‘For What It’s Worth’: The Buffalo Springfield song written in 15 minutes
Inspiration is the key ingredient for songwriting; once it arrives, tracks can be born in an instant. Over his career, Stephen Stills has crafted countless pieces of music, which were painstaking processes. While many of his efforts are beloved, his signature creation with Buffalo Springfield only took him a matter of minutes to pen.
Before he’d even reached for his notepad, the nucleus for the song had already been kicking around in Stills’ mind; he just needed to tap into it. The year was 1966, and Los Angeles was a city filled with tension as the younger generation immersed themselves in the counterculture movement, which rallied against the belief system of their elders.
As part of the house band in the iconic Whiskey-A-Go-Go, Stills had a front-row seat for the revolution as the kids kicked back against the establishment. Disturbances between the police became a common occurrence, and Stills used the anxious spirit that filled the air as the inspiration behind ‘For What It’s Worth’.
The song was written from anecdotal experience, and Stills didn’t need to delve too deeply into his imagination. In the book Neil Young: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History, Stills explained the origin of ‘For What It’s Worth’. He said: “I had had something kicking around in my head. I wanted to write something about the kids that were on the line over in Southeast Asia that didn’t have anything to do with the device of this mission, which was unravelling before our eyes.”
“Then we came down to Sunset from my place on Topanga with a guy – I can’t remember his name – and there’s a funeral for a bar, one of the favourite spots for high school and UCLA kids to go and dance and listen to music,” he added.
The loss of this bar proved poignant for Stills, who understood the severity of what it meant to the local community, who mourned the institution as if it were a friend. However, rather than let the locals peacefully say goodbye, the ceremony was brought down by riot police.
Stills continued: “(Officials) decided to call out the official riot police because there’s three thousand kids sort of standing out in the street; there’s no looting, there’s no nothing. It’s everybody having a hang to close this bar. A whole company of black and white LAPD in full Macedonian battle array in shields and helmets and all that, and they’re lined up across the street, and I just went, ‘Whoa! Why are they doing this?'”
Although the evening was memorable for all the wrong reasons, it directly led to Stills writing ‘For What It’s Worth’ once he arrived home. He concluded: “There was no reason for it. I went back to Topanga, and that other song turned into ‘For What It’s Worth’, and it took as long to write as it took me to settle on the changes and write the lyrics down. It all came as a piece, and it took about 15 minutes.”
Within weeks of the song being written, ‘For What It’s Worth’ was released as a single while the topic of the riots was still fresh in the fans’ minds. It became their first song to chart in the United States, peaking at seven, and helped them become adored across the land. To this day, it remains their most well-known track.
