- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- The Strawberry Statement was a box-office flop, although the soundtrack The Strawberry Statement is a fine document of late 1960’s rock music.
The Strawberry Statement (Movie Soundtrack) (1970): The Strawberry Statement is a movie about student protests, and its release in June 1970 was bad timing; considering that protests were much more serious by then, due to the fatal shootings of four students by National Guard soldiers at Kent State University early the previous month. Less than two weeks later, two more students were killed by city and state police at historically Black Jackson State College (now Jackson State University); I recall the shootings well (I was still in my freshman year in college at North Carolina State University at the time), though they are much less remembered now than those at Kent State. In any case, The Strawberry Statement was a box-office flop, although the double-LP soundtrack album The Strawberry Statement is a fine document of late 1960’s rock music. Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” is featured on the soundtrack, along with “The Circle Game” (written by Joni Mitchell) as performed by Buffy Sainte-Marie. In 1993, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers recorded a bowdlerized version of “Something in the Air” for their Greatest Hits album. Their recording of “Something in the Air” omits the most revolutionary verse – “Hand out the arms and ammo / We’re going to blast our way through here” – and the song is not included on the reissue of Greatest Hits that came out in 2008. Crosby, Stills and Nash perform “Long Time Gone”, as taken from their first album Crosby, Stills and Nash (1969). Two songs by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young from their album Déjà Vu (1970), “Helpless” and “Our House”, are also on the soundtrack album. Two other songs on The Strawberry Statement, “The Loner” and “Down by the River”, are also attributed to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on the record labels. However, these songs are actually the first two singles by Neil Young as a solo artist, released during the first half of 1969; at least the songs are properly identified on the back album cover. The article in Wikipedia on the film The Strawberry Statement (there is no separate article on the soundtrack album The Strawberry Statement) has several other errors: The song “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is shown as the Crosby, Stills and Nash song on The Strawberry Statement, rather than “Long Time Gone”; and Plastic Ono Band is shown as the recording artist on “Give Peace A Chance”, when the song was actually sung by the cast in The Strawberry Statement. The soundtrack for The Strawberry Statement also features the well-known tone poem by Richard Strauss that opens the legendary science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (“Thus Spake Zarathustra”), as originally performed by Karl Böhm conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.