He Should Have Been Better Known
The Tragic Life of Phil Ochs
It was not possible to avoid politics at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963 and nobody was surprised. Folk music in America had been entwined with politics since at least the Great Depression and the events of 1963 had made the year far more politically charged than normal. Due to the history of the folk movement, it was inevitable that political protest would become the theme of that summer’s Newport Festival.
Ever since the 1940s, folk singers had been protesting against racial discrimination; campaigning for civil rights and equality for the African Americans of the Southern states. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger had been the movement’s most prominent voices; branded as seditious by the government they had been blacklisted for their pains. Nevertheless, as the years passed and the Civil Rights campaigns in the South gathered pace, more and more folk singers, both black and white, added their voices. They sang for racial equality, the end of segregation and the enfranchisement of black voters.
Jews were highly visible in the folk movement. Izzy Young ran the Folklore Centre in Greenwich Village, the heart of the folk scene, and Jerry Halpern’s Music Inn was where the performers bought their instruments. Moses Asch, son of the Yiddish novelist Sholom Asch created the Folkways record label, responsible for most of the folk albums of the period. Irwin Silber edited Sing Out!, one of New York’s two premier folk magazines, George Wein was in charge of the Newport Folk Festival and Albert Grossman managed many of the artists. There were Jewish folk singers too; Bob Dylan of course, born Robert Zimmerman, the faux-cowboy Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, a doctor’s son from Brooklyn who had come into the world as Elliot Adnopoz, and Phil Ochs, who saw no need to change his name.
Phil Ochs has never received the recognition he deserved. Born to Jewish parents in Texas in 1940, he learnt to play the clarinet as a child, spent two years at a military academy, dropped out and travelled to Florida, where he was arrested and jailed for a fortnight for vagrancy. He went home, studied journalism at Ohio State University, switched from the clarinet to the guitar and began playing in folk clubs. He considered folk music to be a form of journalism, telling the magazine Broadside that, “before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music”.
Seeing himself as a musical journalist, Phil Ochs reported on the newspaper correspondent William Worthy’s arrest and conviction for visiting to Cuba, penning a ballad mocking the government’s understanding of what it meant to live in the free world.
“William Worthy isn't worthy to enter our door,
Went down to Cuba, he's not American anymore,
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say,
You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.”
Ochs arrived in Greenwich Village in 1962 where he played in the folk clubs and cafes and travelled to the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. By this time, the Civil Rights movement had come of age. Inspired by the leadership of Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, the movement was making its impact through non-violent protests across the Southern States.
In April, Dr King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama. The local civil rights activists decided that the most peaceful way in which they could respond was to organise a protest demonstration by local school children. The response by the city authorities to the children’s protest was brutal. Over the course of the next few days Americans watched in horror as their TVs showed pictures of black children being blasted by water cannon, beaten by police, and attacked by dogs. The events in Birmingham Alabama became a watershed in the history of the Civil Rights movement. They took place just a few weeks before the 1963 Newport folk festival.
A prolific songwriter, Phil Ochs did not have Bob Dylan’s poetic skills, nor, as a singer did he have a particularly remarkable voice. Yet, sincere and earnest, out of all the folk singers who harnessed their talents to the struggle for civil rights, his lyrics were the most incisive, driving his messages home with satire and biting criticism. The Newport Folk Festival was overshadowed by what had happened in Birmingham, with Phil Ochs as the performer whose condemnation of the events rang out most strongly, deftly using ridicule to demolish the self-righteous malevolence of the city authorities.
He opened his act by telling the audience that “whenever there is a deep tragedy there is also present something of the ridiculous”. He illustrated his meaning with the song he had wrote about the Alabama riots, Talking Birmingham Jam. His performance can be seen on a You Tube video, interspersed with newsreel clips of the violence. Switching from humour to reportage, he sang Too Many Martyrs, about the events behind the recent murder of the black civil rights activist Medgar Evers: “The country gained a killer and the country lost a man”. Bob Dylan’s song, Only a Pawn in Their Game, written around the same time, is also about Evers’s murder.
By 1967 the Vietnam war had superseded the civil rights struggle as America’s most contentious political issue. Phil Ochs, who was now heavily involved with the anti-war protest movement, invited the political activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman to join him on stage at the end of a Carnegie Hall concert. The concert had been one of Ochs’s best, with the audience cheering him as it drew to a close. Abbie Hoffman ruined it. Screaming obscenities at the audience about the President and the war, he caused a near riot. Hoffman’s antics marked the start of the downward spiral of Phil Ochs’s career.
Summer 1968 saw one of the most notorious events in the troubled history of the decade, when anti-war demonstrators turned up in Chicago for a “Festival of Life,” protesting against the Vietnam war. The festival organisers were hoping for a turnout of 100,000 protestors, if not half a million. In the event, far fewer arrived, probably no more than 5,000. Nevertheless, despite the low turnout, Chicago’s Mayor, Richard Daley, responded by sending in thousands of police, soldiers and National Guardsmen. The outcome was inevitable. The law forces had been given carte blanche to suppress the demonstration and the protestors were vastly outnumbered. When the order was given for the police to charge, the demonstrators stood no chance.
Ironically, before the carnage began, Phil Ochs had experienced a moment of personal triumph, one that he later described as “the highlight of his career”. He had been on stage, singing his song I Ain’t Marching Anymore, an indictment of the wars that young American men had been conscripted into, when he noticed little flashes of fire breaking out among the audience. The young conscripts in the crowd were burning their draft cards. For Ochs, it felt as if he had been vindicated for everything he had been fighting for.
It was a brief moment of joy for him. It didn’t last long. He had been one of the organisers of the Festival of Light and, although more moderate than many, he had a lot of emotion riding on the success of the event. He had already been arrested once, at a press conference before the demonstration began. and that, together with the poor turnout and violent police response affected him profoundly. He had always suffered from a bipolar disorder and the events of the week overwhelmed him.
His worst moment came when he walked up to a line of National Guardsmen and asked them politely, although naively, whether they would lay down their weapons and join the demonstration. Only one Guardsman responded. He told Phil that some years ago he had taken a girlfriend to one of his concerts, and enjoyed it. But, the Guardsman said, having seen him demonstrate in Chicago, he would never go to a concert of his again. It was the last straw for Phil.
After Chicago, Phil Ochs fell into a deep depression. He never really recovered. By the following year he was drinking heavily and abusing drugs, worrying his friends and family. He made one more album, his sense of humour only just surfacing in the album title Greatest Hits. The irony was that Phil had never had any hits, only one of his songs had ever entered the charts and that was Joan Baez’s version of his There But for Fortune. The album flopped. It was pulled from the shelves after a few weeks.
Phil Ochs struggled on for a few years but nothing went right for him again. His marriage had failed long ago, he rarely saw his daughter and, in 1976, he committed suicide. He was just 35 years old.