Back in the day, Three Wheels on My Wagon by The New Christy Minstrels was a fixture on BBC Radio's Junior Choice.,but there are some surprisingly adult things about it.
The music for the song was witten by Burt Bacharach and the lead singer was Barry McGuire, who recorded the Dylanesque Eve of Destruction in 1965. It reached the top of the US singles chart and no. 3 in the UK.
Eve of Destruction was written by P.F. Sloan, who is playing acoustic guitar on McGuire's recording. According to McGuire, this was only meant to be a demo version, but it was leaked to a DJ who started playing it and it rapidly entered the charts. So a more polished version was never recorded.
Also playing on the recording are Hal Blaine on drums and Larry Knechtel on bass guitar. They were both members of the Wrecking Crew, a loose collective of musicians based in Los Angeles whose members played on many classic Sixties hits.
And McGuire wasn't the only very Sixties artist to emerge from The New Christy Minstrels. Gene Clark of The Byrds began with them, as did Kenny Rogers, whose band New Edition initially traded in psychedelia as well as country.
"C'mon all you Cherokees, sing along with me!"
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