Song stylist and political activist Adam Cohen has died, sources close to the family told Glossy News today. Cohen passed peacefully at his Greenwich Village apartment, after a long battle with colorectal cancer and raging irrelevance.
Cohen is best known for his seminal work with Adam, Eve & Cain. As member of that groundbreaking trio, Adam penned such unforgettable classics as “Leaving on a big Boat” but is better known for passionate anti-war and Civil Rights anthems. His “We Shall be Just Fine” is perhaps not as well remembered as “We Shall Overcome.” Most music scholars attribute that to a scheduling error at Reverend King’s famous Washington event.
Said Jerry Lee Lewis, who was in Memphis at the time of Dr. King’s senseless murder, “Yeah, that Adam Cohen, musical genius, and a tireless worker for justice. Always out there for African-Americans, and you have to admire that. Well, you’re supposed to nowadays.”
Although some controversy attends Adam, Eve & Cain’s contribution to the Civil Rights struggle, they’re widely acknowledged to have led much of the anti-war movement in the turbulent 1960’s.
Folk icon Bob Dylan said of Cohen, “Wheeze Allah fuss dare. A damned coon rocket infrastructure. Margaret ferns Dad.”
After several repeats, it was the consensus among reporters that Mr. Dylan meant “We were all of us there. Adam Cohen rocked in the structure. My great friend is dead.”
The protest songs of Adam, Eve & Cain are well known to musicologists. Best recalled is their signature LP from 1968, “War is Bad.” It featured such unforgettable classics as ‘Where have all the WMDs gone’ and the very controversial, ‘I think I love you GI, got five dollar?’
Though the tumultuous times exacted a toll from the once popular trio, “I think I love you GI” was later re-tooled and became a hit song for the equally subversive Partridge Family.
While another cultural giant has passed from our midst, it’s not the passionate protest songs we’ll remember most about Adam Cohen, ironically enough. Adam, for all his eloquence about justice and war, will always be loved most for having written the ultimate children’s song, “Puff, the Tragic Maggot.”
