That you don’t believe, we’re on the Eve of Destruction.” “But you tell me, over and over and over again, my friend. This stanza was followed by the chorus of the song: You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin?” You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’, “The Eastern World, it is explodin’, violence flarin’, bullets loadin’, Not having heard McGuire’s song for a long time, but still remembering most of the lyrics, and not wanting to wake Sally who had dozed off, I mouthed the words with him, as I recalled them, and as I listened and lip-synced, it struck me that many of the words of that song are just as prevalent in today’s life as they were in the decade of the 1960s. Some of the featured performers from that 2015 show, surprisingly sounding very much the same as they did in the 60s, were Judy Collins, The Kingston Trio, Glenn Yarborough, The New Christy Minstrels, the Highwaymen, the Limelighters, the Smothers Brothers, the Brothers Four, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, and Barry McGuire, who did a retrospect on the times we were living in at that time with his ’65 hit song, Eve of Destruction. The PBS program featured some of the best performers, sharing the same stage at Carnegie Mellon Hall in Pittsburgh as part of a PBS fundraiser in ’15, and was later complied into CDs and DVDs which were being offered as a gift for a pledge to the 2022 fundraiser aired a couple weeks ago.

Barry mcguire on npr echoes