Kent State 1970 and Pittsburgh 2009

It's a huge stretch to make a connection between the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh last week and Kent State, Ohio in 1970.

But the parallels are there if one looks close enough.

The YouTube video above is from the film DOMINOES which features music by the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Crosby Stills Nash Young ( CSNY ), Grateful Dead, Santana, B. B. King, Marvin Gaye, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, Canned Heat, and Richie Havens. DOMINOES covers the electric, turbulent decade of rock, revolution, and the Vietnam War and explores the "domino effect" - where one event causes a similar one, which then causes an additional one, and so on in a linear sequence.

Completed in 1989, it is only now being released.

Neil Young’s OHIO was the anti-war protest anthem to end the DOMINOES decade and the portrait series. Neil Young and CSNY recorded OHIO just after the Ohio National Guard killed four students in anti-war demonstrations at Kent State University provoked by President Nixon’s announcement of the US and South Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The escalation of hostilities in Southeast Asia and the killings at Kent State left the young Vietnam War generation feeling suckered and with the need “to get down to it… should have been done long ago.” It helped to mark the beginning of the end for Richard Nixon.

The spiraling intensity of Neil Young’s chant,” …four dead in OHIO” paces the turmoil within the Nixon-Agnew administration as tax fraud and Watergate scandals forced them to resign despite ending American involvement in Vietnam. OHIO is most dramatic, however, as Neil Young’s raucous guitar underscores evacuation of the last Americans from Vietnam as Saigon fell to the advancing North Vietnamese Army.

Pittsburgh 2009

More on Neil Young's "Ohio".

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