On topic: model trains and The Who in the same article

[Dave W]

Of course plenty of songs have underlying messages. That's beside the point. Last Train To Clarksville didn't. It was just a catchy pop song written by two Tin Pan Alley-type songwriting nerds. They were good at what they did. That was their business, along with their own nerdy pop band.

[Highlander]

The irony is a thing of beauty...

[Alanko]

That's a young Robin Trower, right? It's weird seeing him with a Gibson, why did all British 70ies guitar heroes start on Gibsons and end with a Strat (and never - or rarely - the other way around). Is that the Hank Marvin AND Jimi Hendrix influence? Think Beck, Clapton, Blackmore ... Or they were Strat players right from the start and stuck to it (Gallagher, Gilmour). Mark Knopfler is one guy who was pretty much solely a Strat player initially and dug out a Les Paul (obviously after he could afford one!) more and more often as his career progressed though he never gave up the Strat entirely.

Allan Holdsworth went from a fairly battered SG Custom in Soft Machine (as did his replacement, John Etheridge) and wound up using a Strat, modded with dual Dimarzios, with Bruford. He then went over to the tiny Carvin guitars he still uses.

Maybe those guys just broke their Gibsons? The rigors of touring, especially as a 2nd tier act, probably saw a lot of headstocks getting broken in the back of the van, etc.

[amptech]

Allan Holdsworth went from a fairly battered SG Custom in Soft Machine (as did his replacement, John Etheridge) and wound up using a Strat, modded with dual Dimarzios, with Bruford. He then went over to the tiny Carvin guitars he still uses.

Maybe those guys just broke their Gibsons? The rigors of touring, especially as a 2nd tier act, probably saw a lot of headstocks getting broken in the back of the van, etc.

Allan actually had 3 SG´s at different times, i think 2 customs and a standard. At the time he only had one at a time, he just could not afford to have a lot of guitars. I believe the strat move was due to tremolo use, he liked the sound and playability of the SG´s. But the last SG he had, he had customized with a paint job - but Tony Williams sold it when Allan was on vacation in England:-)
Personally, I think the sound he had with a custom SG plugged into a head and cab is unbeatable, though listening to him is magic even today. He confirmed the SG story last time I met him in Oslo. The white three pickup custom he used with soft machine I think still belongs to a US recording studio.

[uwe]

Of course plenty of songs have underlying messages. That's beside the point. Last Train To Clarksville didn't. It was just a catchy pop song written by two Tin Pan Alley-type songwriting nerds. They were good at what they did. That was their business, along with their own nerdy pop band.

Minnesota locuta, causa finita!

[the mojo hobo]

Of course plenty of songs have underlying messages. That's beside the point. Last Train To Clarksville didn't. It was just a catchy pop song written by two Tin Pan Alley-type songwriting nerds. They were good at what they did. That was their business, along with their own nerdy pop band.

(As Uwe previously stated)

Actually it does have a message, as simple or complex as you want it to be, but it is about a young soldier in love who wants to see his girl before he leaves for Vietnam. He would have been stationed a Ft Campbell Kentucky with the 101st Airborne Division that deployed to Vietnam starting in 1965 and fully deployed by 1967. Don't know if he ever came home.

The song Leaving on a Jet Plane has the same message.

A subtle message at a time that there were overt protest songs: War is hell.

[uwe]

But Dave said it wasn't, so it isn't! 



I thought about how John Denver's song could be 'read' the same way. I always wondered whether that song wasn't over-dramatizing the prospect of airplane travel a bit and we all know how Herr Deutschendorf  was certainly not afraid to fly at all.  But it does of course matter where you are flying.

[the mojo hobo]

When it's the Who and trains a can't help but think of this:



And my favorite Duck Dunn bassline is in a train song:

[Dave W]

Back in the day (I was a college soph) it was widely thought to be about a guy leaving for the service. Nothing subliminal or anti-war about that.

[uwe]

Which one now, Monkees or Denver?   

And at a time when a war is going on and a draft is in place, the difference between service angst and anti-war is a very thin line indeed.

[the mojo hobo]

That's the thing about a well written lyric, it can mean different things to different people or at different times. I was in high school when the song came out and never gave a thought to any meaning, it was a catchy tune with a cool riff. It wasn't until long after I got back from Vietnam that I learned that Clarksville was the home of Fort Campbell and then the whole meaning of the song changed for me. And apparently that might have been an accident.

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=2840