The Story about Buffalo Springfield and the Broom

“For What It’s Worth” is a classic. A moving message song written by Stephen Stills that married a sinister arrangement to a set of lyrics that perfectly summed up the anxiety of the uncertain ‘60s. But one of the signature sounds that made that song was something that Neil Young credited to Stan Ross, the engineer for that Buffalo Springfield recording session. In Neil’s biography Shakey, he recalled that “Stan came in and said, ‘You gotta do this one thing to the [beat of the] drum, the snare.” It was a simple request. Get a broom, take a guitar pick, and strum it crisply on the 2 and 4.

The result? A brittle, uncertain pulse that added some extra tension to the backbeat of that song. The sound “of a guitar pick going through a broom, on the straw. That was it.”