The Gaia Sermon
Sprouting this month from rock obscuria’s compost heap, a folk/ jazz/synth eco-suite for the world.
Various Wilderness America, A Celebration Of The Land PRIVATE PRESS, 1975
AMONG THE sobering challenges the 21st centur y presents, the need to protect the natural world is increasingly urgent. In the middle ’70s, time of the mysterious death of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood, the publication of Edward Abbey’s eco-anarchist novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, and the growing environmental awareness of such artists as Neil Young, Stevie Wonder and the Eagles, the fight arguably remained a more atomised, grass roots affair.
One such ground level activist who sought to widen and promote the struggle was Emily DeSpain Polk, the poet and conser vationist born in Washington state in 1910. In 1971 she founded SWAP, or Small Wilderness Area Preservation, to prevent the bulldozing of ancient Californian woodland for development. Shortly after, with a grant from the Bank Of America’s charitable foundation, she hit upon the idea of, “a musical exploration of our place within the cycle of living things.” To help assemble what would become the consciousness-raising album Wilderness America, A Celebration Of The
Land, she asked Cliff Branch of San Luis Obisbo’s mail-order hi-fi outfit Warehouse Sound Co if he knew any likely candidates.
He immediately suggested his friend David Riordan, who’d previously produced promotional records in Warehouse Sound’s in-house studio. “David was very passionate about saving our environment long before it was fashionable,” Branch told writer, designer and DJ Paul Hiller y in 2020.
Riordan, a Berkeley-raised ex-beatnik and folk guitarist, had tuned onto the psychedelic currents of mid-’60s San Francisco with his bands The Habit and Pacific Grass And Electric, who became The Yankee Dollar for an album of Farfisa-psych in 1968. Later he co-wrote Sugarloaf ’s 1970 US chart hit Green-Eyed Lady and made two LPs with rockers Sweet Pain. Yet by the mid ’70s he was growing unenthused with music: “Airplay was being governed more by watered-down national playlists and it just lost some of the magic for me,” he told Hiller y in 2019. “I just didn’t have any desire for the corporate media circus.”
This project, clearly, was a world away from such things. As well as producing, Riordan would sing, play guitar and write six of the album’s nine songs. Elsewhere, such seasoned players as Herbie Hancock/Santana drummer Gaylord Birch, jazz guitar and Floyd collaborator Lee Ritenour, and Wrecking Crew keysman Mike Melvoin (father of Prince foils Susannah, Wendy and Jonathan) would be channelled into an eco-narrative of particular focus and enlivening stylistic breadth. “All my life, my writing retreats were always in natural places,” Riordan told Hiller y. “I wrote most of the lyrics for this album on a road trip through all my favourite western US nature places.
So, this was a theme close to my heart.”
Recorded mainly in San Francisco, it’s a concept piece with a clear narrative thrust. The work of Greek-American New Age pioneer Iasos, opener Dawn rises from the primordial ocean on the day of creation: there’s darkness on the face of the deep, until lighthouse beams of synth begin to trace the skies. Suddenly, with Metropolis, we’re oppressed in the gritty modern city, with gospel voice Walter Hawkins (brother of Edwin, leader of The Edwin Hawkins Singers) singing of alienated soul-sickness over urbane funk with strings. With songs linked by the sounds of birdsong and running water, and instrumental pieces that take in sylvan balms for orchestra and swinging folk-jazz, further conceptual weight is borne by a Riordan song-sequence addressing humankind’s dependence on and estrangement from nature.
Sung breathily by the producer, the soft rocking, acoustic Mountain sees the divine fecundity in the eternal landscape (“she whispers gentle warnings as she stands against the skies… I am a dwarf within her halls”) and, climactically, recognises the destruction that ignoring it will bring. Sung by Car yn Robin, Manchild is a sweet countr y soul lament where Mother Earth asks her wayward, consumption-addicted child to come home, and asks, “is it really all that bad to be a part of me?” As enlightenment settles in, the sunshine pop chorus of Windsong seeks to renounce the city and rejoin the endless symphony of nature, while mellow, denimy upliftment Before I’m Gone turns outwards again, acknowledging the work to come and making common cause with all: “before I’m-a-gone, I’d like to see us turn the corner, give up being spoilers of the land.” The calls of wolves and whales – serendipitously in the same key as the song – complete the vista.
Released in early 1975 via a variety of environmental groups, organisations including Friends Of The Sea Otter and National Audubon Society benefited from sales. Yet Riordan considered the album his farewell to songwriting and recording. “The end had been coming for a while. I did not want to go back on the road and I was beginning to think my new songs were stale,” he told Hiller y. “I saw [the album] as sort of a swan song.”
He later worked in emerging media with Lucasfilm, and as an interactive movie director in Hollywood. While some of Wilderness
America’s songs, in particular Metropolis, have emerged on deep-digging compilations, the album can once more be appreciated in full with a new reissue on Austria’s Ebalunga!!! label. Its message remains timely and its delivery beauteous – even on vinyl and CD.