We discuss the attempts made at the end of the sixties and at the beginning of the seventies in order to get a consistent N-point amplitude involving the lightest hadrons, such as the pion, that then brought to string theory containing massless gluons and gravitons but not massless pions. This gives us the opportunity to remember the period in which I first met Peter Freund and also to summarise the results of a recent work where an N-point extension of the Lovelace-Shapiro model is constructed.