Intro To The Circle Game (Live at The 2nd Fret, Philadelphia, PA, 11/1966)
I guess my best ambassador is a fella named Tom Rush, who does my second song, "Urge For Going", and err, and he also does this one, so I'm hoping that maybe you've heard it before and you'll know the chorus, because it's great to get a whole room full of people singing on it
It's a song all about the carousel of time, and err, it has a line in it which goes, "The painted ponies, they go up and down", and the funny thing is that, this year in Canada is expo, that's the 100th birthday of Canada, and everyone is madly being vеry, very patriotic and promoting their own peoplе, so as a result I've been getting a lot of television work, and err, I did one part of a series called "Shaun's Songs", which is being shown in Canada, and filmed with two people in each of the provinces, a French Canadian singer, and an English Canadian singer, so that the English Canadian singers for the first time have to watch the French Canadian singers in order to see who they want to see, and the French Canadians have to sit through me, in order to hear Jean Paul, who's also on the show. It's very diplomatic
But the thing was that they flew the French Canadian performed in and out before I got there and I noticed that while I was there they had French and English biffys on the set. "Biffy", that's a Jon to you, haha. But err, that's our own little form of segregation up there, it really isn't all that bad I guess
But the amazing thing is that the crew were French Canadian and the director was a French Canadian Dutchman by the name of Antoine Van Der Water, who had the most peculiar accent I've ever heard, and I can't reproduce it exactly, but, anyway, I came to recording this song "The Circle Game", and I thought it would be fun to go to Calgary, to the city there and, and go to the zoo where they have, erm, a merry-go-round and film it with the painted ponies going all around with lots of kids in it and everything, and he said, well, "We have merry-go-rounds everywhere, you don't need to go to Calgary, we have to have something local colour, you know?" and err, so I said "Well, gee, why don't we go out to a dude ranch 'cause Alberta's a ranching province, and we could have them drive horses around, or I could ride a horse", or something like that, and he said, "Well that's a very good idea, except, Jean Paul, he got the horses... I tell you what, we'll give you the cows, haha". And I didn't think it was so funny, but there I was standing out in the middle of a field, well, the dude ranch operator insisted that his cattle were all show cattle, and they were used to going 'round in circles. So they gathered them all up into a big herd and they drove them around me in circles, and everything went alright on the first take of the song, except that my guitar flashed into the sun a couple of times and there were big glares on the screen, so we had to do a retake. And at this point there was, erm, a young bull and an older bull, and the young bull kind of liked the older bull... As a matter of fact, he liked him right on camera. So we had to do a third take, hahaha. And then on the third take the cattle decided that they just didn't want to go around in any more of those stupid circles, and they all started spreading out, and they had to be all rounded up and herded up and circled around again. And I discovered a very interesting fact at that point, and that was that, when you stampeded cattle around in a circle more than three or four times, haha, they become very regular, haha. And I had three places that I was supposed to walk to in the course of the song and they were white-washed stones, and they were marked point A, point B, and point C, and everything, and erm, I couldn't find them, so I ended up standing right in front of the camera all the way through the song
It's very interesting though, I think, it's too bad that you can't get some of the new shows that are coming out up there. Maybe you could go up to Toronto...
Anyway, this song is called "The Circle Game"