SLS: Change The World

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For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song that was written explicitly as a segue. His post tells all. My first thought was Jackson Browne’s The Load Out/Stay medley that closes his Running On Empty album, but then I spotted the significance of Jim’s use of the word explicitly, which ruled that out: the two songs weren’t even written by the same people. A trap avoided, I think! So I went in search of something else, and this is what I came up with:

Apologies for the audio-only clip, and also for one that was posted by someone who hadn’t a clue what he was doing! It was the only one I could find that wasn’t region-restricted, though. For those who need an explanation, Chicago and We Can Change The World were the two final tracks on Graham Nash’s debut solo album, Songs For Beginners. David Crosby and Neil Young both played on some of the album’s tracks, but Stephen Stills didn’t, further compounding his error.

The two songs are listed separately on the album but they share some lyrics and segue into each other, and are clearly intended to do so. The lyrics are here at genius.com, if you’d like to see them.

From Wikipedia:

“The title and lyrics of the song refer to the anti-Vietnam War protests that took place during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the subsequent trial of the Chicago Eight, where protest leaders were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot. The first line of the song, “So your brother’s bound and gagged, and they’ve chained him to a chair”, refers to Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, the sole African-American defendant, who was gagged and chained to a chair in the courtroom following repeated outbursts in protest of rulings by Judge Julius Hoffman. The line “Won’t you please come to Chicago just to sing?” refers to Nash pleading with bandmates Stephen Stills and Neil Young to come to Chicago to play a benefit concert for the Chicago 8 defense fund. The chorus contains the lines, “We can change the world / Rearrange the World”.

As you can see from that, the one minute song We Can Change The World was an extension and development of Chicago, with backing vocals by a chorus of Rita Coolidge, Venetta Fields, Sherlie Matthews, Clydie King and Dorothy Morrison. The album was released in May 1971 and peaked at #13 in the UK and #15 in the US. Not surprisingly the song has featured at many protest rallies down the years, one of the more recent being at an anti-vaccine rally of Robert F Kennedy Jr in 2023, which earned him Graham’s opprobrium and a cease and desist letter: Graham’s view on vaccines doesn’t fall in the lunatic tendency camp!

I don’t often play long songs for SLS but couldn’t resist sharing a second today. Like many of the best segue songs this one comes from the early days of prog rock, and is by one of my favourite bands. There are various versions of this, and I’m playing a 13 minute live performance from 1977:

Jethro Tull, with an edited version of Thick As A Brick, and again genius.com has the lyrics.

Thick as a Brick was the fifth studio album by Jethro Tull, released on 3 March 1972, consisting of a single continuous piece of music split across the two sides of the original LP record, coming in at nearly 44 minutes in total. It was conceived as a parody of concept albums and the progressive rock genre, after Ian Anderson took offence at critics describing the band’s previous record, Aqualung, as a concept album. Its original packaging took the form of a 12-page local newspaper, which presented the album as a musical adaptation of an epic poem by a fictional eight-year-old prodigy named Gerald Bostock, although the lyrics were actually written by Ian Anderson, of course.

I bought the album at the time and played it to bits, with the added attraction of the ‘newspaper’ to read; it was a delight, even down to the horoscopes, which were actually just a couple of different predictions written in different words. The album received mixed critical reviews, some of them clearly not seeing the joke, or maybe they just weren’t fans of Monty Python, whose humour was an influence on the band. The public ignored the critics – always the best way to treat them – and the album made #1 in the US, Canada and Australia, #5 in the UK, and a selection of #2, #3 and #4 across Europe.

That’s me done for the day. As ever, I give my thanks to Jim for hosting SLS, together with my apologies for making him listen to something so long! I hope he and you enjoyed my choices, though.

See you again for Tuesday Tunes, I trust? Take care 👍

22 thoughts on “SLS: Change The World”

  2. I think I’ve heard the first one before but didn’t recognize the title. At first I thought it was by the band Chicago! Then found out it wasn’t – haha I liked it, and the information about it. Not a fan of the second one though. 🙂

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  3. Great choices, Clive. The Chicago 8 (who later became the Chicago 7 after Bobby Seale’s case was separated) stood for the 1960s anti-war movement, radical political dissent, and counterculture expression. They were a loosely connected group of activist leaders indicted by the federal government for conspiring to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago. Rather than a single unified organization, they represented a broad coalition of the era’s prominent left-wing ideologies. Thick As A Brick is not a segue, but it was great to hear, as this is the best of Tull.

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  4. Clive, thanks for highlighting music from these two events in Chicago, which were among several in this tumultuous year. With the assassinations of MLK and RFK and several riots, the Chicago convention was expected to be raucous if not violent. It is good Graham Nash captured it. I love Jethro Tull and thought their lyrics and musicality produced many great songs. Keith

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    • It was an important song for its time, though it strikes me as sad that it took an Englishman to make the point in musical terms. I share your love of Tull, going right back to their first album 👍

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  6. I particularly liked the Graham Nash song. Isn’t it nice to look back on a period when music had influence on the culture and politics of the time, when what artists said and sang could make a difference?

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  7. You can’t beat Jethro Tull can you and I really enjoyed listening to this in its entireity! Thank you 🙏

    As for Graham Nash and his cast of millions another great track and your interesting write up …a great trip down the memory track!

    Back to Jethro Tull a class act never before or since have we seen the like 💜💜💜

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