President Obam is working today, speaking at the Air Force Academy graduation, but tonight, one half of a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band will play at a high-dollar fundraiser with the president.
Approximately 60 people will pay $35,800 — roughly $2.14 million total — to have dinner with Obama in Silicon Valley tonight. The fundraiser “will also include a performance by David Crosby and Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, and Nash,” according to the White House pool report.
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“From the beginning they’ve been politically astute folk troubadours whose songs often address real events,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which received the band in 1997, says of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (CSNY). “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,” the band sang in the opening line of one of their earliest hits, “Ohio,” about the Kent State shooting in 1968. “Four dead in Ohio / . . . / Soldiers are cutting us down,” they added.
More recently, Nash wrote a song denouncing the Obama administration’s prosecution of Bradley Manning, the Army private who leaked thousands of classified documents to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. “What I did was show some truth to the working man / What I did was blow the whistle and the games began,” the song, “Almost Gone (The Ballad of Bradley Manning),” says from the perspective of Manning.
Nash defended the song last month, saying that “With all due respect, the powers that be that run this entire planet cannot afford Bradley Manning to prevail, and they cannot afford Assange to prevail and they can’t afford WikiLeaks to last.”
After Crosby and Nash fundraiser, Obama will go to another fundraiser — this one, at the Fox Theater in L.A. — where musician Ben Harper will perform.
