Well, it does sound pretty hippie-ish, but I don't think it's about using drugs. Back in the day--let's just say WAY back in the day--"dragging the line" was an idiom for slogging through your daily life.
I think the song is about the virtues of living a simple life. Making a living the old, hard way (i.e., working with his hands rather than sitting at a desk), taking life as it comes, not being too busy or caught up with getting rich to stop and enjoy the simple things (we ain't got much but what we got's ours; hugging trees; peace of mine), with a minimum of encumbrances (only his dog for companionship).
As far as Sam eating purple flowers, I always got this picture of the songwriter going, "What can we rhyme with 'We ain't got much but what we got's ours'?" and the answers getting sillier and sillier till someone just said, "What the hell, let's put in the dog eating flowers," while everyone just totally cracked up. I think that line is a throwaway and not pivotal to the song at all. It is pretty funny though.
Well, it does sound pretty hippie-ish, but I don't think it's about using drugs. Back in the day--let's just say WAY back in the day--"dragging the line" was an idiom for slogging through your daily life.
I think the song is about the virtues of living a simple life. Making a living the old, hard way (i.e., working with his hands rather than sitting at a desk), taking life as it comes, not being too busy or caught up with getting rich to stop and enjoy the simple things (we ain't got much but what we got's ours; hugging trees; peace of mine), with a minimum of encumbrances (only his dog for companionship).
As far as Sam eating purple flowers, I always got this picture of the songwriter going, "What can we rhyme with 'We ain't got much but what we got's ours'?" and the answers getting sillier and sillier till someone just said, "What the hell, let's put in the dog eating flowers," while everyone just totally cracked up. I think that line is a throwaway and not pivotal to the song at all. It is pretty funny though.