"Ohio"

Mementos of the era

There's much about it that's mythical, that goes beyond the memorable syncopation and opening guitar riffs and into something much bigger, so big, in fact, that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young undercut their own hot item, a song titled "Teach Your Children," by releasing "Ohio" as quickly as they did. 

They put it on the market when "Teach" was still climbing, virtually assuring the earlier cut would never reach the heights it might have if they hadn't released "Ohio" when they did. Whether or not they ever actually sat down and decided to release "Ohio" as immediately as they did isn't clear, in part because "Ohio" was, well, epoch-making--and they seemed to understand it themselves, even as they made the recording. "Ohio" was, to them, and to millions of others, including, back then, a much younger me, something more than music. 

The story is worth retelling. In the most hideous confrontation between the National Guard and the anti-war movement, four seemingly innocent Kent State students were shot dead when the Guard opened fire at a campus protest. There was, in early May of 1970, a sense, at least among some young people--including me--that the anti-war folks were gaining ground. The war simply had not been showing signs of ending. Body bags by the score were still coming back from a place most American people couldn't have pointed out on a globe. The anti-war movement was growing.

So the story goes that David Crosby, who died just last week, showed Neil Young the duly famous picture of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of a kid who was shot just then, a picture as famous as any of the era or even of the century, for that matter. 

Young took a look at the picture, grabbed his guitar, and went out into a stand of trees somewhere close. In an hour he created a line of music, or so the story goes, and brought it back in to Crosby, who immediately--seriously, immediately--reserved studio time yet that night. Thus, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young created, released, and marketed an anthem that became something even more than music, a lyric that, like the iconic photograph, came to embody the entire era, the era in which, I confess, I grew up. 

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We're finally on our own
This summer, I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio

"Ohio" didn't mess around. Nixon is right there, first line, just before "four dead in Ohio." They didn't try to be artful. If art requires allusion--something more than meets the eye--"Ohio" isn't art. "Ohio" is testimony.

Those students were shot on May 4. Just a few days later, the call went out--May 10, --to gather in DC for a huge student protest. I was still in bed, my last semester in college, listening to early morning news on a clock radio my parents had given me before I left for college four years earlier. What I heard was that student protest groups were calling kids from campuses around the nation to come to the nation's capital on the tenth of May for a giant anti-war protest of what had gone down at Kent State University, four kids shot dead. There'd been no protests at Dordt College, in the heart of a region that was and still is impossibly Republican. There'd been a gathering in Central Park in support of Nixon--he was, after all, the President, almost a divine right thing.  

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?

When I heard the story about a gathering in DC of college students from the entire nation, I told myself I had to go, and so I did--three of us left in a VW bug for a trip that would take us half way across the continent and far, far away from northwest Iowa, literally and figuratively. No college funds were spent. I don't know that the three of us would have had the backing of any other souls on campus. But we went.

All of that was 1970, more than a half-century ago. I'm almost 75 years old these days, but when I hear those almost savage opening lines of "Ohio," I can't help but think that my decision to go, back then, was just as driven as any in the wake of Kent State, just as immediate as Crosby, Stills, Nash to Neil Young's inspired tune. 

It would take two years before Tricky Dick went down in infamy via a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Just before his demise, he shellacked the South Dakota peacenik, Sen. George McGovern, winning all but 18 electoral college votes in the 1972 Presidential election. Then Nixon's Presidency unraveled. The whole era returned last week, with the death of David Crosby.

That death returned all of us who remember to what truly seemed the anti-war's own battle hymn, the days when America's Vietnam War efforts were ending. Neil Young's "Ohio" simply is the age. It simply is.

It runs for three minutes or so. You don't have to listen to it all, but for my sake tune in to those first verses. You're not just hearing music, you're hearing history.