PHIL OCHS
(19 December 1940 – 9 April 1976)
We originally created this page in April 2016 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the death of the American radical singer and songrwiter Phil Ochs. However, Ochs has always been one of Eddie’s heroes, especially because (unlike some so-called ‘protest’ singers from the 1960s), he never sold out on his political ideas – in fact it may have been his political idealism that killed him in the end, and led him to take his own life. So we left it here.
Now, Eddie has recorded a tribute album to Ochs which you can listen to below. Of course, to hear the real thing, you need to go to the Phil Ochs website to find out what he wrote, and then to Youtube to hear him. Phil Ochs’s songs are as fresh and as relevant today as they were in 1965. We hope you like what you hear
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NOTES
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EDDIE WRITES: Hi, Everyone! This album is my personal tribute to the great radical ‘protest singer of the 1960s and early 1970s, Phil Ochs; a man whose music has followed me round my life this past fifty years and more. Ochs sprang to prominence in the UK with Joan Baez’s recording of ‘There but for Fortune’ (1965), and I bought a copy of his album Phil Ochs in Concert from the same year in Belfast sometime around 1970 – and I have treasured the purity and the clarity of his writing ever since. Much like Sandy Denny, Ochs’s early death means that his work is frozen in time, but the freshness of his songs, and their uncompromising radical tone, remain – for me at least – as relevant today as they were half a century ago.
Like some other ‘protest’ singers, Ochs felt obliged, as the self-obsessed political reaction of the 1970s set in, to try to change his art and to make it more ‘relevant’. In the end, it may have been his loss of faith in the ability of radical protest to bring about real political change, but at the same time his inability to compromise his ideals (a classic Batesonian ‘double bind’?), which led to his final depression and suicide. Paradoxically, the general legacy of Ochs’s memory may be that for the true idealist, ‘selling out’ is a more traumatic experience than political failure, in that it involves such fundamental denial of one’s own deeply-held beliefs. Ochs therefore ultimately found himself in an impasse from which there was only one exit. But I believe that, as it stands, his work survives as a ‘shining moment’ in the history of radical song.
Track 1 I ain’t marchin’ anymore
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Ochs sang this song at many live appearances, so that although I include it here, outside the broadly chronological sequence I have adopted, I decided to kick off the album with it, as being his ‘theme song’. The song chronicles the ‘We come I peace! Shoot to kill!’ ethos on which the young United States was founded, involving the genocide of many of its First Nation inhabitants, the massive land grab of New Mexico and California during the 1840s (whereupon gold was discovered in California the following week – now there’s a coincidence!), and the close links between US foreign policy in Latin America and US capital (‘Cocacolonialism’, but here via the example of the United Fruit Co., the originator of the ‘Banana Republic’ method of exploitation of small countries by large ones). The ‘Early British War’ of Verse 1 would appear to refer to the ‘War of 1812’, during which British forces burned down the White House, something Phil must have ‘forgotten’ to mention!
Track 2 Too Many Martys
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The song refers to the murder of Civil Rights activist Medgar Wiley Evers on 12 June 1963 by Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith, a man only convicted of that offence in 1994. Medgars was NAACP field secretary for Mississippi who had conducted campaigns on desegregation of access to filling-station lavatories, to public beaches in Biloxi, on James Meredith’s successful application to the University of Mississippi, the integration of buses in Jackson, and voter registration. He also investigated the 1955 murder of the ‘boy of fourteen years’ Emmett Till (for ‘disrespecting a white woman’) also mentioned in the song.
