"Wooden Ships" is about human-health experimentation. How could we have missed it?
Recorded in 1969, first by Crosby, Stills & Nash and then by Jefferson Airplane, "Wooden Ships," with its images of silver people and young birds, seemed like a hippie idyll. But really, the thing's so dark.
The two very different versions are both strong, their dynamic arrangements accented by creative guitar work from Stephen Stills (CSN) and Jorma Kaukonen (JA). But the song was written by a committee of Stills, David Crosby and Paul Kantner, and it sounds that way. What the heck is going on?
Recognizing the potential for confusion, the Airplane preface the lyrics on the LP insert with a short setup poem: We're sailing on a wooden ship because metal craft retain the radioactivity that has fallen all over the planet. The silver people on the shoreline are wearing protective suits. The sailor narrators are docking here and there along the coast, scavenging for uncontaminated food.
When the singing starts, the sailors have encountered someone on the land who's from "the other side" of the global conflict. In CSN's version, a sailor (Stills) asks to share the stranger's purple berries, which the latter says he's been eating without getting sick. But then, oddly, the stranger (Crosby) dies, poisoned by his own berries.
Jefferson Airplane's version makes more sense. In it, the sailors (Kantner and Marty Balin) offer scavenged berries to the stranger (Grace Slick). The sailors claim the berries are safe, but really they're trying them out on the landlubber, who eats some and collapses in anguish. Off goes the ship, "very free and gone."
Viewed from the perspective of American history, sinister motives also surface in the repeated admonition to "take a sister by the hand, lead her far from this barren land." Voluntarily? The Airplane album on which the song appears is titled "Volunteers."
Today: Clinical trials of new vaccines will be followed by fast-tracked mass trials. Old hippies might want to wait out the first round.