I recently saw Stevie Nicks in concert. You might know her from such bands as Fleetwood Mac and their multi-platinum album Rumours (Apple Music/Spotify). You also might know that she has a had a very successful solo career post-Fleetwood Mac.
<side note>: She joined Fleetwood Mac as a package deal when her then-partner Lindsey Buckingham was invited to join the band. His solo career gave us “Holiday Road” from the film National Lampoon’s Vacation:
A song that has the misfortune of featuring barking dogs at roughly the 2:00 mark for a movie that featured this scene:
“Holiday Road” has had a lasting legacy—in addition to being featured in the various Vacation movies, including a country-western version from 2015’s Vacation, it’s been featured in advertising , including two ads from rival carmakers…a re-worked version from Honda and a cover from Infiniti. More-recently, it was used to great effect in the excellent series The Bear in season 2, episode 4.
</side note>
At any rate, in 2022, Nicks released a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s 1966 song “For What It’s Worth”, a song you probably know from every movie about the Vietnam War ever.
To refresh your memory, here’s the song:
However, while this song is most-associated with the Vietnam War, it’s actually a protest song against curfews on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood that were imposed in the mid-60s:
The well-connected history of Buffalo Springfield is interesting (to me at least).
Formed in 1966 by Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Bruce Palmer, Dewey Martin and Richie Furay, we can thank Rick James for the formation of the band.
Yes, that Rick James. The guy that held a woman captive and burned her with a crack pipe Rick James.
In the mid-Sixties, Rick James went AWOL from the US Navy, moving to Toronto and forming the Mynah Birds with Neil Young, who eventually invited Bruce Palmer to join the band. Then Rick James got arrested for desertion, leaving Neil and Bruce holding the band’s gear. So they pawned it and drove to Los Angeles to track down Stephen Stills, who Neil had met previously in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Initially unsuccessful in finding him (LA is huge), they apparently just happened to be driving down the Sunset Strip on the day before they were to depart for San Francisco and spotted him going the other direction.
This led to the formation of Buffalo Springfield, which led to the creation of “For What It’s Worth”. And because Rick James didn’t want to be in the Navy, we got not only Buffalo Springfield, but Crosby, Stills & Nash when Stephen Stills joined up with David Crosby (and his walrus mustache) and Graham Nash (a name I can’t see without thinking of “Gray Ham“) and, by extension, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young when Neil Young joined the band.
And, of course, Neil Young has had a long solo career—who doesn’t know “Rockin’ in the Free World”?
In, addition, he’s often considered the “Godfather of Grunge” due to his influential role in shaping the genre’s sound and ethos. While grunge became synonymous with bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam in the 1990s, its roots can be traced back to Young’s raw, guitar-driven music from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Young’s distinctive style, characterized by distorted guitars, feedback, and deeply personal lyrics, laid the groundwork for the gritty, angst-ridden sound that defined grunge. His album “Rust Never Sleeps” is particularly cited as a key influence on many grunge musicians. Additionally, Young’s authenticity and willingness to experiment resonated with the DIY ethic of the grunge movement, solidifying his status as a pioneering figure in the genre.
So, indirectly, we can thank Rick James for grunge, kind of. If you squint. And discount the influences of such luminaries as Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix and even Iggy Pop.
Rick James bounced back, giving us “Super Freak”:
Which was sampled by MC Hammer for “U Can’t Touch This”:
I feel like MC Hammer wouldn’t be as well-known without “U Can’t Touch This” as it was his biggest hit. If Rick James hadn’t been arrested for going AWOL, would the Mynah Birds have stayed together and our reality diverged? Would we never have had Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Neil Young (and his ill-fated Pono music service), Dave Chappelle saying “I’m Rick James, Bitch”, MC Hammer’s giant pants, Melissa Etheridge’s kids and Stevie Nicks covering “For What It’s Worth” as the fifth song in her set at Lucas Oil Live at WinStar World Casino in Oklahoma on May 10th, 2024?
James Burke might call it the pinball effect. Others, the Butterfly Effect. At any rate, it’s interesting, at least to me, how one guy’s decision to “jump ship” from the Navy in the mid-60s reverberates even today.
Anyway, back to “For What It’s Worth”. As mentioned, it’s forever-associated in the American conscience with the Vietnam War, thanks for it’s use in a lot of movies about the Vietnam War.
But rolling forward a couple of decades, it was used to great effect in the opening sequence to the 2005 Nicholas Cage film Lord of War:
And sampled in “He Got Game” by Public Enemy for the soundtrack of the 1998 Denzel Washington film He Got Game:
“He Got Game” featured Stephen Stills singing parts of “For What It’s Worth” rather than Public Enemy sampling the lyrics, which means Stills was, at some point, in the studio with this guy:
Anyhow, all this was a long-winded reason for me to gift the world this unnecessary gift:
Five minutes of the opening notes of “For What It’s Worth” so you can make “that scene” in your Vietnam War movie even longer!