Little Hawk I am engaged by your description of the songwriting process. It is for many songwriters (Dylan and myself included, tho I don't of course put myself in the same class as Dylan) something that springs from the subconscious and brings the influences of years of living and thinking and feeling.

I saw this thread and remembered the guy who sang this song when I was living in a small college town. I think the song still has a valid perspective, even if it's not as well crafted as other songs on the topic by the likes of Dylan or Ochs. The thing is only that (many of ) our generation that has moved on from that mindset -but I'm not sure the song is as dated as we may think.

What the song reminds me most,however, is recalling the community of people I knew in grad school,one foot in school the other in the work world; living in flimsy flats, hair long and tangled;rejoicing in the freedom of young adulthood but searching for love and struggling to find our way in life. Was friendship ever so valued and betrayal ever so scorned as it was in those days of the dawn of our maturity?   And when we believed, at the time, (as Nanci Griffith observed years later in Julie Gold's "Goodnight New York" ) that "having less meant knowing more."