No one took responsibility for the order to start shooting It is not even known if someone gave it or it was the result of the nervousness of the deployed soldiers. In just one minute, several compact bursts of shots followed one another:four students fell dead, one more was left paraplegic. And a silence fell on the Kent campus that lasted only a few seconds, because the whole world would hear the echo of what had happened.
Facts, down to earth
Many media silenced the event, others gave it wide coverage. May 18 Life published it on the cover along with an extensive report inside. David Crosby –former member of the notable Californian band The Byrds, a pioneer in mixing folk and rock – bought a copy on the way to a rehearsal with the “superband” Crosby, Stills, Nash &Young . Upon arrival, he discussed the news with his colleagues, and they all agreed that it was a sufficiently important fact to turn it into a message so that anyone who could hear it acted accordingly.
Neil Young –Canadian, ex-Buffalo Springfield, the latest to join a coalition so stellar that she didn't even need to remember his last name and went by his initials CSN &Y– she took his guitar and disappeared into a nearby forest. After a few hours he came back with the handwriting of Ohio and he played it for his companions. CSN&Y had a single coming out, Teach your children , but contravening all the laws of the recording industry, they decided to enter the studio to record the new song and edit it as soon as possible. Nothing was left behind; they knew the line “Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming” would get them into trouble, but they went ahead.
During that summer of 1970 Ohio it climbed slowly but relentlessly up the charts, competing on the airwaves and on the charts with more banal tracks from the Carpenters, the Jackson 5 and even the Ode to Joy by Miguel Ríos, but also with the Ball of Confusion (That’s what the World is Today) of the Temptations and the War , coming from the repertoire of said band but re-recorded by the tremendous soulman Edwin Starr with the precision and forcefulness of one of those legendary journalistic editorials of the Washington Post , which stirred consciences and hips that hot summer. Something was definitely going on and music was part of it.
Guitars vs. Artillery
In reality, music had been part of the protest since the start of the Vietnam conflict and beyond, from the birth of a counterculture in the mid-50s who became involved with various social movements fighting against racism, oppression, classism (see Emerging doubts. The beginnings of the anti-war movement in Contemporary No. 6:1965, American escalation in Vietnam). Since the 1920s, genres such as country and the blues they had accepted the heritage of using popular music as a mechanism for the transmission of news, often tragic, but in most cases without delving deeply into the need for a reaction; now the stance was evident and intended to provoke a direct reaction in the listener.
Folk singers as Woody Guthrie –who came to record on his guitar the motto “This machine kills fascists”–, Cisco Houston or Pete Seeger “fought” in World War II contributing their songs to the American war effort. Although of pacifist tendencies, they considered that the fight against Nazism prevailed over other considerations. However, their ideology, which brought them closer to communism, overshadowed their career after the end of the war and the outbreak of the Cold War. The author's song, with popular roots, took refuge in the big cities –mainly New York's Village– while throughout the 50s the thriving rock'n'roll it became an escape route from the new American dream and spread not only to every corner of the United States, but to the rest of the planet. It would be a while until the conscience-catalyzing power of the folk and the expansive of rock come together, and that longing bore fruit in the voice and verses of Bob Dylan .
Dylan had made quite a splash with songs like Masters of War and Only a Pawn in the Game , which he came to perform at the March on Washington, the same one in which Reverend King said that thing about "I Have a Dream"... However, he soon realized it, after listening to the "electrified" version that The Byrds made of his theme Mr. Tambourine Man that he was going to reach many more people if he embedded his message in a rock structure. And so he did, despite the reluctance of the folkie community. that hitherto he had revered him; famous is the boo he received at the Newport festival, when he took the stage at the 1965 edition accompanied by The Band instead of doing it, as usual, only with his harmonica and an acoustic guitar. However, the fuse was lit. In successive years, rock served almost as the main weapon of propaganda for a good number of social causes
The years of German lead and vinyl
In some parts of Europe the reflection of this symbiosis reached much more intense extremes; In the turbulent Germany of the 70s, the so-called years of lead, it was the case that the same commune where the terrorist group Faction of the Red Army was born, the krautrock gang emerged –the runaway and highly ideological German rock of the 70s– Amon Duul , one of the most important of the time. In fact, part of the R.A.F. It ended up being known as Baader-Meinhof –in reference to the surnames of two of its best-known and even mythologized members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof– just as many rock superbands did in previous years, such as the aforementioned Crosby, Stills , Nash &Young. Coincidence or reflection, rock, counterculture and politics fed each other during the 60s and 70s to extremes that are difficult to calibrate; In fact, in the wing of the prison where the German terrorists were imprisoned –and where several of them died in mysterious circumstances– it was negotiated that there would not be a lack of a record player, on which they listened profusely to contemporary krautrock .
Time, perhaps, put things in their place. Critics of the peace movement argued that opposition to the Vietnam War waned as soon as the draft ended – heavily criticized on classic tracks like Fortunate Son (1969) by southerners Creedence Clearwater Revival–, but by then the job was done, and in 1975 the United States evacuated Saigon. Rock music, except for isolated cases, abandoned the first line of active politics to dedicate itself to a task, no less important, but not exactly classifiable as activism, of social correction; Charity macro-concerts began to proliferate, such as the Bangla Desh (1971) or the Concert for Kampuchea (1979), the latter organized, curiously, to mitigate with its profits the famine caused by the excesses of the war in Cambodia, to which it did not The presence of a Vietnamese people's army a few years before idealized by the Western counterculture was foreign...
The culmination of this process was the “Live Aid” held simultaneously at Wembley (London) and JFK (Philadelphia) stadiums in 1985, which was seen by millions of people simultaneously around the world. the planet and served to raise an equally millionaire amount and massively raise awareness of the problems of the continent in an era devoted to Epicureanism. However, something had changed; The presence of bands such as Queen, Bowie, Madonna or U2 is remembered from that historic event, which, except for the Irish, were not artists who left their mark for another commitment that was not pure entertainment. Bob Dylan was also there... in what is considered the worst performance of his career, performing a Blowin 'in the Wind to which hardly anyone paid attention, except to denigrate the decadence of its author. Times were definitely changing, and Ohio had been far behind. It has been playing on the oldies stations for many years. like just another song, although there was a moment when it wasn't.