Phil Ochs

Why Phil Ochs still lingers in the consciousness

I recently watched this video by Abigail Devoe about the Phil Ochs album 'Rehearsals for Retirement'^[0] . I enjoyed it and believe it represents the history and beliefs of Ochs as well as the USA in the 60s but it's hard to totally convey why he's still thought of. He wasn't the greatest singer, lyricist or most prolific but I believe he was the most earnest. He gave his time, money, soul and hopes to the changes in America and eventually it destroyed him.

It's easy to feel like the world as they knew it was coming to an end in 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in the USA. In France, May 68 there was a massive set of protests that came close to revolution. Similarly in Japan there were enormous university campus protests along with other rebellions in other countries. With a pointless war going on, an old corrupt Republican president and a feckless, morally hopeless Democratic opposition it was hard to see how the world could continue as it was. Surely the world would collapse if there was no momentous world-changing event blowing it up?

Phil Ochs called himself a topical singer but the topics are still just as salient as then. Racism, poverty and war are still certainly with us; perhaps that's the secret of all writers throughout history. Write about what you see and know, and the themes in it will echo throughout time and place. Phil can write about William Moore, a man taking a letter across the American South demanding civil rights who was shot on the road, or Paul Crump, a man in jail who killed someone and was sentenced to death but seemed to be trying to turn his life around, even writing a book, or John Henry Faulk, a radio host who was blacklisted during McCarthyism and had to go to court to be able to broadcast again. Or one of my favourite light-hearted songs Fifty Mile Hike which is about a fitness program the president had instituted and the silliness it had caused.^[1] The names may change but the ideas and themes still persist. Their stories, like mythology that is passed down as folk stories, become fables that we need to hear to change.

Yet Phil couldn't last. He went up against the world and failed and seemed to feel a frustration with the American public since they didn't care about what they should. As he said "If there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara." To that end he tried to imitate him, wearing a gold lamé suit and releasing a spoof album called Phil Ochs' Greatest Hits with the tagline "50 Phil Ochs fans can't be wrong", playing off Elvis' "50 million Elvis fans can't be wrong".^[2] However his attempts at commercial success to appeal to the masses were doomed to failure. Perhaps they just sounded inauthentic or unspecific and musical and social tastes were changing in ways that weren't for him. A superstar musician or someone with mass commercial appeal could have changed but Phil was not that. After this time his decline was slow but inevitable, both as a songwriter and mentally until he took his life in 1976.

It sounds like he should be forgotten, just another minor songwriter to be randomly seen every now and again in music history books as one of many passing fancies in the folk revival era. However he's certainly not forgotten, there's this absolutely haunting Youtube video about the days before Phil died. Further there's many tributes to Ochs, whether it's covers of his songs or other songs about Phil Ochs (I'm partial to this one by Josh Joplin but there's many others I love). There's also people writing new versions of his songs, which is mostly done with the song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" to update the references for modern times, whenever those times might be. His legacy lives on, even if it's never going to be mainstream and perhaps that's the most anyone can ask for. People still care about him enough to keep his memory alive

Phil Ochs is my favourite musician, because of all the reasons given previously. Some of his songs are genuinely amazing and moving. Maybe you'll take an interest too, maybe not but I hope you at least care.

Footnotes