written By Neil Young and performed by Crosby Stills Nash & Young

It always amuses me greatly that some of the angriest people I’ve seen are pacifists. So what is it that makes these people angry? Usually it’s because they perceive an injustice. Teachers, priests and social workers that I know, who will remain anonymous, lose their mild, reasonable manner when confronted with ‘a wrong’ and develop a rage, that has to be contained. Now please don’t confuse anger with violence. I’m not in any way suggesting that these lovely intelligent people are confronting someone and saying, ‘stop fighting, or we’ll beat you up’, I’m not, because there’s a difference between anger and violence.  

In the 1950s the term ‘Angry Young Men’ was coined to describe a group of mostly working and middle class playwrights and novelists who were critical of traditional British society. The term started with publicity for John Osborne’s play ‘Look Back In Anger’ which was described as a ‘kitchen sink drama’ in that it dealt with the everyday problems of real people and their struggles. Kingsley Amis, Harold Pinter, Alan Sillitoe  and many others were given this label but it wasn’t a society, or a movement who met together to discuss things, they were simply creative people who had all come to the same view of what was happening and wanted people in the wider community to understand these issues and relate to them.

By definition plays, novels and films shown at the cinema  have a limited audience, because you have to make a conscious effort to attend or in the case of a book to read it. By the 1960s television was in everyone’s home, and with only three channels a programme was seen by nearly everyone, and so it was with ‘Cathy Come Home’. Broadcast in 1966 on BBC1, the play tells the story of a young couple, Cathy and Reg and their descent into poverty and homelessness. Not only did it deal with subject matter that was either hidden from or ignored by society as a whole, but director Ken Loach used a documentary style on location, which we would be familiar with now, but which was unknown then.  This gave it added realism and a feeling that you were traveling around with them and facing the problems they were facing – which made you angry, on their behalf.

Some people look to change the world without making people angry. Obvious examples of this are Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s non-violent resistance movements, although it can be argued that their anger was still there but it was supressed, hidden, to stop it being used against them. In this respect the Hippie counterculture movement in the U.S. of the mid 1960s – early 1970s also probably qualifies. Unlike the two previous movements I’ve mentioned they weren’t trying to change societies where the land was occupied by a foreign power, or where people with a different skin colour were treated as second class citizens, but they did want to change fundamental things within the society they lived in.  What they wanted was a less materialistic society, where people focused on each other rather than on commercial gain. A kinder, caring society where people helped each other rather than pushing them out of the way, and above all a fairer society where all people were equal. As part of this they ‘dropped out’ of mainstream society, in some cases forming communes. High ideals that didn’t necessarily come to fruition.

I bought the album ‘Crosby, Stills & Nash’ in the summer of 1969 not long after it was released. I knew of Graham Nash, he’d been in The Hollies not a group whose records I’d bought although I did rather like their single ‘King Midas In Reverse’, which was interesting as it transpired that it was a song  Graham Nash had written and part of the reason why he had differences with the others and quit the group. David Crosby had been a member of The Byrds, a group whose records I did buy, but he wasn’t the front man, Roger McGuinn was and so he didn’t stand out to me, and I had no idea who Stephen Stills was.

Unlike The Beatles where some songs were John compositions and some by Paul , but they were all credited to Lennon & McCartney, you could see which songs were written by Stills, Nash or Crosby. One track that sneaked through under our radar was Crosby’s ‘Long Time Gone’. We I think heard this as a song announcing the world was about to change and become a better place, but that was because we were living in the U.K. not the U.S.A. where it was seen as a call to oppose the current political system. To further emphasise this I remember in my final year at school we had a lesson one day where the teacher, who was not long out of teacher training college, asked me why I had long hair. With hindsight I realise that she was looking to start a discussion about the ’counter-culture’ or ‘the underground movement’, call it what you like and expected me to talk about wanting to change the world politically. However, what she got from the class was a discussion about fashion trends and how boys and girls dressed to attract people of the opposite sex with similar likes and views. I’m sure had this discussion been in a U.S. school it would have taken a different road.

Before CSN, Stephen Stills had been a founder member of ‘Buffalo Springfield’, along with Canadian Neil Young. Both were credited as vocalists and lead guitarist and both also played keyboards and wrote the songs. The group were together from April ’66 until May ’68, released three albums, toured continuously throughout the U.S. often supporting major artists such as the Beach Boys, and released nine singles. One of these was the Stephen Stills song ‘For What It’s Worth’ released in December 1966 and a Top Ten US hit in March 1967 and so regularly played on the radio. Written about a 10 p.m. curfew that was imposed in Los Angeles which lead to protests and subsequent rioting, the song was adopted as an anti-war protest song.

During it’s brief life, Buffalo Springfield gained significant critical recognition due to the song-writing of Stills and Young and their guitar interplay. Competitiveness often leads to greater creativity and so it was in this case. However, Buffalo Springfield records were not released in the U.K. hence why I had no idea who Stills or Young were.

