quote:Originally posted by Auburn Annie:
Drink Yer Glasses Empty refers (mostly) to WWII - he mentions when he was one year old in 1939.
Protocol covers everything from the fields of France (WWI) to Saigon (Vietnam) and older wars in general.
Summer Side of Life is non-specific.
Drink Yer Glasses Empty was inspired by Desert Storm, which made him think back to World War II when he was a child, and undoubtedly to all the other "causes" in between, for which young men and women went to fight.
Here is what Gord says about the song:
4/19. DRINK YER GLASSES EMPTY
"It's chronologically correct, inasmuch as I was very young when World War II started. But I remember the opening years of the war, getting ration stamps for milk and meat and the like. I thought back to that while CNN
was going constantly right at the beginning of Desert Storm. I even gave it a bit of a John Wayne slant, as you can hear in the lyric." (C1999 Rhino Records, Songbook booklet)
The earlier songs - those mentioned and others that are not (like DQ, SDYS, The Lost Children, Leaves Of Grass, for example) - were inspired by the Vietnam conflict. Some are reflections on the futility and sadness of war itself, drawing from wars in the past as much as from the Vietnam War itself. SDYS is most specifically placed during the Vietnam conflict, being about a young American who fled to Canada to avoid the draft.
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Valerie Magee
Visit my GL fan site at
gordonlightfoot.com and Cathy Cowette's web site at
cathycowette.com
