America The Beautiful

Gary McFarland & Co.

GARY McFARLAND actually began AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL half a lifetime ago. When he was seventeen, he spent one summer working as a “whistle punk” at lumber camps in the heavily wooded country that surrounded his home in Grant’s Pass, Oregon. He witnessed the last rites for countless trees that summer, and his sense of desolation at the sight of raw and wounded tracts of levelled woodland always remained part of his heritage. Later, living in Los Angeles, McFarland observed the cancer-like growth of tract housing that has made that city a transportation horror and its car-ridden citizens responsible for an environment which ultimately threatens their lives. Then, as a New Yorker, he shared the frustrations of urban man as he squeezed into up-tight apartment buildings and struggled to keep his senses as they were relentlessly battered by the noise and the dirt, the overcrowding and the violence that have turned every small town boy’s dream of the Big City into a nightmare. Every summer McFarland and his family joined the frantic race for a green and quiet retreat away from the city’s foul air and compounded tensions. And every summer it became more difficult to find, as undeveloped land went the way of the whooping crane and the aardvark. McFarland’s travel in the Army and with bands gave him a virtual seminar on deteriorating America. From Oklahoma dust storms to Calumet City honky-tonks to decaying New England mill-towns, he saw much of it up close. This then is the work of a man who was in training for it even before he had the facility for doing it.

Tracklisting:

1. 1st Movement: On This Site Shall Be Erected
2. 2nd Movement: 80 Miles An Hour Through Beer-Can Country
3. 3rd Movement: Suburbia–Two Poodles And A Plastic Jesus
4. 4th Movement: If I’m Elected
5. 5th Movement: Last Rites For The Promised Land
6. 6th Movement : Due To The Lack Of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled

Produced and arranged by Gary McFarland. Recorded in New York, in 1968.
Composed and Conducted by Gary McFarland.
Orchestra Assembled by Jerome Richardson.

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