Now that I am past seventy and a tad wiser about the world, my interpretation of this song is that it is a lament regarding the social change of the sixties and how in that decade in which the sexual revolution and feminist values were taking hold of the culture, young women had access to the birth control pill and were indoctrinated by the feminist voices and so were opting out of traditional values of true love, marriage, family, children in favor of free love, hedonistic values, personal freedom over familial duty, and basically sex, drugs and rock and roll over church and God. The lyrics suggest a party in which many young women perhaps at the end of high school were making a life choice to live this libertine life of dissipation while young men who might have been their choices for a life partner looked on in dismay, disbelief, and horror at what was happening. The phrase "sixteen vestal virgins who were leaving for the coast" suggests in my interpretation sixteen young and innocent young women who were actively choosing this new lifestyle as represented by the phrase "leaving for the coast", with "the coast" representing the decadent way of living that the west coast represented and actually was and is. I know this from personal experience having hitchhiked from Texas to California in the summer of 1971 right after graduating from high school and seeing people there engaging in these new emerging cultural norms. So that is my interpretation of this song for what its worth.
Now that I am past seventy and a tad wiser about the world, my interpretation of this song is that it is a lament regarding the social change of the sixties and how in that decade in which the sexual revolution and feminist values were taking hold of the culture, young women had access to the birth control pill and were indoctrinated by the feminist voices and so were opting out of traditional values of true love, marriage, family, children in favor of free love, hedonistic values, personal freedom over familial duty, and basically sex, drugs and rock and roll over church and God. The lyrics suggest a party in which many young women perhaps at the end of high school were making a life choice to live this libertine life of dissipation while young men who might have been their choices for a life partner looked on in dismay, disbelief, and horror at what was happening. The phrase "sixteen vestal virgins who were leaving for the coast" suggests in my interpretation sixteen young and innocent young women who were actively choosing this new lifestyle as represented by the phrase "leaving for the coast", with "the coast" representing the decadent way of living that the west coast represented and actually was and is. I know this from personal experience having hitchhiked from Texas to California in the summer of 1971 right after graduating from high school and seeing people there engaging in these new emerging cultural norms. So that is my interpretation of this song for what its worth.