I just watched a You Tube clip that showed Graham Nash telling an interviewer how he, David Crosby, Steven Stills, and Neil Young, the members of CSNY, came to record their song, “Ohio.”
You will remember that it came right after the National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. They were Alison Krauss, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder.
The date was May 4, 1970.
Our own National Guard troops opened fire on a group of unarmed students. All of them were about 19. A few had thrown rocks. All had hurled imprecations.
Imprecations and stones against live rounds and the fury of Richard Nixon’s “tin soldiers,” as Neil Young’s lyric has it.
The power of this song was, I think, one of the things that unified resistance against Nixon, a thug and a scoundrel.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon comin’, we’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drummin’; four dead in Ohio.” That’s the opening verse.
The tune as a whole, with Stills’ guitar, Young’s vocals, the minor key and dirge-like tempo, and the harmony of that much beloved band. Moving stuff. I felt compelled to fire up the stereo system and once again listen to that song, which Young wrote in about 90 minutes, and which the band recorded, start to finish, in another 90 minutes. I turned it up loud.
It made me angry all over again. It grabbed me by the lapels and shook me. Just as it did back in 1970.
This is the power of music, the power of what happens when four musical geniuses, cranky and argumentative though they may have been, sit down with anger and a common purpose.
So, here’s what I want to know: Where is our Anthem of Anger for today? Where are the members of CSNY when we need them? Where is the music that will bring tears to our eyes, boiling anger to our hearts, and fierce resolve to march and resist until change comes?
Where is the 1970-like unity of young people who have had enough of the Trump* cult’s ridiculous charade, of the threat to their common future that Trump* and his thugs represent?
CSNY has broken apart. Expecting those worthies to step once again into the breach may be an expectation too far. But if not them, who?
Who has both the integrity and the audience to come up with an Anthem of Anger for today?
And upon which of Trumps*’ crimes can it be based?
Loss of food stamps for the poor? Children in cages? Use of international politics to enhance his election bid? The rape and pillage of our public lands? The rise of the Nazi Right? Or are none of these as blatantly ugly as the murder, by our own troops, of four American college students?
What will it take? Will it take the murder of more of our own students by our own people?
What will it take? Tell me. I need to know. Because I’m as angry as hell and am totally fed up with this shit. I badly need to see a way forward.
-JFT