The Neil Young song inspired by the Iran–Contra affair
The Kent State shootings will be forever associated not only with the disgraceful actions of US officials in 1970 but also with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s subsequent protest single, ‘Ohio’. A decade after its release, the band tried to capture a political moment in music again, to diminishing returns.
Neil Young had promised David Crosby that he would unite with the band on the condition Crosby’s tackled his addiction issues. After a five-month stint in prison following Crosby’s 1985 arrest for possession of illegal drugs and a firearm, Young was satisfied Crosby had cleaned himself up. He stayed true to his promise, and the iconic quartet reunited to record the second official studio album with the full CSN&Y line-up.
The resulting album, 1988’s American Dream, might’ve been the highest-selling album by Young in the ’80s, but it wasn’t his best songwriting effort. In an attempt to create the cultural resonance of ‘Ohio’, Young constructed a bitter satire of contemporary American politics.
‘American Dream’, the album’s titular track, and its accompanying video chronicled several of the biggest scandals of the ’80s. In the line of fire was televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, presidential nominee Gary Hart’s involvement with Donna Rice, and the Iran Contra Affair with Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall.
The Iran-Contra affair was a secret US arms deal that rocked the political landscape in the late ’80s. The US had traded missiles and other arms in a bid to free Americans held hostage by terrorists in Lebanon, but it then was revealed they had also used funds from the arms deal to support armed conflict in Nicaragua. The controversial deal and the ensuing political fallout threatened to bring down the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
The scandal was first reported in 1986, well into Reagan’s second term, by which point 1,500 American missiles had been sold to Iran for around $30million. An investigation into the unaccounted-for sum of $18m found Oliver North had diverted the missing funds to the Contras in Nicaragua, who used them to acquire weapons.
Although the topic was damning for Reagan, its depiction on ‘American Dream’, along with the fairly obtuse lyrics of “American dream / Don’t know when things went wrong / Might have been when you were young and strong”, meant it missed the Billboard Hot 100 entirely. As did the other three singles from the album, with the exception of ‘Got It Made’, which reached number 69 on the Hot 100 and number one on the Mainstream Rock Tracks Chart.
Ultimately, it wasn’t their best – entirely lacking the counter-cultural resonance they once perfected. Crosby himself admitted as much, saying the recording of American Dream got unnecessarily stretched out. “We did not have, really, the best group of songs to work with,” he said. “Then, even though we did not have enough good songs, we ended up putting fourteen of them on the album. I think that was stupid.”
