Barry McGuire - "Eve Of Destruction"
1965
In 1996, NBC debuted Dark Skies, a series about UFOs, aliens, and a wide-ranging conspiracy. It was an obvious attempt to capitalize on the success of Fox's The X-Files. But Dark Skies was a bore, because what it did was give away the mystery right away. I believe there was an early scene where President Truman met with the aliens at Roswell. Yawn. In The X-Files we had some sort of sprawling mystery/conspiracy that involved bees, oil, a Russian double agent who at one point was locked in an empty nuclear missile silo in North Dakota, The Cigarette Smoking Man, Scully's baby, Mulder's long-missing sister, a baby alien in a jar, and a bunch of other stuff that linked together so well (?) that Mulder turned down sleeping with a smoking hot blonde from the UN. (If I remember the details correctly.) There was always the underlying feeling that show head Chris Carter was making the whole thing up as he went along, but he also gave us those brilliant Monster of the Week episodes to avoid thinking about the overall series arc too much and getting headaches.
Similarly, Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" gives away protest-era Bob Dylan in three-and-a-half short minutes. Dylan would hint at doom in "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" or take on the war pigs in "Masters of War", but those were all part of his expansive oeuvre, which happened to also include a lot of jokes. McGuire instead bludgeons us with guttural vocals, dropped Gs in his phrasing, a strummed acoustic guitar, and piping on the harmonica. It's a sprawling mass of do-goodisms and ill will.
I never heard the tune until 1980, when our ninth-grade gym teacher, while we were on the mats stretching or whatever useless activity was going on in gym class that day (and the activities were all useless), noticed there was a record player and some LPs in the corner. We watched him out of the corner of our eyes (a teacher is genuinely interested in records, this we gotta see), then one of the future burnouts yelled "play some Head East!" Mr. D's eyes lit up as he studied one album. He slapped the vinyl on the turntable and up started "Eve of Destruction." To my young ears, it sounded like some furious hard rock song and by the time I got home that afternoon I was butchering the chorus and singing to myself "there's gonna be a destruction." I was likely reading The Third World War: August 1985 and at the time living near the rumored Soviet Union's number two nuclear target and it was the Cold War, so there always was the feeling that all-consuming destruction was near, if not promised to us. You could say it was a feeling that we were on the eve of destruction. Hey, maybe Barry McGuire was onto something!