Evers was regularly accompanied to and from work by both FBI and local police vehicles, but on the day following President John F. Kennedy’s speech announcing Civil Rights legislation, he arrived home from a meeting without his escort (which had mysteriously disappeared) only to be shot in his driveway. Taken to the local hospital in Jackson, he was at first refused entry on the grounds of his colour. Evers, discharged with the rank of Sergeant from service in the US Army during World War II, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
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Track 3 That was the President
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The President in question is of course John F. Kennedy, assassinated on 22 November 1963 in Dallas, Texas, in circumstances which still remain unclear. The shock of Kennedy’s death did indeed reverberate around the world, and made a deep impression on those of us who remember witnessing his impact on the politics of the day, and his promise of the ‘New Frontier’. In particular it was his eloquence, and his delivery, which seemed to offer a new and different world ‘born in the twentieth century’, although we now know that we owe much of this to his speech writer Ted Sorensen, whose capacity for precise expression at the time of the Cuban missile crisis may well have averted World War III.
Ochs wrote two versions of this song: one in the aftermath of the assassination, with which he was clearly not satisfied, and a later one which appeared on I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore. My version is an amalgamation of this latter version with two verses from the earlier one which, as someone who can still remember how and where he heard of Kennedy’s death, I thought well worth inclusion.
Track 4 Days of Decision
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Not one of Ochs’s more celebrated songs, this one suffers perhaps from being a bit too similar to ‘The Times they are a-Changin’. Unlike the composer of that more famous song, however, Ochs actually believed in the ideals he was propounding and never reneged on them. The ‘three bodies buried in the Mississippi mud’ would be those of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, three Civil Rights workers murdered and buried in an earth dam in June 1964, whose grim fate was the subject of Mississippi Burning.
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Track 5 There but for Fortune
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Ochs’s most famous song, although made famous not by Ochs himself but by Joan Baez, who took it to No.8 in the UK charts in 1964, and No. 50 in the USA. Baez’s version is the one everyone still knows and sings in Cornish folk clubs, and my recording therefore owes more to her than to Ochs’s original. Michael Schumacher (p.117) wrote that “of all the songs … Phil would ever write, none would show his humanity as brilliantly as the four brief verses of There but for Fortune”. Verse 3, in which there are ‘whiskey stains on the floor’, and in which the ‘drunkard … stumbles out the door’, sounds particularly poignant today, as during his final illness, Ochs himself ended up drinking and sleeping on the streets. It occurs to me, however, that in fact the song also indicates that politically, as Ochs said of himself, he was a social-democrat rather than socialist, as all of the problems mentioned in the song are really a consequence of inequality rather than ‘fortune’ (luck).
I began singing this song in 1964, and only waited 55 years to record it!
Track 6 Draft Dodger Rag
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One of the principal sources of friction between young people and the government in mid-1960s America was selective service conscription or ‘the Draft’, whereby all males between 18 and 25 years of age were both eligible, and required to register (indeed still must!), for military service. This measure had been introduced in 1940, so not specifically for Vietnam (1964-1975), but its use to select recruits for service in such an unpopular war was, to say the least, controversial.
Once the Draft began to be used for Vietnam, ways to avoid it flourished. Some men decamped to Canada for the duration; others (like future president George W. Bush, who could therefore in theory still have been sent to Vietnam) joined the National Guard but was then such a sloppy Guardsman that it was specifically recommended he not be sent anyway. Yet others, such as future presidential candidate Mitt Romney, became a missionary, as ‘clergy’ were also exempt. Getting married, having children, or becoming a full-time registered student (or as Ochs put it ‘going to school’) were also very popular options.
Some, like former presidential candidate John F. Kerry, served anyway, were wounded three times and decorated twice, only to find themselves later still being vilified by their draft-dodging opponent (Bush). Medical exemption was also possible, as indicated in the song, but was a more controversial way of avoiding service in a country with a largely private medical system. This was very much the case with the last US president, who in 1964, managed to obtain exemption owing to the presence of bone spurs on his feet. Whether said feet are cloven or not is not stated.
