By the dawn of the Seventies, the protest song was considered as much a relic of the previous decade as the word “groovy,” with notable exceptions like Edwin Starr’s “War,” Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and Bob Dylan’s “George Jackson.” As Arlo Guthrie told Rolling Stone this summer, “The music business went from figuring out how they could make some money selling protest songs to realizing, ‘Well, they don’t really sell that well, so we’ll move on to something else.’ Which they did.”
But the sight of
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