Neil Young's Ohio the greatest protest record
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/may/06/ohio-neil-young-kent-state-shootings
Neil Young's moving response to the killings at Kent State University
40 years ago this week was the pinnacle of a very 1960s genre. The
revolution never came
Dorian Lynskey
6 May 2010
One day in the middle of May, almost exactly 40 years ago, Neil Young
was hanging out at the house of his road manager, Leo Makota, in
Pescadero, California, when his bandmate, David Crosby, handed him
the latest issue of Life magazine. It contained a vivid account and
shocking photographs of the killing of four students by the Ohio
national guard during a demonstration against the Vietnam war at Kent
State University on 4 May. Sitting outside on Makota's sunlit porch,
Young took a guitar proffered by Crosby and, in short order, wrote a
song about the killings: Ohio. "I remember getting nuts at the end of
the song, I was so moved," Crosby told Young's biographer Jimmy
McDonough. "I was freaked out because I felt it so strongly,
screaming, 'Why? Why?'"
Crosby and Young promptly flew down to Los Angeles to join Graham
Nash and Stephen Stills, and the quartet recorded the song in just a
few takes. They gave it to Atlantic records boss Ahmet Ertegun, who
rushed the single into production and had it on the streets within a
week or so, wrapped in a sleeve that pointedly reprinted the section
of the Bill of Rights that guarantees free assembly. In a
pre-internet era, this was the closest pop got to the immediacy of a
news broadcast.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's remarkable single is arguably the
perfect protest song: moving, memorable and perfectly timed. Shortly
afterwards, the NME's Ritchie Yorke predicted: "There will almost
certainly be a trend towards very politically oriented pop acts in
the very near future. Entertainment for the revolutionary troops, so
to speak." But Ohio turned out to signify the end of the fertile
period of political songwriting that had begun with Bob Dylan, rather
than a thrilling rebirth. Only a few months earlier, Yippie leader
Abbie Hoffman had declared: "Rock musicians are the real leaders of
the revolution." By the end of 1970, that was shown to be a hopeless delusion.
It is almost impossible now to imagine how seriously many leftwing
activists took the idea of overthrowing the state and forging a new
America. "We wanted to rewrite society," remembered Michael Davis of
Detroit rabble-rousers the MC5. New radical groups such as Weatherman
were advocating armed insurrection, and rock music was echoing their
call. During 1969, Thunderclap Newman went to No 1 in the UK with
Something in the Air, which cried "Hand out the arms and ammo …
because the revolution's here," while Jefferson Airplane whooped,
"Got a revolution, got to revolution" on their hit Volunteers. As
critic Robert Christgau noted: "It took about 18 months from early
1967 to late 1969 for the idea of 'revolution' to evolve from an
illusion of humourless politniks to a hip password."
The turning point had come in August 1968, when anti-war protesters
had clashed with police on the streets of Chicago during the
Democratic national convention. The convention, which chose unpopular
vice-president Hubert Humphrey over peace candidate Eugene McCarthy,
shattered young activists' faith in the Washington system, while the
violence alienated a constituency that columnist Joe Kraft defined as
middle America. Many Americans preferred brutal cops to longhairs
singing the praises of Ho Chi Minh. "We were hated," remembered
anti-war protester Todd Gitlin. "We were seen, not inaccurately, as
part of a radical ensemble that really wanted to turn a great deal
upside down. Most of the country didn't want to have that much turned
upside down."
The new occupant of the White House, Richard Nixon, studied this
burgeoning backlash with keen interest throughout 1969. In October,
vice-president Spiro Agnew tore into "the hardcore dissidents and the
professional anarchists within the so-called peace movement" and
called for "positive polarisation" in American culture. Encouraged by
the enthusiastic response, Nixon appeared on TV to address the
"great, silent, majority of my fellow Americans". In its first issue
of 1970, Time named the middle American its man and woman of the
year, while sounding a note of caution by quoting a report by the
national committee for an effective congress: "The Administration is
working the hidden veins of fear, racism and resentment which lie
deep in Middle America. Respect for the past, distrust of the future,
the politics of 'againstness'."
Such was the national mood at the end of April, when Nixon announced
plans to knock out Vietcong sanctuaries in Cambodia, thus
precipitating a massive escalation in campus rebellion. At Kent State
on 2 May, students set fire to the headquarters of the university's
reserve officers' training corps and threw rocks at the Ohio national
guard. None of the guardsmen were sympathetic to the grievances of
privileged students. The guardsmen's song, Billy Buckeye, emphasised
their sense of defensive pride: "We aren't no cheap tin soldiers."
A student rally was scheduled for noon on Monday, 4 May. As morning
classes ended, the number of students on the campus commons topped
1,000, watched by another 2,000 curious spectators. To the hundred or
so nervous guardsmen, it must have looked like a mob; to the
students, the gasmasked guardsmen must have looked like stormtroopers.
