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Old 09-18-2008, 08:50 PM   #5
Don Quixote
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Springfield, MA 01109
Posts: 309
Default Re: artvoice article - another 'best of' list

Great article, and mostly correct, but "Summer Side of Life" is clearly about the Vietnam war and the way it ravaged the young people who fought in it. I always thought that one of the greatest "double entendres" in all of GL's songs was "Then he walked in to a house where love had been misplaced--his chance to waste"--talking not only about wasted opportunities, but going into a Vietnamese family's house and killing all, innocent or not. This was called "wasting" during that war, and the army would do this to some extent as a protective maneuver (since the Viet Cong used young boys, girls and women), and also to inflate the numbers of the "enemy" we were killing as a propaganda device. You can imagine the emotional fallout of a young man who had done this, or had been ordered to do this--no wonder he cried "the whole day long".

Otherwise a wonderful article, although I'm sure each one of us would have added about 100 more songs as his best.

DQ
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