Heroes: Phil Ochs
V magazine, 2003
Not every cult figure of the '60s screams to be found. Singer-songwriter Phil Ochs could have been Bob Dylan and did make some of the most ambitious war ballads of his day, but something about his sound and personality led to the other side of fame.
Phil Ochs considered himself a “singing journalist,” and his beat was as broad as the average newspaper reporter’s is specific: the landscape of the ’60s, promise and betrayal, race and class, war and peace, youth and birth—and death. All of it found its way into his songs—folky jibes with titles like “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore,” “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” and “The War Is Over.” He is often called a protest singer, but that label is more useless than most. If his songs were the aural equivalent of picket signs, they were also complex and intensely beautiful, both in arrangement and content, and, while the politics may be dated and the targets might have died off, his themes—of growing up and being disappointed and searching and scared—are timeless. But even if he does fall under the genre of ’60s protest, he’s no historical footnote: his impatience with social inequality and a wheels-off government mired in war unfortunately couldn’t be more relevant today.
A cult figure isn’t much without a mythology, and Ochs’s story is as romantic and tragic as the decade he described. Although he got in at the ground floor of the folk movement—moving to New York City’s Greenwich Village from Ohio in 1961 at age 20, wife and child in tow—he was immediately overshadowed by Bob Dylan, and was then-on often dismissed as a second-rate imitation. This perception is unfair, at least in hindsight: where Dylan rambled through the halls of his mind in search of poetry, Ochs was more concerned with telling you the house was burning down. There is something thrilling about hearing his anthem “The War Is Over,” which Ochs released in 1969; it could easily pertain to Bush’s Baghdad as much as to Nixon’s Saigon:
Fading rhythms of a fading land
Prove your courage in the proud parade
Trust your leaders, where mistakes are almost never made
And they’re afraid that I’m afraid
I’m afraid the war is over
Between 1964 and 1974, Ochs released seven albums. His first, All the News That’s Fit to Sing, addressed Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of civil-rights leader Medgar Evers. Early singles like “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” were fairly direct, but Ochs soon began to operate on a number of levels: “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” wasn’t a heartfelt plea but a parody—a list of all the clichés the left has ever used.
He wanted to be the “Elvis Presley of the left,” as he joked early on, and his songs were basically pop in orchestration. They had big hooks, were occasionally layered with pianos and harpsichord, sometimes with little more than his voice and a guitar. “Rehearsals for Retirement” (1968) is a world-weary sigh accompanied only by piano. “Pleasures of the Harbor” (1967) is a fatalistic escape fantasy that floats by on an elaborate Beach Boys-esque cushion of strings. The biting “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” (1969) is a sarcastically jaunty ragtime number inspired by the murder of Kitty Genovese, the New York City woman who was stabbed to death on the street although forty people heard her screams for help; it proved a swift and thorough takedown of middle-class apathy. “Friends” almost caught on before it was banned from many radio stations for its marijuana references. Ochs never did see chart success, although Joan Baez covered “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” and took it to the Top 40.
In 1969, Ochs played Carnegie Hall. The performance was released as a live album, Gunfight at Carnegie Hall, which was a critical success. But it was the beginning of the end. Thereafter, he released and toured to diminishing critical and commercial returns. He created an alter ego named John Train, which he told friends was responsible for his drinking and pot smoking. Soon he was playing concerts in a gold-lamé Elvis-style suit, the product of his theory that the next American revolution would be led by a hybrid of Elvis and Che Guevara.
Which he essentially was. So it’s somehow appropriate that he both self-destructed and was destroyed. As the folk market died in the early ’70s and pop stardom proved elusive, Ochs recorded his last album of original material, 1970’s Greatest Hits, with Van Dyke Parks, the swami of obscurity who wrote lyrics for the Beach Boys’ aborted Smile album. Ochs posed for the cover in his Elvis suit and in a glint of self-awareness, the back cover read, “50 Phil Ochs fans can’t be wrong!” There was nowhere left to go.
Suffering from writer’s block and depression over his commercial prospects, Ochs co-hosted a concert for Chilean refugees in 1974 and 1975’s “War Is Over” celebration concert in Central Park, but was quiet on the recording front. During a trip to Costa Rica in early 1976, his throat was slashed in a robbery attempt, damaging his voice. Later that year he hanged himself in the bathroom of his sister’s Long Island home. He was 35.
There is something incredibly romantic about Ochs’s story, the forgotten son of the ’60s, the perennial number two. There’s something mysterious and remarkable about his ability to completely disappear from recollections of an era whose most obscure corners have been plundered and revived (it seems even the most dilettantish shopper of downtown record shops can discuss obscure B-sides by ? Mark and the Mysterians and Os Mutantes). In the early ’90s, one of Ochs’s biographers almost aborted the project because he didn’t believe it would ever be published. It was, and is currently out of print.
There’s no good reason that Ochs didn’t become a pop star in his time, or that he hasn’t been sufficiently reappraised. Maybe his lyrics were too strident, maybe they seemed too earnest in the fat, happy ’80s and ’90s, when the return of the draft and active military conflict were beyond the imagination of even the most ardent pessimist. Still, he remained a hero for some of the ’90s most notable artists: Eddie Vedder and They Might Be Giants covered his songs, Billy Bragg recorded “I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night.” Wilco referenced him. But this, and an aborted biopic that was to have starred Sean Penn, didn’t push him to the next level of recognition and appreciation. Thirty years after Ochs prophesied his own demise with “Rehearsals for Retirement,” he has effectively disappeared from cultural discourse. Maybe that’s the way he would have wanted it.
If so, that’s a shame. Anyone approaching his catalog will find a treasure trove of beautiful and important surprises, chief among them that a ’60s relic who wrote lines like “Peace has turned to poison/The flag has blown a fuse/Even courage is confused” actually turned out to be a visionary.