Thirty five years ago this past April 9th, American protest singer Phil Ochs hanged himself with a belt in the bathroom of his sister’s house in Far Rockaway, New York. He was thirty five years old. He never quite achieved the same recognition as some of his contemporaries, most notably Bob Dylan who once kicked Phil out of his limousine with the casual and ill-conceived insult “You’re not a folksinger. You’re a journalist.” In reality Phil Ochs was many things – a journalist, yes, a truly great folksinger, unquestionably, a political activist, a poet, a skilled musician, a father, a figurehead, a friend to many. But he was also troubled, had mental health and alcohol-related issues, was sometimes violent, accused by some of misogyny, of communist sympathies…
But no matter what the truth really was, the fact is that when it comes to those who know and love his music he had the ability to change lives because when Phil sang, he sang from the heart. I’ve questioned a lot of the things I have read about Phil Ochs, but the one thing I have never questioned is his integrity. He cared about the issues he wrote about, maybe too much. You could say that was what killed him. Phil could never have been an icon on the scale of someone like Dylan because he was too bold, too blunt, too uncompromising. A song like “William Butler Yeates Visits Lincoln Park And Escapes Unscathed”, inspired by the 1968 Chicago riots, was simply never going to be a hit in the way a song like “Blowin’ In The Wind” was. And Phil knew it. He once defined a protest song as one that is so specific that “you cannot mistake it for bullshit.” Well Phil Ochs didn’t bullshit his audiences and he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty either. Not content to act as a bystander, Phil was involved in the planning of the demonstrations on the day of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He was arrested, released and then later called to testify in the months-long trial of the Chicago Seven in which seven men involved in the protests were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot. It is because of his political activism that Phil was shamelessly and relentlessly hounded by the FBI, under the guidance of controversial FBI head John Edgar Hoover. Hoover is now known to have exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI, using illegal methods to spy on protesters and investigating ordinary American civilians for nothing more than their political beliefs.
The FBI kept Phil Ochs under active surveillance for thirteen years. The introduction of The Freedom of Information Act revealed pages and pages of information on Phil with the FBI labelling him a “communist” with “un-American thoughts” and later even going so far as to point to him as potential threat to the president’s life. They looked into his business associations, his credit rating, his voter-registration history. They even tapped his phone. Throughout his career, Phil released six studio albums, as well as a number of live albums. He wrote about war, political corruption, police brutality, human apathy, human love, religion, morality and the absurdity of the world. The closest he ever came to a hit record was Joan Baez’s successful cover-version of his song “There But For Fortune.”
His death in 1976 followed months of drunken mania, during which he assumed the identity of his alter-ego John Train, and from which he never fully recovered. On April 29th, thirty five years ago, Congresswoman and social activist, the late Bella Abzug entered this statement into the Congressional Record: “Mr Speaker, a few weeks ago, a young folksinger whose music personified the protest mood of the 1960s took his own life. Phil Ochs – whose original compositions were compelling moral statements against war in south east Asia – apparently felt that he had run out of words. “While his tragic action was undoubtedly motivated by terrible personal despair, his death is a political as well as an artistic tragedy. “I believe it is indicative of the despair many of the activists of the 1960s are experiencing as they perceive a government which continues the distortion of national priorities that is exemplified in the military budget we have before us. “Phil Ochs’ poetic pronouncements were part of a larger effort to galvanise his generation into taking action to prevent war, racism and poverty. He left us a legacy of important songs that continue to be relevant in 1976 – even though ‘the war is over’…”
Today, in 2011, I believe Phil’s songs are as relevant as they have always been. As it is, the ‘war’ will never really be over and each new generation needs its own legacy, needs its own Phil Ochs. This generation perhaps more desperately than ever.
Scarlett Wrench
