The Buffalo Springfield - "For What It’s Worth" (1967)

For What It’s Worth is Stephen Stills’ astonishingly successful effort to take the fall 1966 battles between Hollywood’s Sunset Strip police and teenagers and use it as a microcosm of what was happening on the streets, and in the hearts and minds, of America during one of the most tumultuous times in our history. Rolling Stone in its book Rock of Ages called the song “the first explicit document of our unbridgeable generational divide.”

The twenty-one-year-old Stills (born January 3, 1945, in Dallas) had come to Los Angeles after spending time in Nicaragua, and seeing cops busting kids’ heads outside the Whisky-A-Go-Go and Pandora’s Box clubs while enforcing a curfew had a galvanizing effect on him. One measure of the song’s success is that unlike so many other social-commentary pieces of that era, its lyrics not only are not outdated, but seem every bit as keenly observant and prescient today as they did over four decades ago. Another is that its opening guitar chords still stand as one of the most indelible moments in rock history; little wonder that the chords have been sampled by rap artists and have taken on a musical life of their own.

The stellar quintet of Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Richie Furay, Dewey Martin, and Bruce Palmer formed Buffalo Springfield in Los Angeles in 1966. Stills had met Young in April 1965 while they were touring in Canada with their respective groups, and met Furay later that year. He auditioned unsuccessfully for the Monkees, tried to put together a group with Van Dyke Parks, and invited Furay to join his then-nonexistent band in California. As related by Richie Unterberger, Young’s group had broken up, and he and the group’s bassist Bruce Palmer decided to drive from Toronto to Los Angeles in hopes of finding Stills, for whom they had no address or phone number. On a now-legendary day around the first of April 1966, Young and Palmer, having failed to find Stills in L.A., were headed north to San Francisco in a Sunset Boulevard traffic jam when Stills and Furay passed them in a van going the opposite direction. “On a collective hunch that a hearse with Ontario license plates could belong to no one but Neil Young,” they did a U-turn and managed to catch up with the Canadians. Buffalo Springfield was born, with the addition of another Canadian, Dewey Martin, on drums.—

Within just a few weeks of forming, they were opening for The Byrds on a brief California tour. Then the Springfield settled in as resident band for the hottest spot on the Sunset Strip, the Whisky-A-Go-Go. Stills was actually in San Francisco when the Sunset Strip police battles took place (he saw them on TV), but he felt a personal understanding of the cultural battle. Michael Walker: “Stills knew a budding revolution when he saw one, and promptly wrote For What It’s Worth. With its chilling guitar harmonics and peer-to-peer admonishment to hassled longhairs everywhere . . . For What It’s Worth was a rallying cry and proof that rock could create music as vital as it was hummable.”—

Their first single, Young’s wonderful Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing, was widely ignored despite some regional action, and a second single, Everybody’s Wrong, stiffed. The third was quite impossible to disregard. Paul Williams, selecting For What It’s Worth as one of the 100 best singles of all time, calls it “one of the greatest topical songs of its era—but, if I may say so, the record is even better than the song.” That’s because its melody, performance, and overall sound match the power of the lyrics. “The sound of For What It’s Worth is absolutely electrifying . . . First thing we hear: Neil Young’s gentle, penetrating, hauntingly beautiful guitar, followed by an equal, awesome gentleness in the rhythm and vocal performances. The tempo achieved is unique to this record; and it’s certainly a rare rock and roll performance that draws its power from its modesty. Stephen Stills’ vocal is brilliantly underplayed: the calmer his voice is, the more we feel the strength of his conviction and the earnestness of his simple request that we direct our attention here.”

“The message is spiritual as well as political,” suggests Williams. “Stills criticizes the police state and the paranoia it creates, its destruction of spirit, and at the same time ... cautions its listeners that they themselves have the power to determine whether or not they will let fear rule their lives . . . The song is a call to awareness and, at least implicitly, resistance, but there is also a plea for brotherhood, a rejection of ‘us and them’ thinking. In short, most of the vital issues are touched on, issues that confuse us to this day.”— The Staple Singers, who were in the process of crossing over from gospel, hit the charts with their own distinctive version of the song in September 1967. Amazingly, this proved to be the only hit by the virtual supergroup, from which Stills and Young went on to individual stardom, with Furay co-founding the group Poco.