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This recording of Ochs’s song is therefore dedicated to that brave soldier President Donald J. Trump
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Track 7 I’m gonna say it now
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A song about the many campus protests of the mid to late 1960s, in particular the fact that, at the time, universities could make strict rules about much of how theirstudents lived their daily lives, including whom they could or could not live with Indeed, the origin of some of the most famous protests of the time, Les Evenements in Paris, May 1968, can be traced to a ruling by the Sorbonne which barred students from living on campus in mixed accommodation.
Ochs’s song clearly refers however, to some of the larger American universities (“To get around this campus why, you almost need a plane”), especially UCLA, Berkeley, where another celebrated series of protests began with the ‘Free Speech’ movement of 1964-5, which aimed to gain the right for students and faculty to participate in, and publicise, ‘off-campus’ political issues on campus. Ultimately this right was conceded, but in the aftermath of the campaign a certain Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California on a ‘clean up the mess at Berkeley’ platform.
Cultural reference: Chiang Kai-Shek, anti-communist leader of Nationalist China and political and military opponent of Mao Zedong.
Track 8 Cops of the World
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The idea of America as ‘World Policeman’ stems from the ‘Truman Doctrine’ declared to Congress by President Harry S. Truman in 1947; that the United States should ‘give support to countries or peoples threatened by Soviet forces or [by] Communist insurrection’. The doctrine was reiterated by President John F. Kennedy, one of Ochs’s heroes, in his inaugural address on 20 January 1961, when he stated that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty”.
Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as escalating the war in Vietnam, also continued the same policy, in the shape of the ‘Johnson Doctrine’,which stated that ‘domestic revolution in the Western Hemisphere would no longer be a local matter when the object is the establishment of a Communist dictatorship’. But as Ochs pointed out, all too often this involved finding oppressed people ‘a leader that you can’t elect’, a mistake still being repeated
The real reason for these successive policies, of course, is summed up in the last verse:
“And the name for our profits is Democracy.
So, like it or not, you have got to be free.”
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Track 9 Santo Domingo
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Or more correctly, ‘The Marines have landed on the shores of Santo Domingo’, marks the intervention of the United States in the Dominican Civil War of 1965, in which for the first time in three decades, US troops were used to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign Latin American country. Although the episode did not quite proceed as Ochs portrays it in the song, 1700 US marines were indeed involved, and they did occupy a large portion of the capital, Santo Domingo, mostly the area containing foreign embassies.
In a recent article, Anthony Ashbolt points out just how much, unlike many songs of this kind, Ochs’s narrative focuses on the reactions, pain and fears of women at their country being invaded, with all that that implies.
Track 10 Love me I’m a Liberal
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As Ochs put it in his introduction to this song on Phil Ochs in Concert:
“In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. …ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.”
It should be said, however, that in US politics, the word ‘liberal’ covers a wider range of opinion than in Europe, and that many American ‘liberals’ could probably be more accurately described as social democrats if not democratic socialists. Either way, Ochs mistrusted their tendency to be blown as straws in the wind, much like our own beloved Liberal Democrats
As well as President John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers, the song is full of other cultural references, namely:
Malcolm X – black nationalist religious leader murdered 21 February 1965.
DAR – The Daughters of the American Revolution. Women’s organisation for those who can trace their ancestry back to anyone who contributed to US Independence, but which in Ochs’s day, had a history of support for segregation.
“Harry & Sidney & Sammy”: Hollywood stars and entertainers Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Sammy Davis, jr
‘Humphrey”: Vice- President Hubert H. Humphrey, chosen at the 1968 Democratic Convention as the party’s official candidate to run against Richard M. Nixon (see below) in the 1968 Presidential election.
The AFL-CIO board: US equivalent of the TUC.
“Bus my children”: Policy of bussing children from one school district to another in order to promote desegregation, first adopted by the city of Boston in 1965, and against which the then Senator Hubert H. Humphrey wrote two amendments to the historic Civil Rights Bill of 1964.
Les Crane: US TV Talk show host
Pete Seeger. Legendary US folk singer and activist.
