![]() When he appeared on Howard Stern’s radio program in 2013, Graham Nash vividly recounted the circumstances surrounding the creation of “Ohio.” David Crosby, his band mate in CSNY, excitedly called Nash and made an urgent request, which stunned Nash at the time: “Book the (recording) studio right now!” Nash recalled Crosby telling him. David Crosby had written and sung “Long Time Gone,” on the Crosby, Stills and Nash breakthrough album the year before, and “Almost Cut My Hair on déjà vu. After all, Stills had already achieved fame for the unforgettable “For What It’s Worth” (“There’s something happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear”) in the Buffalo Springfield. Within the supergroup Young might have been voted Least Likely to Write a Protest Anthem. He co-wrote “Everybody I Love You,” which might have been embraced by whatever hippies lingered from the Summer of Love, with his pal Stephen Stills. “Country Girl" was one of his then-trademark twisted love songs wrapped around heavy musical backing. On "Helpless" he mused about the serenity of the Ontario town he had left behind to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles. On déjà vu, the highly successful first album consisting of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, released in March 1970, Young's contributions were primarily folk-leaning pop tracks. He had staked his reputation on singing memorable snapshots of twisted love songs-perhaps most famously, “Down by the river/I shot my baby”-that wrapped neatly around catchy, FM radio-friendly guitar riffs, in such songs as “Down by the River,” “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Cinnamon Girl.” Today, of course, Young is defined by his lifelong activism, but in early 1970, before the release of "Ohio," there was no real indication of the protest singer he was about to become. ![]() That same year, Young joined the songwriting supergroup Crosby, Stills, and Nash, for whom he would eventually write "Ohio." ![]() Before “Ohio,” Young had achieved a modicum of fame in Buffalo Springfield and from the appeal of his first two solo albums, the eponymous Neil Young and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which had been released in 1969. “Neil Young underlined just how corrupt and awful the government was, not only about Vietnam.” “What was so important about that song was that it didn’t let the moment die,” David Karen, a sociology professor at Bryn Mawr College tells me. ![]()
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