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The last time Jimi Hendrix worked at Record Plant New York was May 15, 1970, one week before the Woodstock<\/em> album\u2019s release and the same date that the shootings at Kent State appeared on the cover of Life<\/em> magazine. The black & white photographs startled a nation and changed the course of the Vietnam War. David Crosby picked up his own copy of the magazine from a grocery-store newsstand and stared at it in tears before handing it to Neil Young whose response was to grab a guitar, walk out into the woods, and write \u201cOhio<\/em>,\u201d one of the greatest protest songs of all-time. In his biography, Wild Tales<\/em>, Graham Nash remembers what happened next:<\/p>\n \u201cCroz immediately called me and said, \u2018We need to be in the studio right now.<\/em>\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018What is this all about<\/em>?\u2019 I asked him.\u2018It\u2019s a song we\u2019ve got to cut immediately<\/em>,\u2019 he insisted. \u2018Round up the guys<\/em>\u2026\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cguys\u201d were all planning to be together in LA to rehearse for their next tour, while Stills was already down there working on his first solo LP at Record Plant Studio A with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) engineer Bill Halverson behind the console.<\/p>\n CSNY wasn\u2019t a Record Plant client, though their first session as a band took place at the Record Plant New York. Once out in LA, the band preferred the more low-key Heider\u2019s Studio Three, which had originally been built for the Beach Boys to evade their corporate overseers over at Capitol. In comparison to the Record Plant, which had already become a scene, Nash recalls, \u201cHeider\u2019s was a beautiful little dump of a place. We recorded there because it was private, off the beaten track<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, Heider\u2019s Studio Three was booked the night of the \u201cOhio<\/em>\u201d session, so they used Stills\u2019s time over at Record Plant Studio A instead. Halverson rented one of his favorite 3M 24-tracks from Heider, raided the Record Plant microphone closet for an expensive German vocal mic, and hired them a new rhythm section.<\/p>\n The assistant on the date, Mike D. Stone, remembers, \u201cThey each came into the studio individually. I remember Neil coming in and going into his own corner. Graham Nash came into the control room and introduced himself; he was probably one of the few musicians that ever did that to me. They all seemed so isolated from each other, until they sang.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe mood was very intense<\/em>,\u201d Halverson adds, \u201cI\u2019ve been around those personalities for a long time, and the four of them take over a room. That night they were bent on getting it right and were on a mission. We set up and they fiddled around for a while, and I don\u2019t recall us doing more than two or three takes of the song with live vocals, live harmonies and everybody chiming in<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n The band picked \u201cFind the Cost of Freedom<\/em>\u201d for the B-side and, to record the song, Halverson arranged four, facing folding chairs inches apart, with one mic set up for Stills\u2019s guitar. They did a few quick takes, Halverson doubled their voices, applied filtering to even it all out, and had a master track finished in less than a half hour. Together, they \u201cgang mixed\u201d both songs on the studio\u2019s Hidley speakers and had the entire single done by dawn.<\/p>\n Coincidentally, Atlantic Records President Ahmet Ertegun was in Los Angeles and stopped by the Record Plant for a listen. Graham Nash tells the rest of the story: \u201c\u2019Listen, man, we want it out now,\u2019 <\/em>we told him. \u2018This is too big a deal. The country has started shooting its own children<\/em>.\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018But you\u2019ve got<\/em> \u201cTeach Your Children\u201d going to number one<\/em>,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n \u2018Pull it!<\/em>\u2019 I told him.<\/p>\n Ertegun was incredulous. \u2018Graham, you\u2019re going to have a number-one hit<\/em>!\u2019<\/p>\n \u2018I don\u2019t care. Pull it.<\/em>\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In less than two weeks, the song hit the FM radio airwaves. \u201cOhio<\/em>\u201d, along with Jimi\u2019s \u201cStar Spangled Banner<\/em>,\u201d amped up the anti-war movement in America that summer. With Jimi finally out of Record Plant NY, working exclusively at Electric Lady for the remaining months of his life, a band of anti-war demonstrators late-one-night rappelled off the 10th<\/sup> floor roof and raided the Selective Service records office on the floor below. Nobody ever found out who at the Record Plant let them in.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The last time Jimi Hendrix worked at Record Plant New York was May 15, 1970, one week before the Woodstock album\u2019s release and the same date that the shootings at Kent State appeared on the cover of Life magazine. The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":916,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,18,3,17,16],"tags":[54,56,53,55,52],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-film","category-music","category-stories","category-vault","category-witnesses","tag-ohio","tag-56","tag-csny","tag-may-4","tag-record-plant"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.recordplantdiaries.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}