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Track 11 Bracero
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In the American southwest, a Bracero is a migrant manual labourer (literally, one who uses their arms [brazos] to work), mainly from Mexico, a practice institutionalised in the Bracero Program of 1942 implemented in order to alleviate perceived labour shortages for low-paid agricultural work during World War II. The Bracero Program ended in 1964, but disputes between migrant workers and US employers (particularly fruit and vegetable growers of California and Oregon) continued, culminating in the ‘Salad Bowl’ strike and boycott (1970) organised by the United Farm Workers Organising Committee (UFWOC) as coordinated by Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla and César Chavez, against both the employers and the Teamsters Union who were organising against UFWOC (‘scabbing’!). It was the largest strike of agricultural workers ever in the US, and led to a nationwide boycott of lettuce.
The song is in the tradition of Woody Guthrie’s earlier great ballad Deportees (Plane Crash at Los Gatos) which we recorded on The William Morris Songbook, and more than holds its own even in that auspicious company.
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Track 12 Canons of Christianity
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Ochs described this song as ‘the first anti-hymn’, and, as he introduced it, it was clearly aimed at the Hollywood version of ‘Gahd’, who is, as is well-known, a supporter of right-wing politics, motherhood, and apple pie. For me the song refers especially to the Latin American church of the 1960s, which in the days before ‘liberation theology’ was very reactionary, and almost always sided with military dictatorships. Visiting the cathedral in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1987, the largest Christian church in the Americas, which does actually ‘glitter with the gold’, I also saw what ‘building castles amidst the poverty’ really means. And of course, at the end, the song also mentions Tony Blair’s ‘God of Battles’, a clear sign that any political ideology which bases itself on metaphysics is inherently deeply dangerous.
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Track 13 Ringing of Revolution
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Ochs asks to imagine a scenario in which the last remaining members of the elite and the ‘idle rich’ shelter in a house encircled by the oncoming social and political revolution. ‘All the people on the inside spiritually resemble Charles Laughton. And all the people on the outside physically resemble Lee Marvin’, a Hollywood actor noted for his ‘tough guy’ roles and ability to convey menace. In fact ‘the song is so cinematic that it’s been made into a movie.’ Ochs then goes on to mention a notional cast list in which a series of right-wing Hollywood ‘hawks’ play left-wing characters, including Frank Sinatra as Fidel Castro, John Wayne as Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson as God, and himself as ‘Bobby Dylan’ (‘The young Bobby Dylan!’). Future President Ronald Reagan (mispronounced ‘Regan’, deliberately or otherwise) plays George Murphy, a fellow actor then currently US Senator for California, whom Reagan called his own ‘John the Baptist’.
We could surely update this list for the current century. My knowledge of present-day Hollywood actors is too limited to name a current substitute for Lee Marvin, but as for Charles Laughton, my suggestion is: ‘All the people on the inside spiritually resemble Boris Johnson.’
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Track 14 Changes
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The song is said to date from the break-up of Ochs’s marriage to Alice Skinner in 1965 (they never divorced). Perhaps more important is the point that it repudiates Dylan’s jibe at Ochs, that he was a ‘journalist not a folk singer’, and could not write the kind of introspective material that singer-songwriters were beginning to bring to the folk movement at the time.
Dylan was wrong about that anyway. The folk tradition is not about modernist introspection, but seduction, foul and bloody murder, great events such as wars and rebellions, and protest against hardship and deprivation. So in fact, Ochs wrote much more in the tradition of Dylan’s ‘hero’ Woody Guthrie than Dylan himself.
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Track 15 Crucifixion
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Like many other Ochs fans, when I first heard this song, I wondered why he was singing so sympathetically about Jesus, although other people have suggested it to be about the Rev. Martin Luther King jr (murdered in 1968), or President John F. Kennedy (assassinated 1963; compare ‘That was The President’, this album). Certainly, when Ochs played it to the President’s brother Robert F. Kennedy, he appeared to think the same. Ochs thought it the greatest song he ever wrote, and he was probably right, but he also stated that it was not about any specific person, but about a certain part of the human psyche which appears to rejoice in the downfall of the radical or reforming hero (a trait of which the Murdoch and other gutter press organisations have long availed themselves).
