«Cros had also taken me to the Airplane House, where Jefferson Airplane lived. There I met Grace Slick, who was beatiful, sang great, was topless, and blew my mind. That was the first time I met her. The whole San Francisco scene was something I had never seen. It was overwhelming. (...)
So anyway, we're in Butano Canyon at Steve and Leo's place, and the tragedy at Kent State had just happened. Time magazine had a picture of the girl, Allison Krause, after the National Guard had killed her and three other victims. We were looking at it together. She was lying there on some pavement with another student kneeling down looking at her, as I remember.
(foto: John Filo)
The weight of that picture cut us to the quick. We had heard and seen the news on TV, but this picture was the first time we had to stop and reflect. It was different before the Internet, before social networking to say the least. So full of this feelings of disbelief and sadness. I picked up my guitar and started to play some chords and immediately wrote "Ohio"; four dead in Ohio. The next day, we went into the studio in LA and cut the song. Before a week had passed it was all over the radio. It was really fast for those times; really fast. All the stations played "Ohio." There was no censoring by programmers. Programing services were not even around; DJs played whatever they wanted on the FM stations. We were underground on FM. There was no push-back for criticizing the government. This was America. Freedom of speech was taken very seriously in our era. We were speaking for our generation. We were speaking for ourselves. It rang true. The U.S government has still not apologized to the families of the fallen four of Ohio.»
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