‘Guinnevere’ by Crosby, Stills and Nash: the most hippie song of the 1960s?
The moment Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, and David Crosby first harmonised their vocals at the 1968 dinner party has gone down in musical legend, and for good reason. That was the point that three of the 1960s’ finest musical minds merged as one, breaking off from their pasts and turning towards the near future, with the foundations now in place for CSN. This outfit would come to typify the essence of the counterculture that had consumed all of their beings over the latter half of the decade.
The band’s masterpiece is known as their 1970 effort, Déjà Vu. One reason is that it contains a bolstered lineup featuring Stills’ old Buffalo Springfield bandmate, Neil Young. It’s also marked out as the swan song for the high-point of hippiedom, featuring definitive anthems such as ‘Teach Your Children’, ‘Woodstock’, and the spirited ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, which explicitly outline and defiantly endorse the subculture’s ideals in spite of changing times. However, arguably, the group had already crafted the most hippie song in ‘Guinnevere’ from their 1969 debut.
It’s interesting because the track is not hippie in the way we might automatically think; there are no wailing solos, open discussion of drugs, or most of the other aspects generally associated with the counterculture, flower power and the psychedelic rock genre, which the period birthed and is inextricable from.
However, what it is is incredibly transcendental. Produced in an era of supposed personal improvement through drugs, a fascination with the assumed mystique of ancient Eastern religion and a desire to escape the real world were combining and forming a significant part of the counterculture, ‘Guinnevere’ typified this heady removal from reality that was happening, but in the most elegant of ways. It draws upon Arthurian romance to supplement the chiming guitars, all-encompassing production and enchanting vocal harmonies. It represented total refinement compared to practically everything else happening at the time, even the work of The Beatles.
The meaning of the track has always been up for debate. For a long time, many thought Crosby wrote it about his ex-lover, Nancy Ross, who left him in 1966 for another hippie star, Gram Parsons. Notably, Parsons was the grandson of a citrus fruit magnate, with lines alluding to this being that the titular Arthurian queen “drew pentagrams” like whomever he is addressing – another reference to the spiritual – and, more directly, “Peacocks wandered aimlessly / Underneath an orange tree”.
Crosby had his own say, and after commenting on the unusual tuning that added to the song’s mystique and clever use of shifting time signatures, he revealed it’s about “three women that I loved”. One was Christine Hinton, who tragically died in a car accident; another was Joni Mitchell; and the third, he refused to name. Yet, in doing so, Crosby tapped into the romance and idealism that heavily featured during the era. He also believed it was his finest composition.
Not only does this mystery about the meaning of the song give it a strong sense of countercultural mystique, building on the otherwordly charm of the Arthurian legend, but ‘Guinnevere’ is also a deeply hippie song in that it did not conform to musical standards of the day. CSN arrived when rock was the zeitgeist, and the electric guitar was the coolest instrument around. However, they did not abide and instead sought to do something completely fresh away from expectation, mirroring the countercultural ideal’s aim to create a totally new world.
Forgoing electric guitars and instead using acoustics, more naturalistic instruments that also appealed to the pastoral predilection of their generation, ‘Guinnevere’ was totally unique, connecting something much more ancient and intangible than, say, Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ or other rock classics deemed central to the hippie period. This overlooked David Crosby masterwork was more in line with the actual spirit of the counterculture than any other song the period produced. It lifts you and takes you to someplace completely removed from others, a place of pure serenity and existential reflection.
