‘Ohio’: David Crosby on the “high point” of CSNY’s career
There are always certain unwarranted expectations that come with being in a supergroup. Everyone in the band is already one of the finest musicians in the world, so it’s almost expected that they’d be able to make that same kind of magic once they actually combine their creative mindsets under one roof, right? In the case of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, that’s mostly true, but David Crosby admitted that even he couldn’t have predicted what happened when working on the track ‘Ohio’.
However, understanding the appeal of CSNY means going back to why they made music in the first place. Throughout their short time together, their tunes were as much about reporting as they were about the greater problems with the world. For every heart-aching song that Graham Nash contributed, Neil Young always offset him with a more cynical bent to the lyrics.
No matter what kind of lyric surrounded everything, the harmonies made every one of them go down easy. There would be sentimental songs, angry protest tracks, and often moments where the two of them would combine, like when they transformed Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ into something much more fierce.
But out of all their political agendas, ‘Ohio’ hit far too close to home. Right as they were riding high, the Kent State shootings made all of the violence of political unrest look frighteningly real. Whereas many future rock legends were on the scene when it happened, like Chrissie Hynde and Joe Walsh, Young knew the best way to make sense of it would be to write about it.
And even by Young’s standards, ‘Ohio’ holds absolutely nothing back. Whereas most of their songs did try to have a little bit of a silver lining around everything, Young is disgusted with the way that he’s seeing his fellow man behave in this song, with the backing vocals practically crying for those poor lost souls who lost their lives for the crime of speaking their minds.
Even though Crosby was far more in tune with the harmonic structure of the tunes at this stage, he couldn’t deny that this was a major peak for the group, saying, “For me, ‘Ohio’ was a high point of the band, a major point of validity. There we were, reacting to reality, dealing with it on the highest level we could – relevant, immediate. It named names and pointed the finger. It said ‘Nixon.’ I was so moved that I completely lost it at the end of the song.”
Despite having a moment of genuine camaraderie, though, this would end up being one of the last hurrahs for the group. Because if you’re Neil Young, you’re not going to be confined to just one band, and almost as soon as they hit their stride, Young left everyone out to dry by launching his solo career with records like Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps.
Still, ‘Ohio’ might be one of the true watermarks of Young’s career in terms of capturing the spirit of the times. He wrote the song and can pretty much do whatever he wants with it, but even if he performs it these days, it’s never going to sound the same without those harmonies soaring behind him.
