What's that sound?

Ah, well, I appear to be stuck in the past this week. Let’s have a couple of pieces from Crosby, Stills and Nash (and sometimes Young).

Way, way back, when they were still Buffalo Springfield, Stephen Stills wrote “For What It’s Worth”.

One of my outstanding associations for this song is them singing it on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. When they got to the line, “There’s a man with a sign over there/Telling me I got to beware,” the man was Tommy Smothers, holding a sign that said "Beware".

Aside from that, the song was not in any way amusing. Stills wrote it about curfew riots on the Sunset Strip in 1966, but its applicability to what was going on in Vietnam was immediately apparent.

(Yes, children, there once was a time when kids under 18 could be legally detained if they were out “after curfew”, which in many municipalities was 10pm. It was truly the Dark Ages.)

The CSN&Y song that’s perhaps most associated with the anti-war movement was Neil Young’s “Ohio”, which was about the killing in 1970 of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen called in to quell an on-campus protest of the US incursion into Cambodia. In less than 15 seconds, Guardsmen fired more than 65 rounds into a crowd of students. It was an appalling thing to see on your TV screen and think, Not Saigon, not Lagos; Ohio.

CSN&Y recorded “Ohio” on 21 May, less than three weeks after the shootings. When it was released, the B-side featured Stills’ “Find the Cost of Freedom,” which has always sent me into silence, from the moment I first heard them perform it.

There’s a long acoustic introduction, which annoyed some audiences on their tour. But the whole thing is extremely powerful.