When David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young joined forces in 1970, they became one of the most successful acts in music. They had all played in successful bands prior (The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Hollies), and their new project saw them build on and surpass their former success.
CSNY would however prove to be an explosive combination of personalities. Clashing opinions, painstaking and drawn-out creative processes that wore everybody out, the need for numerous takes, and territorial behaviour when it came to their own song contributions all resulted in frayed tempers and outbursts. Stills may have described it best when he said “Well, it was glancing blows, but they were continuous.”
For this reason, the CSNY grouping of people were not destined to stay together for long stretches at a time. They would work together sporadically over the years with long breaks in between. CSN (without Y) managed better and had less frequent breaks between their projects as a trio.
As a quartet, though, their first album together was Déjà Vu in 1970. This remains the highest-selling album that any of its members have ever been involved with.
The album had been recorded after the group had first gone out on a four-leg, 39-date tour, including a performance at the legendary Woodstock music festival. The tour ended with three European concerts in January 1970. This meant they were in road playing shape when they entered the studio. Great from a performance point of view, although they may have needed a break at that point.
There would be no rest for the guys. After the emotionally fraught recording sessions for Déjà Vu, the touring was even scheduled to continue. The first show was set to happen at the Denver Coliseum on 12 May. To say that their schedule was hectic was a bit of an understatement.
This all happened while the United States were involved in the Vietnam War. At this specific time, the US had plans to expand their involvement into Cambodia, which did not sit well with the increasingly many Americans who felt their country should not have been involved to begin with. Fortunately, the citizens of the US have a constitutional right to protest what their government is doing – or do they?
On the morning of 4 May, the students of Kent State University in Ohio had staged a peace rally opposing the current expansions in the Vietnam War. This was felt to be such a big threat that the National Guard was called in to have a presence on campus to prevent things from escalating. It had the opposite effect. The rally went ahead with upward of 300 students actively participating. At least 1,000 other students were also around, many of them observing the protest in their breaks between classes.
The National Guard ordered the rally to disperse. This did not happen. After using tear gas against the students and still failing, a segment of the national guard opened fire upon the students. Four students were killed and nine others wounded.
This event is referred to as the Kent State shootings, and was the first time that a student had been killed in an anti-war gathering in US history. It sent shock waves well beyond the country and is widely remembered as a national tragedy and a landmark event in modern US history.
Young and Crosby were staying at a house near San Francisco when reports of the Kent State shootings arrived. Just like anyone else, they were shocked and horrified with what had happened.
In the days that followed, there was a nagging feeling that something had to be done. They felt they had to do something, say something… but what? The answer was so obvious that they didn’t see it right away.
During breakfast on the morning of 19 May, their thoughts and feelings about the event were brought into focus in a way that suggested a clear call to action. In speaking about it for the VH1 Legends Documentary, Crosby said: “Neil and I were out driving around in one of his cars, and we went over to a friend’s house. And the friend was just coming back from the market, so we sat down on his porch and played around on the guitar a bit, just fooling around, talking. And Frank came back with a magazine which had a picture of the girl kneeling over the dead kid on the ground. And I looked at it and my heart froze.”
The magazine in question was the newest issue of Life Magazine – the issue dated 15 May 1970, with the cover line Tragedy at Kent.
Crosby took the magazine, stared at it, looked at the article, stared at the front image some more. Then he intently handed it to Young.
Neil Young told VH1, “I was at this house in Anna Canyon on the California coast. Crosby came up and he had the magazine with the Kent State killings cover on it. And I’d heard it on the news, but Crosby always has a way of bringing things into focus. That woke me up to that there was something going on that I had some thoughts about.”
Young grabbed his guitar and wandered off, his mind already spinning as he pondered how to formulate everything he was feeling. In only fifteen minutes he emerged from the woods with the song we know as Ohio. He sat down and played it for Crosby, who sat right beside him, immediately starting to work on the harmony parts as Young sang the lyrics. It was hard, as the words were striking, direct, painful, but also stirring. They were as angry as they were sad.
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer, I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
Both Crosby and Young knew they had something special. This song had to be recorded and released as soon as possible. But, the band were going on the road in just days. They were spread around. The album was already out, singles had been released and/or planned, and everything was mapped out. Another song did not fit into all this, and there really was no time either. How to solve it?
Simple. Put Crosby on the case.
Crosby said: “As Neil put the guitar down, I called Graham and said, ‘get us a studio now. No, I mean now. Not after breakfast, NOW!’ And he did.”
Nash had not expected to get such an urgent call. In speaking with Howard Stern in 2013, he said: “I got a call from Crosby. I’m in Los Angeles, Neil and David are up in a place that I had in Pescadero in Northern California. It was a friend’s house. Crosby calls me and goes, ‘book the studio right now. Get the band together, get Halverson!’ He was our engineer – Bill Halverson. ‘Wait until you hear this song.’”
As Crosby explained the background, there was no doubt in Nash’s mind that this was a song they just had to do. Stills also got on board with it pretty much immediately. They booked themselves into the Record Plant Studios in Los Angeles, and Stills and Nash were waiting for Crosby and Young when they arrived.
Crosby: “We went to Los Angeles and we recorded it the next night after Neil wrote it, I think it might even have been the night of the morning that he wrote it.”
They went to work on the song with a single-handed determination and levels of unified thinking that they rarely achieved as a group. The result was the smoothest recording session they ever did as CSNY, everybody being fully aligned and of one mind about the song retaining its original, raw approach.
