The May 15, 1970 issue of Life Magazine, a weekly noted for its photojournalism, shocked millions with its unsparing photographs of students killed and wounded at Kent State on May 4. One particular copy was to have an impact that has lasted to this day.
Rock musician David Crosby brought that issue of Life to a studio session for the supergroup he was part of. Originally Crosby, Stills and Nash, it had been joined by Stephen Stills’ old bandmate from the Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young.
All four members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were seen as political artists. Graham Nash who had been in the British Invasion band, The Hollies, had released in 1969 a solo cut "Chicago (We Can Change The World)", which starts with a reference to another frame-up trial of Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale. (Those who have read earlier "May '70" installments may recollect that the call for a national student strike went out on May Day from a Free Bobby rally in New Haven).
It was Neil Young, though, who took the magazine and disappeared for a couple of hours, returning with the 10 lines that are burned into the consciousness of that generation.
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.
The group recorded the song on May 21, along with a B-side “Find The Cost Of Freedom” written by Stills. (I had always thought that they recorded it on May 15, and several internet sources cite the earlier date, but the notes to Neil’s Greatest Hits from 2004 say May 21 and his archives are legendary, so I’m going with this.)
Even though their record company tried to back them down because they had another single ("Teach Your Children") climbing the charts at the time. CSNY demanded that "Ohio" be released immediately. Dubs were rushed to LA and New York radio stations within days, and another battle began. Many stations refused to play it, especially the mainstream Top 40 stations on the AM band and the new, insurgent, free-form FM stations were the ones to pick it up and run with it.
Singles were out by June, and in July "Ohio" hit the charts. Though it never got higher than #14, it was on for seven weeks, long enough to etch itself into our brains forever--so much so that I've used lines from the song to title three of the earlier posts in this series in the full confidence that most of those reading them will make the connection.
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment.
May 22, 2010
May '70: 18: ...And In The Studio
April 29, 2010
May '70: 1. Finally On Our Own...
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own…
Forty years ago today, on Thursday, April 30, 1970, Richard Milhouse Nixon, the president of the United States, appeared on television for a special announcement about the Vietnam War. He told us that US troops, tens of thousands of them, had moved into Cambodia, expanding an already prolonged and costly war into another country. He claimed it was a necessary step toward ending the war, and toward insuring that the US would not be perceived in the world as "a pitiful helpless giant."
Nixon's announcement kicked off the most intense wave of campus struggle this country has ever seen, a month of bitter and exhilarating clashes which triggered huge changes that echo to this day. May, 1970 also changed forever the lives of some significant number of the hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of students and others who took part.
Today that incredible upsurge, which pretty much shut down the 1969-70 school year throughout much of the American higher education system, is remembered mainly through one of its most dramatic events--the killing of four students at Kent State University by a sustained fusillade of gunfire from Ohio National Guard troops occupying their campus.
For forty years, the veterans of those days and younger activists have struggled to keep alive the memories of Kent State and of the subsequent police murders of two more students, this time at a traditionally Black college in Mississippi, Jackson State. We have succeeded in this, helped in part by that amazing mnemonic, Neil Young’s heartbreaking song, "Ohio," which opens with the couplet at the start of this piece.
But we have, in significant ways, lost the memory of the vast eruption which Kent State and Jackson State were a part of, and whose flames the killings provided so much fuel for.
Over the course of next month, I hope to recall--in a series of posts under the heading May '70--some of that legacy, for OGs like myself who were there and for younger folk who may never have learned much at all about the events in question. I will draw on my own memories and those of friends, along with some Internet surfing, especially in the early posts. Ideally, others whose lives were shaped during that heady month will come forward to weigh in with their own thoughts and memories.
There is one final thing I’ll spell out in this first post. You can consider it a reminder for the veterans of those days. Or call it context for young folks who may find it hard to believe that, for instance, in the first week of May 1970, more than 30 ROTC buildings around the country burned or were bombed. 30. More than four a day.
The Vietnam War had created a deep, deep fissure in the American body politic, deeper than anything since the Civil War. And this time the divide was not sectional. It ran through every part of the country, divided communities, split classes, sundered families. If anything, it was generational (though that itself is a big overgeneralization). As we sang along with Phil Ochs:
It’s always the old to lead us to the war
It’s always the young to fall
And it was that split--between the young and the America we had grown up in--that made us sense, in May of 1970, that we were finally on our own…
Click here for the next installment.
January 14, 2009
Neil Young on the Meltdown: "Fork in the Road"
Well, Neil Young screwed up bad once, back in the 1980s, slipping Reaganwards, but he's been pretty much on the one ever since.
Apologies for the video--don't like 'em much, myself. Still, check out ol' Neil's first take on the economic meltdown. It's a throwaway from a recent recording session, not as composed as his savage "Let's Impeach The President" which ripped Bush in 2006, but that's yesterday's news, and like Neil, we'd best be looking ahead.
I've got hope, but you can't eat hope. I'm not done. Not giving up. Not cashing in. Too late.
There's a bailout coming but it's not for you. There's a bailout coming but it's not for you. It's for all those creeps hiding what they do.
Neil Young - Fork In The Road
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