Perhaps we’re always on the eve of destruction. Perhaps it just feels that way. Perhaps in the 20th century, weapons of mass destruction concretized an existential dread humanity is doomed to. In 1965, the singer and songwriter P. F. Sloan was feeling that dread when he wrote his apocalyptically topical song “Eve of Destruction”. Sociopolitical events would grow even bloodier and scarier as the 1960s progressed, but by the decade’s midpoint the news was intense.
Here’s P.F. Sloan’s innocuous acoustic-folk version of his song, laying out in rhyme and off-rhyme signs of the world’s or civilization’s end. Prominently among the signs are the nascent Vietnam War:
As Wikipedia explains, Sloan offered the song to folk-rockers the Byrds, but they turned it down. He then played guitar on the version you’re most likely to have heard, a huge 1965 hit by Barry McGuire that plays up the melodrama in a way Neil Diamond must have envied. McGuire’s gruff vocal, reportedly as he read the lyrics for the first time, ended up as the released version:
That same year, folk-poppers the Turtles, best known for the perennial favorite “Happy Together”, recast “Eve of Destruction”. They replaced the bombast with world-weariness in the vocal, Beatlesque harmonies in the chorus, and a musical evocation of the Vietnam-era draft:
Again in 1965, guitarist Billy Strange, one-time member of the studio ensemble known informally as the Wrecking Crew, gave the verses a pleasing twang and the chorus a wickedly distorted undertow, with Byrds-like ringing in there. No garage band could better the buzz of this instrumental:
P. F. Sloan’s lyrics were decidedly antiwar but not committed to leftist politics. Still, right-wingers and other upholders of the status quo have been irked by the song’s emphasis on the negative, to the point that some created answer songs. In their 1965 hit, “The Dawn of Correction”, the Spokesmen reject “Eve of Destruction” by running through reasons to be cheerful:
While the world didn’t end in the 1960s, major life-threatening problems didn’t get fixed. By the late 1970s, frustration with a broken world yielded punk rock, furious or humorous or both. Decidedly on the joking side were the Dickies, who began their recording career with a sped-up version of Black Sabbath‘s “Paranoid”, then followed it with a sped-up, snot-nosed “Eve of Destruction”:
Barry McGuire’s recording of “Eve of Destruction” could have served as the blueprint for the New York Dolls‘ acoustic-guitar-based “Lonely Planet Boy”, from 1973. Thus, but only in retrospect, it makes sense that in a recording studio in 1983 with just an acoustic guitar, the Dolls’ one-time guitarist Johnny Thunders rendered the song in his inimitably nonthunderous whine. Thunders was a notorious junkie, so it’s tempting to think this recording’s brevity reflected his forgetting the rest of the lyrics, but the result feels like a complete, focused statement:
In the Pogues’ 1990 take, they bring the Irish to the folk. Frontman and notorious substance abuser Shane McGowan slurs his way through something like all the lyrics, sounding far more dissolute than Thunders:
On their 1998 album Philharmania, conductor Mike Batt and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra somehow got the idea and the gumption to have Lemmy, vocalist for the heavy metal band Motörhead, sing this uncategorizable slow-burning account. Lemmy outdoes Barry McGuire in terms of gruffness and depth of feeling:
In 2003, the indie rock band Bishop Allen took the Dickies’ punk version at least one step further, rewriting “Eve of Destruction” as some kind of love song and thus recontextualizing it to the point of insignificance:
The Chemical Brothers took Bishop Allen’s version to the zenith by jettisoning everything about P. F. Sloan’s song but the title in this 2019 dance track:
Having reached the song’s dismantling and absorption, we end with its reinvention as a 21st-century protest anthem. In 2022, the South African news website Daily Maverick enlisted Anneli Kamfer for this global-warming rewrite:
Here’s an interview with Daily Maverick publisher Branko Brkic about journalism, climate, and the “Eve of Destruction” cover/revision as radical journalism: