Neil Young's Ohio the greatest protest record

Publish date: 2022-04-09
Neil YoungNeil 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

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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