Musings of a Loquacious Mind

Last Train to Clarksville...

So I was listening to the radio the other day in the car (oh, for the old days when my car still had a radio...) and the DJ was about to spin "Last Train to Clarksville", which you may well know is the first hit single by the Monkees, released in 1967.

Well, anyway, as the DJ is tossing to the song, he throws in that the song is about a guy going to Vietnam. OK, this fits easily with the lyrics, but that doesn't make it true. I've made up all sorts of stories to explain the narrative of "Hotel California", some of which fit, but that doesn't mean that's what the song is about.

So I did some "websearch" (it's like research, but since it's all using web sources that are not necessarily validated I refuse to call it that), and found out the DJ is right! The song was written by the Boyce and Hart (who also wrote and released "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight", which I can never not sing when it comes on, and am, in fact, singing right now), and here's a quote about where the name came from by Bobby Hart:

We were just looking for a name that sounded good. There's a little town in Northern Arizona I used to go through in the summer on the way to Oak Creek Canyon called Clarksdale. We were throwing out names, and when we got to Clarksdale, we thought Clarksville sounded even better. We didn't know it at the time, [but] there is an Air Force base near the town of Clarksville, Tennessee - which would have fit the bill fine for the story line. We couldn't be too direct with The Monkees. We couldn't really make a protest song out of it - we kind of snuck it in.

Check the lyrics.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

Labels: music

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