Ochs is said to have written ‘Crucifixion’ during a two hour car journey from Manchester to London in November 1965. If so, that is a feat of genius, not so much to write such a great (and lengthy) ballad in such a short period of time, but that someone managed to drive from Manchester to London in two hours in 1965, at a time when the M6 and the M1 motorways were only connected by a hitchhikers nightmare of about 100 km (60 miles) of obsolete, three-lane A roads and road works!
Track 16 Chicago/Lincoln Park
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The National Democratic Convention of August 1968 marked a watershed in the history of radical politics in the United States, and in Ochs’s own life. The Convention was held in order to select the Party’s candidate to run for President the following November, following the declaration by incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1968 that he would not seek, or accept, the nomination.
Counterculture and anti-Vietnam War protest groups had promised to come to Chicago and disrupt the Convention the previous year, and in August members both of the Youth International Party (‘Yippies’), who used mainly street theatre and other stunts to mount protest, and of MOBE (National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), who used more conventional methods, arrived in the city planning major disruption and massive demonstrations.
Their actions were opposed by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, who used a mixture of legal sanctions and police actions to frustrate the demonstrators, who meanwhile also began to realise that the massive popular support they had expected was not going to materialise. On Friday 23 August, the Yippies attempted to nominate their own candidate, a pig they had named ‘Pigasus’. Ochs, Jerry Rubin, and five other Yippies were arrested.
Demonstrators had tended to use Lincoln Park as their daytime base, but had been made to clear the Park at night. On Sunday 25 August, a ‘Festival for Life’ was held there at which Ochs sang, and the MC5 played. On 28 August, protestors gathered in Grant Park for the main demonstration. They moved out of the Park under tear gas attack and gathered in front to the Conrad Hilton Hotel where they were subjected on live TV to seventeen minutes of what was later deemed a ‘police riot’.
Eight defendants were later charged with conspiracy and incitement to riot, and five convicted but later cleared on appeal. Numerous attempts were made by defendants to undermine the legitimacy of the proceedings which they considered to be already a farce. Several films and TV programmes have been made about the trial, including HBO’s Conspiracy. The Trial of the Chicago 8.
Ochs was deeply disturbed about the events of ‘Chicago 1968’, especially the failure of the protests to attract mass support, and the inability of protestors to influence events in the Convention Hall, where Hubert Humphrey was selected to run against Nixon, even though Senator Eugene MacCarthy, the anti-war candidate supported by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and by Ochs (though not the YIppies), had won a majority of votes in Democratic Party primaries.
Afterwards, he said he thought he would write ‘thunderous protest songs’, but all he came up with was the fragment ‘Where were you in Chicago’, and the rather plaintive ‘William Butler Yeats visits Lincoln Park and escapes unscathed’ which I think reflects his inability to deal with massive political failure.
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Track 17 Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon
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A relatively late song (1974) based on the earlier ‘Here’s to the State of Mississippi’ (1965), and one which shows what a tragedy it is that Ochs died so young. Imagine what he would have made of Ronald Reagan), Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, to say nothing of the most recent incumbent. Richard M. Nixon is (so far!) the only President of the United States to have resigned the office, following the Watergate scandal of 1972-74, at the end of which it was shown that he had been complicit in employing money-laundering and slush funds during his re-election campaign, bugging political opponents, burglary of the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate hotel, and numerous other ‘dirty tricks’. Nixon also taped conversations which took place in the Oval Office of the White House, an activity which ultimately led to his downfall, as they provided evidence that he had indeed known of the Watergate burglary, and the subsequent ‘cover up’. And he did indeed phone-tap several members of his own immediate family.
Track 18 When I’m gone
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