California Saga/Big Sur

                           Composer and Lyricist/Mike Love


Cashmere hills filled with evergreens
Flowin' from the clouds down to meet the sea
With the granite cliff as a referee
Crimson sunsets and golden dawns
Mother deer with their newborn fawns
Under Big Sur skies and that's where I belong.

Big Sur I've got plans for you
Me and mine are going to
Add ourselves to your lengthy list of lovers
And live in canyons covered with a springtime green
While birds and flowers to be heard and seen
And on my old guitar I'll make up songs to sing.
Sparklin' springs from the mountainside
Join the Big Sur river rushing to the tide
Where my kids can search for sea shells at low tide
Big Sur my astrology it says that I am meant to be
Where the rugged mountain meets the water

And so while stars shine brightly and up above
Fog rolls in through a redwood grove
And to my dying fire I think I'll add a log.

(c) 1972 Brother Publishing Co. (BMI)


                         California Saga/The Beaks of Eagles

                 Verse by Robinson Jeffers, from "Jeffers Country."
                Composer and Additional Words/Alan and Lynda Jardine
                        Narration/Mike Love and Alan Jardine

An eagle's nest on the head of an old redwood on one of the precipice-footed 
     ridges 
Above Ventana Creek, that jagged country which nothing but a fallen meteor will
     ever plow: no horseman
Will ever ride there, no hunter cross this ridge but the winged ones, no one
     will steal the eggs from this fortress.
The she-eagle is old, her mate was shot long ago, she is now mated
With a son of hers.
When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same tree, in the
     splinters of the thunder bolt.

In a broken shack an old man takes his time about dyin'
And just at the back a wild flowerbed that he'll lie in
In dawn's new light a man might venture
A horse drawn stage from Monterey.

The she-eagle is older than I: she was here when the fires of eighty-five raged
     on these ridges,
She was lately fledged and dared not hunt ahead of them, but ate scorched meat.
The world has changed in her time; humanity has multiplied,
But not here; men's hopes and thoughts and customs have changed, their powers
     are enlarged, their powers and their follies have become fantastic.

Spilled down the hill a wagon load of bodies lay scattered, shipwrecked at sea.
Limestone ore is all that mattered.
They took it from the hills right through the cargo doors
How many ships have come and gone at Thurso's landing shore?

The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly.
The motor and the plane and the great war have gone over him,
And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle
Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry
And is never tired: dreams the same dreams, 
And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the 
Throats of these living mountains.
It is good for man
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish, not to
     go down the dinosaur's way
Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed, in fact, in ten thousand
     years than the beaks of eagles.
Of the eagle's plight, we know that nature's balance is undone.
And it's the birthright of man to unify and live his life as one.
A whisper of the word will let you soar with your soul.

(c) 1972 Wilojarston Music, Ltd. (ASCAP)


                             California Saga/California

                         Composer and Lyricist/Alan Jardine

On my way to sunny California
On my way to spend another sunny day

Water, water get yourself in the cool, clear, water
The sun shines brightly down on Penny's place
The sun shines brightly down on the bay
The air's so clean that it just takes your mind away
Take your mind away
Take your mind away

Have you ever been south of Monterey
Barrancas carve the coast line and the chaparral flows to the sea
'Neath waves of golden sunshine
And have you ever been north of Morro Bay
The south coast plows the sea
And the people there are of the breed 
They don't need electricity
Water, water, cool cascades of clear, clean water
The sun dance fiery scene sets the hills ablaze.
Horizon edges quick up the mountain's way.

Have you ever been down Salinas way?
Where Steinbeck found the valley
And he wrote about it the way it was in his travelin's with Charlie
And have you ever walked down through the sycamores
Where the farmhouse used to be
There the monarch's autumn journey ends
On a windswept cyprus tree

Water, water get yourself in the cool, clear, water
The sun shines brightly down on Penny's place
The sun shines brightly down on the bay
The air's so clean that it just takes your mind away
Take your mind away
Take your mind away

Have you ever been to a festival, the Big Sur congregation?
Where Country Joe would do his show
And we'd sing about liberty
And the people there in the open air, one big family.
The people there love to sing and share
Their new found liberty

(c) 1972 Wilojarston Music, Ltd. (ASCAP)