Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming
Sayin' something about a queen
There were peasants singin' and drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree
There was a fanfare blowin' to the sun
That floated on the breeze
Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies
Look at mother nature on the run in the nineteen seventies
I was lyin' in a burned out basement
With a full moon in my eyes
I was hopin' for a replacement
When the sun burst through the skies
There was a band playin' in my head
And I felt like getting high
Thinkin' about what a friend had said,
I was hopin' it was a lie
Thinkin' about what a friend had said,
I was hopin' it was a lie
Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Flyin' mother nature's silver seed
To a new home in the sun
Obviously, this is pretty open to interpretation, but I have one that I haven't seen espoused elsewhere, but that I can't really find any holes in. I think it's about Kennedy, the space race and the cold war. I think it aligns well with Neil's proclivities, too. Not that it matters, but I think it's a possibility that this is the intended reading.
Having been released in 1970, seven years after the assassination, there had been plenty of time for the Myth of Kennedy, helped along by the propaganda machine of the Cold War to come into full force. The idea of Camelot had been around for just as long. Jackie coined it in an interview a week after his death. So, I think the leap to the first verse is a short one. He's describing the scene with renaissance imagery. The dream foreshadows the future status of Jackie as a figurehead for the leftist high culture. He describes the parade with the peasants all there celebrating, and then tells us about an impossible shot. An archer can't split a tree. Oswald couldn't have made the shot they claimed he did. The fanfare, the tangible tribute to Kennedy, is blowing to the sun, a very nice figurative mashup of these astounding rockets flying to the moon. The moon landing had just happened in July of '69, so it was still very fresh. It must have felt like a heroic defiance of nature to set foot on another world.
He jumps to a more violent scene... a burned out basement left after war. The moon shot doesn't seem to matter so much from Vietnam, but it's still there. It's just the Moon, though, not a symbol of accomplishment in the same way that Vietnam is just a clusterfuck by then, not the heroic trouncing of commies it was supposed to be. Hoping for a replacement reinforces the war imagery and colors the following line. The moon is out. It's not really the sun, it's an atomic bomb, another idea weighing heavily on the collective consciousness of the Cold War era. Young doesn't want any of this. He wants to get high and play music. He seems like the kind of guy who might experience auditory hallucinations when he's high and alone. I assume his friend said that the assassination was a conspiracy. It'd be nice if that were a lie.
So he's high now. Dreaming again. Forgetting about the Bomb, and about Vietnam. He's talking about the only good thing to come from all of this... the accomplishments of NASA. Silver spaceships are exactly that. Astronauts used to be heroes. Chosen ones. Their arrival home would spawn parades with flags (colors) flying, and kids yelling. It's Kennedy's funeral too, though. Flags and a country suddenly orphaned weeping, all looking to the remaining royalty of the Kennedy family, divinely chosen. Making sure we know it's only his dream, he ends with the possibilities of space travel. The energy crisis was looming, and we were already leaving the planet. Maybe we're mother nature's silver seed, and maybe we'd find a new home, fantastically, in the Sun.
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