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?
Young would play the ominous guitar riff that runs through the song, with Stills filling in other guitar leads and melody lines. Crosby played rhythm guitar, while Nash played organ. CSNY had recently recruited Calvin Samuels (bass) and John Barbata (drums) for their coming live shows, and they were called upon to complete the line-up that performed the song more or less live in the studio.
Towards the end of the song, the stark mantra “Four dead in Ohio” is repeated. It is a chilling section, preventing us from just enjoying the song and the momentum it has built at that point. The stark reality is right there. We’re not allowed to forget. We don’t want to forget. The anger is as present as the sadness.
A particularly emotional Crosby would ad-lib the callbacks in the final stages of the song, bringing out his pure frustration.
Four dead in Ohio
Four dead in Ohio – four!
Four dead in Ohio – how many more?
Four dead in Ohio – why?
Crosby cried after the recordings were complete. He later said, “I was so moved by it that I completely lost it at the end of the song, in the recording studio, screaming, ‘Four… Why? How many more?’”
“The mood was just very intense,” engineer Bill Halverson related on his website. “They were bent on getting it right and were on a mission.”
The song was rehearsed and completed in only five takes with no overdubs. What they had captured was magic, raw, real, and very emotional.
If they were going to release this song as a single, they needed a suitable b-side. They had been performing Stephen Stills’ Find the Cost of Freedom live on the recent tour. This is still one of his finest songs, and an extremely fitting companion song to Ohio. Where the a-side is filled with anger about the events, the b-side is the emotional hymn, the requiem, the ode to those who lost their lives for freedom.
Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground
Mother Earth will swallow you, lay your body down
Recorded with the same ethos, and completed in a half-hour, it is easily as good as the a-side and equally chilling in its own way. The result was one of the best and most important singles of its time.
Things moved quickly from there. CSNY wanted the single out as soon as possible, and the master tape was given to Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegun, who had also flown in to be present during the sessions. “We mixed it, gave him the two-track and said, ‘Ahmet, we want this out now,’” Nash remembered. Ahmet did have concerns about what this might do to the single they already had out, but ultimately he supported the band. He brought the tapes back to New York and set the wheels in motion. “Ahmet put up an argument, but we were firm,” Nash said. “Twelve days later, we put it out in a single sleeve with a copy of the Constitution that had four bullet holes on it.”
The single was released in early June, achieving its peak at #14 in August, providing another American Top 20 hit for the group. This might seem like a slow-burn hit, taking two months to reach its top spot. There were of course challenges impacting its success.
The single suffered from a ban from several AM radio stations, including in the state of Ohio, because of the challenge to the Nixon Administration. To the band, it was never an option not to do that. Crosby once stated that Young keeping Nixon’s name in the lyrics was “the bravest thing I ever heard.”
The song primarily received airplay on underground FM stations in larger cities and college towns, and was obviously prominently featured by the band on their tour. Today, the song receives regular airplay on classic rock stations.
The single release came at a different type of cost as well. At the time of the song’s release, they had a different single (Teach Your Children) climbing the charts. It was in the top 20, heading towards the top 5, possibly even the top spot. The band decided to kill their own single in favour of Ohio, as they felt that song and its message was more important.
In his 2010 book Shakey, Young has nothing but good memories about the song and CSNY’s work on it: “Ohio was the best record I ever made with CSNY. Definitely. That’s the only recording I know of where CSNY is truly a band. It’s all live. And it felt really good to hear it all come back so fast — the whole idea of using music as a message and unifying generations and giving them a point of view.”
Crosby felt the same. “For me, Ohio was a high point of the band, a major point of validity. There we were, reacting to reality, dealing with it on the highest level we could – relevant, immediate. It named names and pointed the finger.”
Just like many other artists from their generation, CSNY would support or get involved in causes, frequently displaying liberal and/or humanistic leanings. This has made it hard for people of different persuasions to enjoy the band when they feel they “talk politics,” even when they are otherwise well dispositioned to liking their music and lyrics. Ohio no doubt also fell into that category, especially at the time of its release.
In an interview with Dan Rather, Graham Nash spoke about this. “I can’t separate my music from my politics,” he said. “And I’m not so sure that politics is the right title. When you shoot four kids down at Kent State because of their constitutional right to protest what their government is doing in their name, and you kill them… is that politics or is that humanity?”
He went on to say, “It is one of the most important songs I have ever been associated with. Very much so. It was such a wound in the national soul. We’re killing our own children? Something is terribly wrong here.”
The song would be CSNY’s most profound statement. The writing, recording, and release of Ohio was a unique experience for both the artists and their audience that would make a lasting impact. This is reflected in Rolling Stone Magazine’s overview of the Top 500 Songs of All Time, which ranks Ohio at 395. In 2009, the song was also inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The song has become embraced in a totally different way over time than it was when it first came out, when people weren’t sure whether they were OK to applaud it or if they should stay away from it.
The song would become a major turning point for Neil Young as a songwriter, as this was his first protest song. Throughout his career, he would pen a plethora of tracks reflecting his political stance and activism, including Southern Man, Long Walk Home, Fork In the Road, and Rocking In the Free World. He has never forgotten the song that kickstarted this type of writing. Ohio has often been performed during his solo shows, especially whenever there have been further shooting-related incidents and tragedies.
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