The Monkees – Last Train To Clarksville

From their 1966 album The Monkees. The song reached number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart on November 5th, 1966. The train in the video is the Sierra Railway No .03 The Cannonball from the TV show Petticoat Junction. It was also in the movie Back to The Future part III plus hundreds of other TV shows and movies.

From Wikipedia,

The song was written by the songwriting duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart.  Boyce has said that the song’s opening guitar part (played by Louis Shelton) was an attempt to emulate the type of memorable and clearly identifiable riff that the Beatles had used in songs such as “I Feel Fine,” “Day Tripper” and “Paperback Writer“.  The latter Beatles’ song had reached number one on the U.S. charts three months earlier, around the time that “Last Train to Clarksville” was written and recorded. The lyrics, too, were inspired by “Paperback Writer”: Hart misheard the end of that song on the radio and thought Paul McCartney was singing “take the last train”; Hart then decided to use the line himself, after he found out that McCartney was actually singing “paperback writer.”

Hart knew that the Monkees’ TV series was being pitched as a music/comedy series in the spirit of the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night, and he was hoping that by emulating the Beatles the song might become a successful single.

The lyrics tell of a man phoning the woman whom he loves, urging her to meet him at a train station in Clarksville before he must leave, possibly forever. There is no explicit reference to war in the song, but its last line, “And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home,” was an indirect reference to a soldier leaving for the Vietnam War.  Hart has denied any connection by the song to the city of Clarksville, Tennessee, near Fort Campbell, the home of the 101st Airborne Division that was then serving in Vietnam. According to Hart, “We were just looking for a name that sounded good. There’s a little town in northern Arizona I used to go through in the summer on the way to Oak Creek Canyon called Clarkdale. We were throwing out names, and when we got to Clarkdale, we thought Clarksville sounded even better. We didn’t know it at the time, but there is an Army base near the town of Clarksville, Tennessee — which would have fit the bill fine for the storyline. We couldn’t be too direct with the Monkees. We couldn’t really make a protest song out of it—we kind of snuck it in.”

Last Train to Clarksville

Take the last train to Clarksville
And I’ll meet you at the station
You can be here by 4:30
‘Cause I’ve made your reservation

Don’t be slow
Oh, no, no, no
Oh, no, no, no

‘Cause I’m leavin’ in the morning
And I must see you again
We’ll have one more night together
‘Til the morning brings my train

And I must go
Oh, no, no, no
Oh, no, no, no
And I don’t know if I’m ever comin’ home

Take the last train to Clarksville
I’ll be waiting at the station
We’ll have time for coffee flavored kisses
And a bit of conversation

Oh, no, no, no
Oh, no, no, no

Take the last train to Clarksville
Now I must hang up the phone
I can’t hear you in this noisy railroad station, all alone

I’m feelin’ low
Oh, no, no, no
Oh, no, no, no
And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home

Oh

Take the last train to Clarksville
And I’ll meet you at the station
You can be here by 4:30
‘Cause I’ve made your reservation

Don’t be slow
Oh, no, no, no
Oh, no, no, no
And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home

Take the last train to Clarksville
Take the last train to Clarksville
Take the last train to Clarksville
Take the last train to Clarksville

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Bobby Hart / Tommy Boyce