Marsh Family sings 'Grief and Destruction'

Today's "something brief I can share in April, no fooling" is "Grief and Destruction" - Marsh Family parody of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" on war in Iran.

There are obviously lots of angles to this story, and it’s dangerous to wade into things without knowing how they will play out. So we waited to see if anything positive might emerge after the initial assassination of the despicable Khamenei (whose name was in an early draft of a chorus), and what the Trump administration/regime’s purported rationale was … and over subsequent days as we watched the grotesque media performances by Hegseth, the missiles killing children not just tyrants, and the escalation of damage and casualties without any sign of a coherent policy or endgame, we made the song about how it’s dangerous to wade into things without knowing how they’re going to play out.

If we’d known undead Tony Blair was going to remerge from the media crypt with some pearls of wisdom on Sunday, we would have probably made space to take the piss out of that ... but it would have been counterproductive to just parachute in (a bit like in 2003).

The original track “Eve of Destruction” was only reluctantly laid down at the end of a recording session by a gravelly-voiced Barry McGuire, and the demo leaked to a radio station where it was an instant hit in a country torn apart and increasingly divided over foreign wars and domestic protests in late 1965. Phil Sloan wrote the song months earlier, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was central to LBJ’s justification for US escalation in Vietnam. We had it on our radar for a future conflict, but want to give a shoutout to Kevin Ellis for urging us to use it to address this conflict.

If you want to hear a properly mixed folk-pop song of ours about the heroic protest movement in Iran, then you can find “Zan Zendegi Azadi” on our forthcoming album.

With luck, this might not be worth sharing in April, because by then the conflict might be over. High oil prices are bad for the economy and worse for Donald "Hoover Harding Cleveland" Trump and the Republicans running for Congress. He might just declare victory and quit bombing. All of us should be so lucky.

Tomorrow is the sixth anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic and the fifteenth anniversary of the Fukushima triple disaster. Stay tuned to see which one I write about. In the meantime, Happy MAR1O Day!