OPINION: Singing 'Four dead in Ohio,' CSNY brought a generation together

Glenn Gass is a professor of music at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he has taught a series of courses that he created on the history of rock and pop music.

Forty years ago, in May 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's recording of Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock" was saturating the airwaves. Their new single, "Teach Your Children," was following closely behind, and their Déjà Vu album was heading to No. 1 on the charts.

It's hard to overstate the band's importance at that moment. CSNY appeared as the banner-carriers for the '60s promise that the power of the Baby Boom's sheer numbers and youthful sensibilities would change the world for the better. With the Beatles' partnership recently dissolved and Bob Dylan in seclusion, this supergroup was the most popular and powerful band in the world, and it seemed willing to put its influence to positive use.

The band proved that with "Ohio," a single written by Neil Young and rush-released after Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of protesting college students on the campus of Kent State University on May 4, 1970, killing four and wounding nine.

The raw facts are still breathtaking - a gasp literally goes through my own Midwestern classroom when I state the blunt facts and ask my students to imagine their roommate, their friends or themselves lying dead on the ground for protesting against a war that people their age were expected to fight, like it or not.

To capture the Kent State killings in song required something specific and defiant - a true sense of the collective outrage shared by young people (and by a large number of suddenly alarmed Silent Majority parents). "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Get Together" were not the templates for such a moment.

The brute force of the event was met with brute force on a record fueled by scorched-earth electric guitars, Young's siren-cry vocals and the Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonies that sounded searing, not sweet. It was a record that held the president accountable, by name (and was, of course, banned from most AM radio stations). This was not a new "CSNY single," but rather a conduit for a cry of rage from a generation that had just learned how high the price of dissent in America could become.

I always play "Ohio" twice in my History of Rock Music class: once when discussing CSNY's career, when the song is accompanied by the usual student murmurings and texting glows, and again after talking about Kent State, when the classroom is dead quiet and dark.

"Woodstock" may have been a hit single, but in 1970 the Woodstock spirit was fading fast, beaten up at Altamont and gunned down in Ohio. Yet the Baby Boom generation was probably never as united as it was in the weeks following Kent State, and the song contributed much to that sense of unity. Colleges closed and authorities did all they could to disperse young people as far and as widely as possible, but Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young helped forge a connection that made everyone feel a bit less alone, a bit less powerless in the face of such evil.

When they sang "Soldiers are cutting us down," there was no question about who was "us." Except for the half dozen or so people who actually enjoyed Up With People concerts, the young people of 1970 had emerged as a remarkably unified group: a counterculture in full rebellion against adult authority, from the president to their parents and teachers.

The baby boomers coalesced as a generation on Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles appeared on the "Ed Sullivan Show," and they were raised by the Beatles and Bob Dylan to look to music as a common language and a guidepost, rather than mere entertainment. Sgt. Pepper, the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock had already proven music's power to help define a social and lifestyle rebellion, and the messages of explicit protest inspired by folk and folk-rock had proven music's power as a rallying point. David Crosby railed against the madness of 1968 in "Long Time Coming," James Brown chanted "Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud," and John Lennon pleaded with the world to "Give Peace a Chance" as the decade that began with "The Twist" drew to its chaotic close.

'Ohio" upped the stakes of protest songs, in response to an event that had dramatically upped the stakes of protest. It suddenly seemed possible to address any event or attitude in the most specific of terms, and rock suddenly seemed to have grown, like its fans, a little older, warier and wiser. 1971 saw the release of Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On," Sly & the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On," and George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, which paved the way for future cause-specific charity concert fundraisers.

Graham Nash released his own calls to action with "Military Madness" and "Chicago" in 1971, and - collectively, individually and in various permutations - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and their allies kept rock's social conscience alive, even as disco arrived to officially bury the '60s.

Actually, Young himself had already buried that era in the sand, alongside a newspaper headline calling for Richard Nixon's resignation, on the cover of his 1974 "On the Beach" album. He then banished any remaining '60s naiveté in his harrowing "Tonight's the Night," recorded in 1973 but released in 1975, at the midpoint of the decade that began with the Jefferson Airplane singing, "We are all outlaws in the eyes of America" and ended with the insipid "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" at the top of the Billboard charts.

By the arrival of the new century, any sense of "we" seemed to have vanished. Deep fissures formed within a generation that had grown up and grown apart. Many former Vietnam War protesters supported a new war as the new "eyes of America." In response, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young rekindled their activism with the Freedom of Speech '06 Tour, combining new political songs like "Let's Impeach the President" with old ones revived in reaction to the Iraq War. The concerts met with a clash of cheers and boos that showed just how deep the divide had grown, even among the group's fans.

Forty years ago, though, we were together, and Neil Young stepped up with a powerful and beautiful response to one of our nation's most terrible moments. In this era of tea party anger, it is worth remembering just how fractious the country was back then, and the price that was paid when Americans viewed each other as the enemy. Thanks in no small part to "Ohio," the country is not likely to forget the events at Kent State and, hopefully, their lessons.