The Story Behind "Wooden Ships"

"One of the most fondly recalled songs of the '60s, "Wooden Ships" was recorded by both the Airplane, on Volunteers, and Crosby, Stills and Nash on their debut album.

The song had its genesis during a weekend in paradise off the coast of Florida some time in 1968. There David Crosby had anchored his boat, the Mayan, while Stephen Stills, Grace Slick and Paul Kantner, and two or three of Crosby's girlfriends, cavorted aboard, diving, getting high in the sun, playing music and dreaming.

David Crosby: I'd been kicked out of the Byrds, and I found a boat and bought it, in Fort Lauderdale. Stephen came down to see me and Paul Kantner came down to see me, and they happened to be there at the same time. I had this set of changes that I'd been playing for a long time, that I really, really loved. We were sitting around in the main cabin of the boat, and we started fooling around, as we would naturally do, and we started playing that set of changes and we wrote that song together. Stephen came up with a couple of ways to arrange it, musically, and he wrote the "Horror grips us as we watch you die" verse. Paul came up with the original hook line, "Wooden ships on the water." It was a very organic process, we really wrote it very, very together. I'm amazed we never wrote anything else together. It was such a kick in the head to do it. Paul continued writing, and added an entire section to his version of it that we didn't. One of the things that I most liked was that we did it and they did it and then people would go out and buy both records and then play them back to back, and say, "Well, dig, this is a, oh, now, here, well, I really like, but see here, and I really like when they do that." It was a great thing.

Paul Kantner: That song comes out of "The House At Pooneil Corners," as a continuation, another obvious alternative to the same situation. It started out, actually, as the lyrics of the first song I ever wrote, when I was in college. Then David had had this piece of music for about a year or two that he hadn't written lyrics to. He had passed it around and nobody did anything about it. We had gone sailing with him–me and Grace. David would take us on his boat here and there. Grace and I weren't together yet at that point. I knew how fond David was of the ocean. It was his song, really, to start with. So I just put "Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy," which charmed David to no end. Most of that is my lyric and most of it's David's music. Stephen Stills wrote one verse, the nasty verse about watching you die, which is sort of fitting for Stephen.

David Crosby

"Wooden Ships"–Paul's original title for it was "Positively Negative"–is certainly one of the lovelier songs ever written about the quest for survival in a post-apocalyptic world, and the enduring human spirit that motivates the living to remain positive and rebuild from the ashes of destruction, in this case, a new civilization free from the madness that felled the old one.

On their ship–and what is this planet, in the end, but a vessel on which we are all passengers?–sailing "far from this barren land," they search for "somewhere where we might laugh again," living "free and easy," subsisting on "purple berries" (courtesy of Owsley?). "Haven't got sick once, probably keep us both alive," they sing. To the "Silver people on the shoreline"–who Crosby has characterized as "guys in radiation suits"–they say, "let us be."

Paul takes the first couple of lines–"If you smile at me, you know I will understand, 'cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language"–words modified from a saying that Crosby found on the side of a Baptist church in Florida. Grace, then Marty, follow, each taking a couple of lines by themselves, before they join together in pristine harmony.

Paul Kantner: That's an old folk thing. That goes back to the folk era, Irish jig kind of songs, where different members of the band will sing a song and all join in on the chorus.

As he mentioned, Paul lifted part of the lyrics, including the line "Take a sister by the hand, lead her far from this foreign land," from the very first song he wrote, something called "Fly Away," dating back to his college days circa 1962. The Airplane's version of "Wooden Ships" also includes a couple of verses–the ones added by Paul (who, interestingly, is deliberately not listed as a co-writer on the CSN version because he did not want Matthew Katz to hold up any royalties due to Stills and Crosby as part of his ongoing lawsuit over the Airplane's publishing rights at the time)–that CSN did not. There is also a prelude, included in the lyric sheet but unsung. It leaves no doubt that the song isn't about a weekend pleasure cruise, despite its origin:

"Black sails knifing through the pitchblende night
Away from the radioactive landmass madness
From the silver-suited people searching out
Uncontaminated food and shelter on the shores
No glowing metal on our ship of wood only
Free happy crazy people naked in the universe
WE SPEAK EARTH TALK
GO RIDE THE MUSIC."

The Airplane, but not Crosby, Stills and Nash, took hold of that last line, "go ride the music," and riffed on it as a coda to the main body of the song. It puts a glimmer of hope to an otherwise numbing scenario–stay with the music and it will take you to a freer place.

Paul Kantner: "Go ride the music" came from me mis-hearing the lyric "gonna ride a Lear jet" in a Byrds song–dyslexic ears–and I had just written that down. That was just in my work file and it made a nice, fitting, tacked-together ending.

Both the Airplane and CSN treated "Wooden Ships" as the epic it was. In the Airplane's interpretation, Jorma's guitar during the first part of the song is muted, almost mournful. As the severity of the protagonists' situation becomes clearer, it takes on a pained, angry edge, stinging notes replacing the jazzy, laid-back, floating mood. Finally, during the "go ride the music" stanza, the instrumentalists (including Nicky Hopkins on piano) and the vocalists turn celebratory, free and easy at last.