This is surely the best version of Dolphins – which Folk legend Fred Neil wrote and recorded in 1966
The song was released as a single and also on Neil’s second eponymous album in 1967, along with Everybody’s Talkin’ which was made into a global hit by Harry Nilsson in 1970 after it was used in the film Midnight Cowboy. Fred Neil was famously unimpressed by fame and turned down the chance to appear at the Woodstock festival in 1969 – he was apparently the first artist to be asked.
Fred Neil, Joni Mitchell and Debbie Anderson at California Celebrates The Whales benefit – Sacramento, 1976
As a musician living in Greenwich Village NY in the mid 60s he was sometimes backed by the young Bob Dylan on harmonica, who described him as an influence. Neil Young described him as inspiring a generation of singer-songwriters.
In the early 70s he had become a virtual recluse, returning to Florida, where he was raised, to work with marine biologist Richard O’Barry, who trained the dolphins for the television series Flipper and set up the Dolphin Project in 1970 with a donation from Neil and Steven Stills. O’Barry and Fred flew to Japan in ’77 to protest the dolphin industry under the namesake Rolling Coconut Revue.
Fred also played music to the Dolphins who had fascinated him since schooldays. Friends described how he would take them sailing and call the dolphins to the boat – using a cone in the water. He dedicated much of the rest of his life to Dolphin conservation.
Fred died aged 64 in 2001, but the extraordinary timbre of his baritone voice and his virtuosity with a 12-string blues guitar continue to inspire. The song links unrequited love with a world where hate and war are commonplace, and juxtaposes that against the imagery of sailing out to witness the harmonious and familial purity of dolphins living in the wild. The song begins with shifting guitar chords that have an aquatic quality – like lightbeams oscillating through water. The ten-fathom voice conveys the lyrics’ yearning before acquiring a more discordant harsher tone conveying the singer’s sense of futility of his hopes for peace, and love. It’s a work of absolute genius.
A good quote: “He was a lazy perfectionist at best. He didn’t write lyrics down and rather arranged songs over a few days, on the boat, in the backyard or around the house. Songs streamed out his head; riffs on lyrics from an internalized burrow of gospel,” wrote James K. Williamson in 2014
The Dolphins
This old world may never change
The way it’s been
And all the ways of war
Can’t change it back again
I’ve been searchin’
For the dolphins in the sea
And sometimes I wonder
Do you ever think of me
I’m not the one to tell this world
How to get along
I only know the peace will come
When all hate is gone
I’ve been searchin’…
You know sometimes I think about
Saturday’s child
And all about the time
When we were running wild
I’ve been searchin’…
This old world may never change
This world may never change
This world may never change
If you prefer female tones then Brigid Mae’s version is quite haunting. There are also famous covers by Tim Buckley and The The and another favourite is the Billy Bragg cover in 1991 on You Tube – Bragg Dolphins
Main photo: Dolphins in the English Channel – summer 2018. (©DHouston)