One Way Ticket Home Lyrics

Lyric discussion by Saveyourself 

Cover art for One Way Ticket Home lyrics by Phil Ochs

This song--it seems to me--could be taken in two ways: 1) It could be taken as a plea from a young soldier in Vietnam, who just wants to return t a place where the biggest fight is Coke or Pepsi. Or 2) It could also be his desire to return to the simpler times of American history. In the fifties, "Elvis Presley [was] the king", television was new and fantastic, etrc. And then, in the sixties, everything started to fall apart. The generations split, the President of the United States was being villified, fear and discord were everywhere, and maybe he just wants everything that changed so suddenly to go back to the way it was back then. Anyway, fantastic song, love the timpani at the beginning.