Kantner could not be credited as one of the joint authors-composers of "Wooden Ships" on the original May 1969 release of Crosby, Stills & Nash, because he was embroiled in legal disputes with Jefferson Airplane's then manager, Matthew Katz. Crosby said, "Paul called me up and said that he was having this major duke-out with this horrible guy who was managing the band, and he was freezing everything their names were on. 'He might injunct the release of your record,' he told me. So we didn't put Paul's name on it for a while. In later versions, we made it very certain that he wrote it with us. Of course, we evened things up with him with a whole mess of cash when the record went huge." The song was also released by Kantner's band Jefferson Airplane in November 1969 on the albumVolunteers. The two versions differ slightly in lyrics and melody. Crosby recorded a solo demo in March 1968 with the melody but no lyrics. Stills recorded his own demo the following month with most of the lyrics in place. Both Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performed the song in their respective sets at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. However, the CSNY performance is better-known, as it was included in the film and from the festival. The film's soundtrack uses the studio album version, while the soundtrack album has the live performance. Jefferson Airplane's performance – which ran to over 21 minutes in length and included several extended jam sections – remained unreleased until the 2009 Woodstock Experience set.
Meaning
"Wooden Ships" was written at the height of the Vietnam War, a time of great tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, nuclear-armed rivals in the Cold War. It has been likened to Tom Lehrer's "We Will All Go Together When We Go" and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction," in that it describes the consequences of an apocalypticnuclear war. We "imagined ourselves as the few survivors, escaping on a boat to create a new civilization." This represents one of Kantner's recurring themes, to which he would return again in the 1970 concept albumBlows Against the Empire. The words of the song depict the horrors confronting the survivors of a nuclear holocaust in which the two sides have annihilated each other. A man from one side stumbles upon a man from the other side and asks him/her, "Can you tell me, please, who won?" Since the question has no real meaning in the circumstances or even at all, it is left unanswered. To stay alive, they share "purple berries", as a result of which they "haven't got sick once". The lyrics beg "silver people on the shoreline," described by David Crosby as "guys in radiation suits," to "let us be." As the wooden ships, devoid of metal that would become radioactive from neutron activation, are carrying the survivors away from the shores, radiation poisoning kills those who have not made it aboard. That grim tableau is described thus: It is also described in an prelude, included in the lyric sheet:
The song is alluded to in Neil Young's 1986 song "Hippie Dream" from the album Landing on Water in the refrain "The wooden ships/were just a hippie dream" which is later altered to "The wooden ships are a hippie dream/capsized in excess/if you know what I mean".
