A piece of beauty art by Graham Nash for your Sunday. I loved it.

[King Coal]

IMMIGRATION MAN
by Graham Nash, LWW Today
Video: quicktime low - medium - high / windows low - medium - high
So…. In 1970, there I was at the airport in Vancouver…waiting with the rest of the band to get back into the United States… waiting to go to San Francisco. We’d just done a wonderful show and I was anxious to get back home..
At the Immigration desk the man was watching me with a look in his eye that meant trouble…..Every one else was let through with a minimum of fuss… then came my turn.
Now I don’t know if Canadian Immigration people have a thing about Englishmen but this guy wasn’t about to let me in without a great deal of scrutiny. What I’d done to deserve this ‘special’ treatment I don’t know but it was taking a long, long time to process me…
The silly thing was I was being asked for my autograph constantly by people who knew who I was yet the guy, who was watching all this was still giving me a hard time. In 1970 I was, and still am, a hippy and I looked the part. Maybe this was why I was being treated differently.. Frankly this infuriated me.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t take rejection well… quite frankly I was not at all happy about this… I was watching the rest of the guys walking down the corridor and I wasn’t with them…
When something affects me like this I have to do something about it and the way I do it is to write..
We are and have always been a country populated by immigrants. They, without question, helped to build and make this country what it is today.
On the plane my fury changed into words and by the time I was home this song was almost finished…
I wrote it in the fly leaf of the book I was reading, a Robert Heinlein book, The Silver Locusts. I have it to this day to remind me of that moment…. The moment that Immigration Man was created.



http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/index.html

[thepurpose]

1. This country has also hated every new immigrant group that ever showed up

on its shores.

[cry baby]

2. Thank you, KC. One of my favorite songs ever!

Listening to it again on that wonderful video makes me feel like lettiing loose the "old hippy" in me.

[King Coal]

4. I wish to God we still had hippies. nt.

[bloom]

3. Interesting to get the story behind the song.

nice video