Young was the first to leave the group to pursue a solo career. His first album was a patchy affair which comes across as outakes from the latter days of Buffalo Springfield and ranges from overproduced 60s style pop through country to a nine minute solo meandering monologue with just Neil and his acoustic guitar. Nothing on there could have prepared you for the album that followed. ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ was released the same month as the first CSN album. My friend Steve suggested I take a listen to it and so one Saturday I went into a department store in Enfield where I knew they had listening booths and got them to play me the first side of the album. The first track ‘Cinnamon Girl’ blew me away, and still does. Neil had put together a blistering five piece rock band with himself on lead guitar and this was two minutes fifty eight seconds of sheer energy. These days, we’d describe the sound of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, as he’d called his backing band, as a ‘garage band’. They were at the same time ‘loose’ as if it were a jam session and they were making it up as they went along and ‘tight’ as if they’d been playing together in bars and clubs for years.

Neil is a man of varied musical tastes and his subsequent solo albums have compositions that have ranged from simple songs with his voice and acoustic guitar or piano, through country style numbers augmented by steel guitar and fiddle, to in his latter years grunge style rock. Certainly someone as they say who brings a lot to the party and all of it passionate.

After the release of their first album, Crosby, Stills & Nash wanted to play live and tour. Whilst they could simply sit on three stools with acoustic guitars they were at heart a rock band and wanted to have an electric set as well. Also, on the album, Stills had played electric guitar, acoustic guitar, organ and bass guitar, and he couldn’t do all of that at the same time. They had a bass player and a drummer  but needed someone to dovetail with Stills and their record company suggested Neil and so three became four. Neil agreed on the basis that he could continue to be a solo artist, which wasn’t a problem as the whole idea of calling the band by their surnames was to retain their individual identities and they all had solo projects in the pipeline. So Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young played their second gig at an open air music festival near the town of  Woodstock, New York State, in August 1969.

Joni Mitchell couldn’t go to Woodstock due to TV commitments but she wrote about it in a song that became a worldwide hit and had the line ‘and I dreamed I saw the bombers turning into butterflies’, a reference to the carpet bombing taking place in Vietnam by the U.S. Graham Nash had an anti-war song on his first solo album, Songs For Beginners called ‘Military Madness’ that when performed live has a chorus – No More War.

Vietnam lies to the south of China, and had been occupied by the French since the 1850s. Inspired by Chinese and Soviet communism in 1946 nationalist groups rose up and fought a war against the French which culminated in victory in 1954 and the partition of the country with the north declared as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. From then on the regime in the north wanted to unify the country under a single communist regime whereas the government in the south wanted to stay aligned to the west. Initially, the U.S. sent military advisers to South Vietnam but from 1965 active combat units were introduced, and by 1969 more than 500,000 were stationed there.

The Vietnam War was unpopular with the American public. Particularly it was unpopular with young people who saw it as a needless war fought to maintain U.S. prestige. But what made them even angrier was the draft system. We are used to wars being fought by armies where the soldiers have chosen to fight, but the draft system as with national service in the U.K. in the 1950s required all males between the ages of 18 -25 to undergo military service, and in time of war that meant basic training followed by front line combat. Not surprising then that kids who wanted to change the world through peace, love and understanding would be angry about the prospect of picking up a gun and shooting people in South East Asia.

At lunchtime on 4^th May 1970, 200-300 students at Kent State University in Ohio gathered on the university’s Commons, near Taylor Hall to protest against the Vietnam War. It started with the ringing of the campus’s iron Victory Bell and one person gave a short speech. Protests against the war had been taking place on campuses across America in the previous few days. This crowd was peaceful and initially quiet. The Ohio National Guard arrived at the campus and ordered the protesters to disperse. They failed to do so and tear gas was fired into them, causing them to retaliate by throwing stones at the guardsmen. There were 77 guardsmen present that day and 28 of them opened fire on the crowd firing 67 rounds of ammunition in a 13 second burst at the end of which 4 students lay dead on the ground and 9 more were wounded. These unarmed 19 and 20 year old students had been gunned down by the people responsible for protecting them –  for wanting a war to stop.

David Crosby and Neil Young read about it in the next morning’s newspaper. Neil sat down and wrote the song ‘Ohio’ there and then, and CSN&Y went into the studio that afternoon and recorded it. The record sounds raw, it sounds angry, and for me and a lot of other people, hearing that song and understanding what had happened in Ohio was the day that the Hippie dream of peace, love and understanding came face to face with the brutal establishment world that they wanted to change. These days, we see these confrontations played out on our screens where the people rise up against an oppressive regime, demanding democratic change, but, the Ohio shootings were in the country that prides itself on being the home of democracy.

Neil Young Decade

Click on the link above the photo to view the album on CD, vinyl (if available), or as an MP3, or to stream.

Click on the link below to access Amazon Music and then type into the search box ‘Crosby Stills Nash & Young Ohio’ to access the track.