Gordon Friesen showed Gary the south Bronx area of New York City...an area at that time largely abandoned by landlords and by any social services net. In fact, many landlords had begun burning their own buildings to collect insurance money. The 41^st police precinct had totally alienated itself from the abandoned poor in the area and almost nightly barricaded themselves inside the station to hide from angry near-rioting residents. The cops called their station Fort Apache and Gary picked up on it for this song, harshly condemning landlords, cops, insurance companies, bankers, and religion for allowing the situation to fester.

In 1981 Paul Newman stared in a major movie called "Fort Apache The Bronx", based in part on Gary's observation and song. Producers of the film refused to use Gary's song for the theme, though they discussed it with him repeatedly. "It sounds to southern ethnic," he was told. 

Unlike most of the songs on this otherwise allegorical album, this song reverts back to the writing style of Gary's first album and is a straight-on protest song.

Though he lived for almost another 20 years, Gordon Friesen was in his 70s and complaining that everyday would be his last, when Gary was living with him in New York. Brutally blacklisted in the 1950s from his job as a writer for CBS news, he never worked again. Gary created this beautiful poetic allegory of Gordon's plight as a reflection of the capitalist system itself in the mid 20th century. Is the old man in the song Gordon, a passing generation in general, or an economic/political structure thought by many in the 60s and 70s to be dying away?

Did Annie really exist? There has been much debate about that issue and Gary isn't telling. If she did, she was not part of the StreetSounds album that Gary produced of street musicians for Folkways Records that year. On the other hand, Gary himself performed on the streets of New York all during the hot summer of 1977 and came to know dozens of other street performers, especially along Fifth Avenue, Central Park West, and West 50yh Street where the images in this song clearly were born ("I wonder if Mister Rockefeller's atlas is really made of solid gold").

What IS clear is that Gary was frustrated by his dozens of attempts to get Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels to talk with him about writing for the show, and he was equally frustrated by Michaels' staff who haunted the bars and restaurants in that part of midtown, occasionally throwing quarters into Gary's open guitar case. This song is a poem to those frustrations, framed through some plight of the real or imagined Annie.

Again influenced by Gordon Friesen and Sis Cunningham (both of whom were from Oklahoma), this song is an allegory of struggling to survive in real world but wanting some other world that can never exist. In the 21^st century, Gary is quick to point out that the title to this song has nothing to do with his involvement with Indian casinos in Oklahoma.

An absurd but true entanglement with the bureaucracy with Duke Power Company in Charlotte North Carolina had Gary's electricity turned off in 1976 with no sane way to have it turned back on. A pretty straight-forward protest song.

At the time Rev. Chavis was a young Methodist preacher who had been falsely imprisoned by the state of North Carolina in a celebrated case called The Wilmington Ten. When Gary visited Ben in prison, he was pained to learn that the celebrated leftist hero had received very few visitors from the outside world.

Though this song does not carry the intensity of Gary's powerful attack on the North Carolina political establishment as his later Ain't No Two Ways About It carried (from Gary's third album), this is a pure and simple explanation of Chavis' plight and more generally of Black people in the state of North Carolina in the 1970s.

The song was praised by Chavis and his family, but blasted by many Whites for using the "N" word used by the prosecutors in the Wilmington Ten case. Reverend Chavis fully understood and endorsed this usage of the word.

This song also shows a major variation in Gary's guitar style, away from the Carter Family Lick to a much more intense and sophisticated style of a true instrumentalist.

Another one of Gary's straight-forward western ballads with little or no political underpinnings. This is one of the oldest Gary Green songs recorded, written in 1969 in Nashville, Tennessee.

The poet's frustration with the cockroach population of New York's upper west side, his amusement at social clubs (Moose, Elks, Eagles, etc.),  and a healthy taste of Guthrie-esque satire and wit is all punctuated with a quick guitar style that shows up more and more in Gary's later compositions. A listener can hear Gary's primitive folk melding with rockabilly guitar, in acoustic nylon.

"Some of the biggest cockroaches you'll ever see call themselves landlords, cops, bankers, preachers, an generals in the army."

This song remained one of the most popular in Gary's concert appearances well into the 1980s...especially in urban areas.

The singer/songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s were often called Woody's children because of Guthrie's influence. When Gary became close friends with Woody's widow, Marjorie Guthrie, he began to see how a dozen little cottage industries had exploited Woody and ignored what he was really about (at least according to Marjorie and the Friesens with whom Woody (like Gary) lived with for a while before marrying Marjorie). After reading some of Woody's unpublished political writings and examining some of his more political songs, Gary wrote this "letter" to the late icon more of a thumbing his nose at the exploiters.

The songs most criticized by the folk and country music mavens, were the songs most encouraged by the visionary Asch. This album, Allegory, came from that conversation, but specifically this cut was written in response to Asch's question.

Alternatively named Hymn To The Capitalists and Burn Burn Burn and I Will Watch You Die, this is a frighteningly bitter allegory that openly declares war and calls for death and destruction of a system and its proponents.

Truly one of the most bitter and inflammatory songs ever commercially recorded, this song took on even scarier tones when Gary and his brother Ron electrified it and added effects in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Not for the politically sensitive.