I just got the word that Peter Yarrow has died, from my friend who's been making a documentary film with Peter's wife Mary Beth. Another piece of my childhood drops away.
Peter, Paul and Mary had two albums that could have made the runners up list of my post above, namely
"Peter, Paul and Mary"
"In the Wind"
"Album 1700"
"Album 1700" is an underappreciated gem. It dropped in 1967, and is the only PP&M album that could legitimately be considered "art" among contemporaneous classics released that year by the Beatles, Hendrix, Cream, the Doors, Velvet Underground, and Janice Joplin.
By 1967 PP&M were out of the vanguard of "important" acts, and really, they'd always been interpreters of the songs of others. But on "Album 1700," Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey were really working at it and produced some really great songs. Yarrow contributed "Weep for Jamie" and "The Great Mandella" which are really haunting songs. Stookey threw in "I Dig Rock and Roll Music" and "Whatshername," both of which wryly commented on the zeitgeist of the time. The one glaring misstep on the album is "I'm in Love with a Big Blue Frog," which is charming and tries to fit in as a sly comment on racial and sexual taboos, but just doesn't have the weight of the other songs on the album. It intrudes on the hypnotic flow of the album like a drunk frat-boy crashing a dinner party.
This is what I'm listening to at the moment, in honor of Peter.