Peter, Paul & Mary had been singing lush, pretty harmonies for years before “Leaving On A Jet Plane,” and you can hear in the song’s arrangement that they knew just how to sing around each other, to back each other up. Political resonance aside, “Leaving On A Jet Plane” is also a piece of music so outright gorgeous that it could spin your head around. Singing from what I imagine is the perspective of this young man, Mary Travers keens, “When I come home, I’ll wear your wedding ring,” knowing full well that the narrator might not make it back. After all, an impending deployment could leave a young man trying suddenly and desperately to get his priorities in order, hoping to correct any mistakes he’s already made in his too-short life. Even that bit about the many times that the singer has played around works within the cultural context. It’s a simple and graceful domestic moment, a case of geopolitical events tearing people apart and causing incalculable, irreparable damage in people’s lives. “Leaving On A Jet Plane” is, in its own way, the most effective kind of protest song: The kind that never announces itself as a protest song. Certain things are implanted too deeply for me to get any kind of distance.) Ray’s Hair Weave, or the taste of my own boogers. (I have no idea what rating I’d give “Puff (The Magic Dragon).” It would be like rating birthday cake, or the commercial for Mr. (I’d give it a 9.) And they also did it earlier that same year with “ Puff (The Magic Dragon),” an original song that group member Peter Yarrow had co-written. Once was their beatific 1963 version of “Blowin’ In The Wind,” which might’ve been a generational touchpoint even before they sang it at Matin Luther King, Jr.’s March On Washington. Peter, Paul And Mary landed six top-10 singles in the ’60s, as well as two #1 albums. So it’s a bit of a shock that “Leaving On A Jet Plane” was the trio’s only #1 single, though they came close plenty of times. So if you look at it from a certain angle, Peter, Paul & Mary’s hit cover of “ Blowin’ In The Wind,” the version that brought Dylan’s music to the masses, was a cannily executed piece of cross-promotion.)Īlmost from the moment that they showed up, Peter, Paul & Mary were a massively successful enterprise. (A year after he created Peter, Paul & Mary, Grossman signed on as Bob Dylan’s manager. We might think of Peter, Paul & Mary as idealistic and starry-eyed kids, and maybe they were that, but they were also Grossman’s attempt to capitalize on a musical moment. Peter, Paul & Mary had been around since 1961, when the manager Albert Grossman auditioned and assembled three kids from the Greenwich Village folk scene and put them together as a vocal group. And so “Leaving On A Jet Plane” became a Vietnam War song. But it didn’t become a single until 1969, when the Vietnam War was near its peak, both as an armed conflict and as a whole generation’s defining event. Peter, Paul & Mary recorded “Leaving On A Jet Plane” in 1967, and they included it on Album 1700, the LP that they released that year. What matters is what the songs do when they go out into the world - the significance that these songs take on when they enter the lives of millions upon millions of strangers. John Denver, a relatively unknown musician in the Los Angeles folk scene, had written the song at an airport in 1966, and it’s pretty clear from the lyrics that it’s all about an unfaithful traveling musician: “There’s so many times I’ve let you down / So many times I’ve played around / I tell you now, they don’t mean a thing.”īut in pop music, authorial intent doesn’t really matter. “Leaving On A Jet Plane” was not a song about the Vietnam War. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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