I’ve found a “new” song I like. It’s the theme to the Reebok commercial “Join the Migration.” The singer’s voice is gorgeous, and the song has this alluring, haunting quality. I like it so much I’m almost ready to buy one of their t-shirts. It begins with men looking slowly skyward and includes bird imagery; I like that the men assemble in V formations yet they don’t beat you over the head with the metaphor by showing migrating geese.
Her voice made me so curious I did a little research, which led me here, to the original tune she wrote long ago, called “17 Pink Sugar Elephants.” Considering the smash-mouth virtues of American football, the music is already eerily anomalous to the NFL players migrating in slow motion in the commercial (the most NFL players ever used in one ad, apparently). Despite the elephantine imagery, that dichotomy or split is rendered complete when you hear her original lyrics. What was initially soothingly pleasant for me turned almost giddily psychedelic. (Maybe I should imagine elephantine NFL players drinking pink gatorade?)
Her name is Vashti Bunyan — an unusual name for someone born in London in 1945 (according to Wikipedia) and who says she wrote the song in 1963 — before the Beatles visited America! She gets classified by some as “psychedelic folk” but if she wrote these lyrics in 1963 she certainly pre-saged psychedelia most everywhere else:
I saw seventeen pink sugar elephants
Sitting under a chestnut tree
I said “good morning pink sugar elephants”
But they wouldn’t speak to me
Each had two eyes but they couldn’t see me there
Each had four legs but they couldn’t go anywhere
And so it just sat that early autumn morning
Sun not yet risen’ and magic everywhere
I walked up to a pink sugar elephant
Asked why wouldn’t he speak to me
But he was a factory-made pink sugar elephant
Given to children for treats after tea
He had two eyes but he couldn’t see me there
He had four legs but he couldn’t go anywhere
And so it just sat that early autumn morning
Some treason and magic everywhere
I’m a big Beatles fan, and still like Sgt. Pepper, et cetera, but with the benefit of hindsight many years after the fact, I can’t think of many psychedelic lyrics I like as much as that last one, “Some treason and magic everywhere,” considering all that’s happened over the last four decades.
I guess Puff the Magic Dragon was already out there in folk music — still, her pink elephants were well ahead of their time, considering the melody found renewed life four decades later.
She also has recorded a full version of the new song she has written based on the melody, which is posted on YouTube as a “response” to the ad. It’s called The Train Song, and at 2:16 it’s a full length version of the commercial (which uses only the first minute of the song). It’s also the version of all this I like best, in part because of that presumably very old photo accompanying it — an emaciated young woman by a building’s corner, very thin legs under a fur coat. Perhaps not the usual image the NFL might encourage, say, for it’s cheerleaders — she seems more like someone the guys might try to pick up after the game for activities other than grinning sideline gymnastics with pom-poms. I found the lyrics here:
Travelling north, travelling north to find you
Train wheels beating, the wind in my eyes
Don’t even know what I’ll find when I get to you
Call out your name love, don’t be surprised
It’s so many miles and so long since I’ve met you
Don’t even know what I’ll find when I get to you
But suddenly now, I know where I belong
It’s many hundred miles and it won’t be long
Okay — so she wrote the tune in 1963. I guess it’s not really a new song. But it’s new to me. And considering that I haven’t cared for much popular music over the last couple decades, I’m going to enjoy it while I can.
OmbudsBen 
45 years later she still sounds pretty darn good.
Thanks for the intro. I love her voice too.
Back in the day, I seem to recall that seeing pink elephants was supposed to be the standard hallucination when someone stopped drinking. I remember as a teenager when my dad was going through the DTs he claimed he was seeing pink elephants. My oh-so compassionate teenage response? “Gee, dad, could you be any more cliche? Whatever” (or the 70’s equivalent of the phrase du jour for teenage disdain).
Ya know, while aging kinda sucks, I’m sure glad I’m not a teenager anymore.
Thanks, you two. Yes, A, she still has the pipes. I’m not sure I could listen to her a whole lot — there is something almost too pretty about her voice, but I do like that song. I have to admit I go and play it every so often (both full length and the commercial, tho’ I’m no longer an NFL fan), and often have it running in my head.
Yeah, LB, I remember the pink elephant allusion. And have my share of youthful regrets, too. As Ronnie Wood sang in “Ooh La La” when he was with the Faces:
“I wish that I knew what I know now
when I was younger,
I wish that I knew what I know now
when I was stronger … ”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we got a second whack at being young? To see if we could do it better, this time.
Sorry, found it very difficult to concentrate on the lady’s voice with all those gorgeous men walking across the screen 😉
Come visit the home office, here in San Francisco, Trucie. In the fall, you can see those “gorgeous men” every Sunday. Except most of them will be hidden under helmets and pads.
I read this a week or so ago, checked out the Youtube and then got so lost in listening that I forgot to come back and thank you.
I’ve always thought old songs manage to become new again when someone who hasn’t heard them before picks them up. Isn’t that how revivals and these blasts from the past occur?
When I was about in my early teens (in the 70’s) 50’s music (sock-hop stuff) became pretty popular. So did sock-hops, now that I think about it, all probably due to “American Graffiti.”
Just babbling. As usual. 🙂
Robin: Ha! I remember that 50’s nostalgia fad, too, including the American Graffitti tagline: “Where were you in ’62?” Considering the movie came out in ’73, it has to be one of the quickest nostalgic returns ever — a more 11 years. Mayhap a testimony to how much had happened in those 11 years?
Lovely voice. Truly lovely.
Regarding everything old becoming new again, yeah, I remember in the 80s, all of my teachers grew up in the 60s, and would talk about the music, etc. and it was so boring. Now, I do that with 80s stuff, and bore the hell out of my nieces. 😉
Ha! Very amusing.
I can totally see that; and at the same time I have to say, I wish everyone had the sense of freshness, vitality, and energy that emanated from music then.
I worked and lived in SF during the dotcom craze of the late 1990s. There was a similar sense of energy and creating a new world, but it was so much about money. Money is important, I know — but I find it a bit lacking as arbiter of values in a high energy time.
I wasn’t in SF in the mid 60s (which I’d have preferred seeing to the 70s, at any point). Would I trade what I saw happen in SF in the late 90s for a chance to see the same city 30 years earlier? The coining of the concept counterculture, a value shift such as emphasizing ecology over pollution, of placing people over profits, rather than the unbridled youthful greed I saw sweep the City in 1995 – 2000?
In a heartbeat, a heartbeat.
And yet, would I want to listen to a teacher yammer about it? Not so much, perhaps …
Thanks for writing, and good luck with the neices!