“…there's just one thing I got to know, can you tell me, please, who won…?” American children aged 10 and below have lived their entire lives with our nation at war; if you consider that we typically don’t become conscious of much outside our own lives until we are five or six years old, it’s essentially an entire generation of kids that have known only war---albeit, a rather detached vision of war, but war none the less. It doesn’t take a social scientist to know that that’s going to have some impact on their socialization, but speculating what that fallout will look like is anyone’s guess; you can bet that David Crosby, Stephen Stills & Graham Nash would prefer them to be a bit more disgusted by the ever-growing military industrial complex (both federal & private) in front of them. This anti-war tale, fittingly written on Crosby’s boat in conjunction with the Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner (safe to assume they were all exceedingly baked), takes a different approach from many of its leftist musical peers of that time, tackling the idea of thermonuclear fallout rather than merely the Vietnam mess that was then at hand, “…wooden ships on the water, very free and easy; easy, you know, the way it's supposed to be; silver people on the shoreline, let us be, talkin’ ‘bout very free and easy...horror grips us as we watch you die, all we can do is echo your anguished cries, stare as all human feelings die, we are leaving---you don't need us…” This album remains rock solid from front to back, a relic of its time but, sadly, still relevant to unlearned lessons.
