track, as the Sixties ecology movement has faded away, but look for it to resurge on players everywhere, and soon.

This is the last bit of advice you'd expect The Beach Boys to dole out, but it's actually a clever way of repurposing the old cliche into an environmentally conscious plea -- one suggested by their new management to get them back on the charts after the mental flameout of leader/resident genius Brian Wilson. It didn't work, exactly, but not for lack of trying: this appealingly skewed little number keeps just enough of that old magic to satisfy fans, yet listen carefully and you'll find a musical background as queasy as the polluted oceans it laments. And who better to mourn the loss of the beach as a social hangout?

The master of blackcomic parody does his usual Harvard-educated best at essaying the title problem in this mid-Sixties favorite. "Throw out your breakfast garbage, and I've got a hunch / That the folks downstream will drink it for lunch," he sings, and as always, it's a joke that sticks in the craw. Cleverly designed as a warning for visiting foreigners, this little ditty mainly sees the problem as another sign of urban decay. Little did we know the ozone layer wouldn't make that kind of distinction.

"They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot," sings Joni on this 1970 hit, her first and among her most endearing. And while she typically veers off at the end into the sort of romantic musings that make love seem like an absurd dance, don't be fooled by her angelic voice: she recognizes decay in all its forms. "Took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum / And charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em," she sings of a real botanical garden in Hawaii, of all places. Which is also where she spotted the parking lot, creeping up on a breathtaking range of mountains.

This leadoff track on Stevens' genre-defining 1970 LP Tea For The Tillerman takes a mildly defensive approach at first, agreeing that technology, innovation and progress can be wonderful things. But when Cat gets to the chorus and asks the title question, he's really asking us what price we're willing to pay for such convenience, not just in a interdependent "spaceship Earth" way, but in our very souls. Some might argue that children can play in asphalt-covered playgrounds, which were all the rage at the time, but what child wouldn't get something more out of, say, a forest?

This latter-day cover was released on a concept album that found the sunshine-pop group pretending to be a different fictitious band on each track (take that, Sgt. Pepper!). Actually, this closing number was supposedly performed by all the "bands," and it sounds like it: a entire choir of Turtles coming together at the end of a variety show to deliver a serious message. Written by folkie Bill Martin in the mid-Sixties, it has a more spiritual and defiant air than any of the others on this list, suggesting that the Earth itself, as our home, takes on a certain Godlike status -- a life-giving deity that its inhabitants should be willing to die for.

Harder and funkier than you might expect from the guys who invented folk-rock, this late-period Roger McGuinn classic speaks from the POV of the beleaguered Earth itself, explaining that space exploration (among other things) led to a depletion of natural resources. It plays less dry than that sounds, especially with the tasty little acoustic solo.

Well, well, well. A warning about finite oil reserves from a big-band R&B outfit? In 1975? Yep, even before the first energy crisis had fully taken hold, the band behind "So Very Far To Go" was declaring, "We just ain't got sufficient fuel" and concluding that "Alternate sources of power must be found." They were not rewarded with a hit for their prescience, but the bottomless greasy club funk here would fuel a whole fleet of Willie Nelson tour buses.

With an intro that proves his importance to the burgeoning singer-songwriter movement (Jim Croce's "Operator" owes a lot to it), Tom Paxton's "Whose Garden Was This" is nonetheless a searing indictment of our own wastefulness, imagining a future where flowers are extinct things you've merely read about, like dinosaurs. Paxton's signature sarcasm, which is not leavened by an ounce of pressure-relieving humor, is a stark wake-up call. So why did no one wake up?

Done with his usual attention to the minutest poetic detail, Don McLean's "Tapestry" (not to be confused with the Carole King song of the same name) probably works a little too hard to paint a picture of the cosmos with lines like "And every dawn that breaks golden is held in suspension / like the yolk of the egg in albumen." There's none of the epic yet gentle sweep of "Vincent" and "American Pie" in this poesy. Yet there's a real righteous anger in the way he sees man's inhumanity to his planet, especially when he speaks of "smoldering cities, so gray and so vulgar / as not to be satisfied with their own negativity / but needing to touch all the living as well."