Giving a Fresh Spin to History’s Lessons : Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ is popular--and perhaps it will lead listeners to rediscover some far more worthy songs

The philosopher George Santayana once issued a warning to people in a position to shape history: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Maybe somebody should issue a new warning to pop songwriters who take on historical subjects: Those who cannot put the past into some sort of perspective are condemned to regurgitate annoying lists of facts.

That’s the problem with Billy Joel’s recent No. 1, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Damning the torpedoes (of critics such as yours truly) and rushing full speed ahead, Joel packed 40 years’ worth of rhyming names and events into his song, starting with Harry Truman and ending with “rock and roller cola wars.” In his staccato rush, Joel couldn’t pause for a line or two to explain what any of those names and events might have meant, or how they might have affected the people who lived through them.

Still, at a time when educational horror stories abound about high school students who don’t know Mussolini from minestrone, any focus on history is welcome--and Joel’s hit seems to be serving a need. Reacting to feedback from teachers who used the song in their classrooms, educational publisher Scholastic Inc. has sent schools across the country cassettes of the song, along with suggestions for incorporating it into their lessons. While verses such as “Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex/J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say?” strike me as unutterably banal, who’s to argue if they wind up serving as starting points for compositions or class discussions that go into greater depth?

However. . . .

If a ridiculous song like “We Didn’t Start The Fire” is doing some good in classrooms, what might be made of some of the first-rate historical rock songs that have come down over the years?

Songwriters such as Ray Davies of the Kinks and Robbie Robertson of the Band have given us songs and albums that not only deal in facts but engage our emotions. Once students learn that history isn’t the stuff of disconnected factoids, but of sadness, anger, pride and suspense, the door to learning can be flung wide open.

Here are some songs that teachers, students, history buffs and plain old music fans might find worthwhile. (The list takes into account songs about pre-1960s history. For students of more recent events--Vietnam, the U.S. civil rights crusade and racial unrest, South African apartheid--rock and pop have offered a running commentary of songs too numerous to mention by such great writers as Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder and Peter Gabriel.

(As for Billy Joel, songs like “Allentown,” “Goodnight Saigon” and the recent “Leningrad” show that, when he pauses long enough to tell a story, he is capable of writing a decent song from historical material.)

“Acadian Driftwood.” This song from the Band’s 1975 album, “Northern Lights--Southern Cross,” tells the story of the Acadians, the French-speaking inhabitants of Canada’s maritime provinces. Uprooted from their homes in the mid-1700s when the British seized Canada from the French, the Acadians trekked south to the nearest French-controlled territory, Louisiana, where they became known as the Cajuns. That’s the historical gist of it. But Robertson’s story, sung from the viewpoint of a single Acadian refugee, goes beyond mere facts to explore what it’s like to be one of history’s victims. This eloquent, fiddle-accented song is full of sadness and longing for a lost homeland. Listening to “Acadian Driftwood” once more, I thought of how history does repeat itself: The Vietnamese war refugees who have settled in Orange County are the Acadian driftwood of today.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Another one from the Band, this time about the fall of the Confederacy. The song captures the potent mixture of poverty, pride, anguish and bitterness among white Southerners that doomed the Reconstruction to failure. Again, the key to the song is Robertson’s ability to center a historical tale on a character who, more than just narrating facts, brings home the emotional experience of living through great events.

“Past, Present And Future.” This 1974 album by British folk-rocker Al Stewart is full of first-rate songs drawn from 20th-Century history. Included is probably the only rock song that will ever be written about President Warren G. Harding (Stewart even tells you what the ‘G’ stands for), whose pathetic incompetence in office is evoked in a sprightly, mocking tune. “The Last Day of June, 1934” illustrates how blissfully unaware we usually are of the history going on around us, shaping our lives. Verses about carefree lovers enjoying themselves on a balmy June day in England and Germany are set against the story of Hitler, on that same day, consolidating his power with a bloody purge among his own Nazi followers, setting Europe--and those happy, unknowning lovers--on a course for disaster. In the album’s epic masterpiece, “Roads To Moscow,” Stewart--like the Band--tells of earthshaking events through individual eyes, giving an account of the crucial Eastern Front warfare during World War II from the viewpoint of a Soviet foot soldier. The song, like Soviet history, is tragic: Nazism is crushed, only to give renewed free reign to the terror and paranoia of Stalinism.

“Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire).” With “Arthur,” a 1969 album often regarded as the first rock opera (it was originally the soundtrack for a BBC TV drama), the Kinks’ Davies shows the sweep of British history from World War I to the socialist experiments of the 1950s and 1960s, and what it all means to one average English family. Like life itself, this great album is alternately funny and sorrowful. Just as the Band couldn’t play a song during its heyday without reflecting deeply on the American soul, the Kinks’ music in the middle to late ‘60s captured a specially British essence of character. Both bands realized that you couldn’t delve into the nature of a nation’s soul and character without closely considering its history.

“Sympathy for the Devil.” People who haven’t really listened to this famous Rolling Stones song tend to assume that it is a worshipful ode to Satan. They’re ignoring the bitterly ironic historic commentary embedded in the lyrics. Mick Jagger does play the role of Satan in “Sympathy for the Devil”--a Satan who cackles and gloats over how readily mankind has done the devil’s bidding throughout the 20th Century. This Satan points to the horrors of the Russian Revolution, the Second World War and the Kennedy assassinations, implying that only creatures in close sympathy with the devil could have written such a grievous history for themselves.

“Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914).” The Zombies, one of the most underrated bands of the British ‘60s rock invasion, ended their career in 1968 with a great album, “Odessey & Oracle” (available on a Rhino Records re-release). Included is “Butcher’s Tale.” The song’s angry, unflinching account of World War I trench warfare is given by a shellshocked British soldier infuriated by a preacher’s militaristic fight-for-God-and-country sermon. The song’s harrowing details, which presage the welcome war-really- is -bloody-hell realism of Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War films, make it one of the definitive anti-war statements in rock history:

“And I have seen a friend of mine hang on the wire like some rag toy

And in the heat the flies come down and cover up the boy . . . .

If the preacher he could see those flies, wouldn’t preach for the sound of guns.”

“Butcher’s Tale” makes us see the flies.

“Cortez the Killer.” The tricky thing about history is that it’s so easy to twist. In this song about the Spanish conquistadores’ destruction of Aztec civilization, Neil Young does more than a little twisting to make the Aztecs look like innocent, spiritually lofty victims of greedy, morally bankrupt Europeans. “Hate was just a legend/War was never known,” Young sings, extolling the Aztecs. In fact, they were ruthless conquerors themselves, who enslaved their neighbors and spilled vats of their war prisoners’ blood in human sacrifice (Young’s lyric tries to put a happier face on that little circumstance by implying that the sacrificial victims gave their lives voluntarily and altruistically for religious reasons). Cortez and his gang were greedy and morally bankrupt, of course, but Young draws the conflict in stark moral terms that defy historic fact. “Cortez the Killer,” from the album “Zuma,” is worth hearing because it is a terrific rocker, and also because Young’s distortions illustrate how tempting--and how wrong--it can be to paint history in simple black and white.

PAST AS ROCK: A history class at a Fountain Valley school uses “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” B1