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| #Inspiration |
The Hit
Not many songs express their era – even a generic version of it – but Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” still stands as a singular example. If you’ve watch five movies or documentaries about the 1960s, or the Vietnam War, you’ve heard it; hell, if you’ve seen a commercial that references the 60s, you’ve heard it. It had nothing to do with Vietnam, as it happens: Stephen Stills wrote the song after seeing the protest of a curfew on Sunset Boulevard turn into a riot outside a club called Pandora’s Box.
It’s one hell of a song, still and anxious; it puts you in the calm before the storm and holds you there for as long as it plays. The instrumentation is minimal, but brilliantly used to create that tension. Burdened as it is with standing in for an era and old daydreams about making the world beautiful, it takes listening to it with fresh ears to drown out the clichés and just hear it as a piece of music…
…with that in mind, the angst the main players in Buffalo Springfield feel about their music cracks me up a bit. Especially in context.
The Rest of the Story
“But getting back to Buffalo Springfield, I’m glad the music is getting out. Flawed as it is, it’s really genuine. There’s no posing.”
- Stephen Stills
Not many songs express their era – even a generic version of it – but Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” still stands as a singular example. If you’ve watch five movies or documentaries about the 1960s, or the Vietnam War, you’ve heard it; hell, if you’ve seen a commercial that references the 60s, you’ve heard it. It had nothing to do with Vietnam, as it happens: Stephen Stills wrote the song after seeing the protest of a curfew on Sunset Boulevard turn into a riot outside a club called Pandora’s Box.
It’s one hell of a song, still and anxious; it puts you in the calm before the storm and holds you there for as long as it plays. The instrumentation is minimal, but brilliantly used to create that tension. Burdened as it is with standing in for an era and old daydreams about making the world beautiful, it takes listening to it with fresh ears to drown out the clichés and just hear it as a piece of music…
…with that in mind, the angst the main players in Buffalo Springfield feel about their music cracks me up a bit. Especially in context.
The Rest of the Story
“But getting back to Buffalo Springfield, I’m glad the music is getting out. Flawed as it is, it’s really genuine. There’s no posing.”
- Stephen Stills
It is impossible, maybe even ridiculous, to talk about Buffalo Springfield as a one-hit wonder – and that goes well beyond legends like Stills and Neil Young fronting the band. That said, they did not last long as a project – just two years and two albums, with a third Last Time Around coming out after the band broke up. After a short honeymoon period, permanent chaos reigned, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it, “After various drug-related arrests and line-up changes, the group broke up in 1968.”