On the dot of noon, three units of guardsmen advanced on the commons,
firing teargas canisters, but the majority unwittingly walked into a
dead end, hemmed in by a chainlink fence at the end of the university
sports field. After 15 minutes of rocks and ridicule thrown by the
students, they retreated up the hill. Then, at 24 minutes past noon,
one group turned around to face the students and opened fire.
Thirteen seconds and 61 shots later, four students lay dead on the
ground: Bill Schroeder, Sandy Scheuer, Allison Krause and Jeff
Miller. Student photographer John Filo snapped a picture of
14-year-old runaway Mary Vecchio kneeling, open-mouthed, over
Miller's corpse, and it was this horrifying image that, a week later,
caught Young's eye.
"Neil surprised everyone," Crosby told one reporter. "It wasn't like
he set out as a project to write a protest song." Young's
explanation, according to Crosby, was rather vague: "I don't know.
Never wrote anything like this before … but there it is …" Indeed,
Young was the only member of CSNY who hadn't written a protest song
before. Young, who would later shock many fans with his support for
Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, always wrote from his gut, and, for
the first time, his gut was full of rage.
In Ohio, not a word or note is wasted. There's the cold, accusatory
refrain of "Four dead in Ohio"; the gutsy, precise naming of Nixon
and the "tin soldiers" of the national guard; the sudden shift from
the perspective of an outsider reading the news to that of a mourning
friend crouched over a victim's body. The wrenching guitar solo
incarnates all the anger and grief of the subject at hand. The only
problem with it is the first-person plural: We're on our own;
soldiers are cutting us down. There was a big difference between the
Kent State students and a bunch of rock stars.
Future Devo member Gerald Casale was a Kent State student who
witnessed the deaths of Krause and Miller, both of whom were his
friends (fellow student Chrissie Hynde also saw the shootings). At
the time, he told Jimmy McDonough, "we just thought rich hippies were
making money off of something horrible and political that they didn't
get. I know there were big, screaming arguments in SDS [the radical
group Students for a Democratic Society] meetings about Young being a
tool of the military-industrial complex."
Although John Lennon would later take considerable risks (and write
some lousy songs) in the service of his political convictions, rock
stars were generally seen as complacent poseurs who did no more than
pay lip-service to radical ideas. In his 1970 book Revolt Into Style,
George Melly reflected on the anti-war protest in London's Grosvenor
Square two years earlier: "This was surely the moment when you might
have expected pop to provide the anthems, the marches, the songs for
the barricade. In fact it did nothing of the sort … At all events the
political upheaval of 1968 proved that pop music, in the
revolutionary sense, was a non-starter, a fake revolt with no
programme much beyond the legalisation of pot."
Neil Young was sincere about Kent State, but he was no radical. In
fact, in an embarrassing 1973 radio interview included in his
Archives Vol 1 boxset, he even sounds shaky on the basic details,
confusing Mary Vecchio with "Allison Whatsername". He only recorded
three more protest songs: two attacks on the renegade segregationist
Democrat George Wallace (Southern Man and Alabama), and a single in
aid of George McGovern's 1972 presidential bid (War Song). None of
them could touch Ohio for power and conviction.
In this inability to match conviction and music, he was not alone.
The aftermath of Kent State called for more ferocity than rock's
aristocracy could muster. The rightwing backlash following Kent State
was shocking: "The score is four/ And next time more" was one chant
doing the rounds on the streets of Kent, and a national poll found
that most Americans blamed the students for their own deaths. When
further violence swept US campuses in reaction to the killings, and
two black students were shot dead at Jackson State College in
Mississippi, the Beach Boys responded with the feeble Student
Demonstration Time. "I know we're all fed up with useless wars and
racial strife," wheedled Mike Love, "But next time there's a riot,
well, you'd best stay out of sight."
If events at the turn of the decade had shown rock stars to be pretty
milquetoast revolutionaries, then Nixon's demolition of McGovern in
the 1972 election demonstrated they weren't even successful
mainstream campaigners, and for the first half of the 70s, American
music's rebel energy resided with soul music, not rock. CSNY, like
most of their peers, pursued what Newsweek described as "a move away
from rock-as-cultural-offensive" towards "contemplation,
appreciation, celebration".
With every passing year, Ohio's tightly focused fury seemed
increasingly impossible to replicate. "It's a different world now
than it was in the 1960s," Young told Uncut magazine in 2008. "And
I'm a different person than I was in the 1960s. I am not under any
misconception that my next record is going to change the world."
Ohio did not change the world, but, approaching its 40th anniversary,
it feels like not just a classic song but a vital historical document
of a time when politics felt like a matter of life and death. Even
now, it is hard to think of Kent State without hearing that stark
accusation: "Four dead in Ohio." When Young reconvened CSNY for
2006's anti-Bush Freedom of Speech tour, he also revived the
long-dormant Ohio. "For years I couldn't sing it," he explained,
"because I felt I was kinda taking advantage of something that
happened and we were trading on somebody's misfortunes … to give the
audience a kind of rush of nostalgia … In this period of time, that
doesn't apply. What it is now is, it's a history. We're bringing
history back. That's what folk music does."
.
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