My Favorite Level 99 Spoony Bard
Phil Ochs: The Anti-Dylan
The life, times and music of protest singer Phil Ochs, is the subject of a new documentary. It's called "Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune."
Phil Ochs arrived in New York city in the early 1960s and immediately began performing downtown in the Village, the center of the folk movement.
Unlike Dylan, whose respect he craved, but apparently never got, Ochs' songs were almost entirely politically based and were not exactly mainstream. Consequently, Ochs never reached the heights of fame that he desperately desired. He wanted to be the spokesperson for his generation. Although he had a small loyal following and released a number of albums, he never achieved widespread popularity.
Sort of a musical journalist, Ochs would comb the newspapers to find topical material to rail about in his songs. Among his targets, the Vietnam War, civil rights activism and the misdeeds of numerous presidents. (SOURCE)
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A warts-and-all portrait of a singer and his celebrity, "Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune" is an overdue look at the '60s folk movement's anti-Dylan -- a songwriter who almost singlehandedly launched the pop-musical protest against the Vietnam War, but whose early death had the tragic cast of a 19th-century ballad. Briskly constructed and rich in Ochs' music and period notables, Kenneth Bowser's film will be a must for the artist's fans, but its fresh take on an overexamined decade should also appeal to Kennedy-era completists. Expect robust life on cable/DVD following limited theatrical runs.
Like any singer-songwriter defined by the Greenwich Village-based folk scene of the early '60s, Ochs could not -- and still cannot -- escape the shadow of Bob Dylan. Indeed, it's the contrast with Dylan (the one essential figure missing from the film) that best defines Ochs himself: Whereas Dylan was the songwriter-as-poet, Ochs was the troubadour/journalist, delivering metaphor-free reports on current events; where Dylan's sound was raspy and defiant, Ochs' voice was tremulous, almost needy. And as audiences grew hipper, angrier and cooler ("Phil was never cool," a friend says), his sound fell out of fashion, as did the naivete and earnestness of so many singers from the period.
Ochs was no innocent, however: As the docu and its characters attest, the singer's appetite for success and celebrity -- whetted by his eminence during the early folk years -- made him a little desperate. His friends and admirers, who include ex-Fugs leader Ed Sanders, '60s firebrand-cum-Congressman Tom Hayden and even the usually acerbic Christopher Hitchens -- seem more than willing to concede this fact, so long as Ochs gets his due as a musical force. It's significant, if not particularly emphasized by the film, that the Ochs numbers that have endured (including "There But for Fortune," "I Ain't Marching Anymore," "A Small Circle of Friends") are the ones that transcended specific times and events, unlike the music that initially made his career.
Bowser presents quite the gallery of talking heads, including a few who appear from beyond the grave -- among them journo Jack Newfield and Yippie pranksters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who address Ochs' fierce political commitment, his insistence on singing in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (the advance publicity for which kept virtually all other performers at home) and, later, his disillusionment with what happened -- or rather, didn't happen -- as a consequence of Chicago.
Ochs had already been changing musically, moving away from the vocal-guitar formulae and adding strings. Again, like Dylan, he alienated the faithful by not giving them what they expected, with commercially disastrous results; his ironically titled "Greatest Hits" album, the cover of which featured him in an Elvis-style gold lame suit, bombed. And his attempts to carry the irony into live performance was met by humorless folkies who yelled "Bring back Phil Ochs!" Drinking, something Ochs had no talent for, became his refuge. And as his friends and family attest in the film, Ochs had alienated many of the people who loved him by the time he hanged himself in 1976.
But one of the film's more poignant chapters arrives toward the end of the film, recounting Ochs' friendship with Chilean singer and martyr Victor Jara, who would die at the hands of Pinochet thugs following the CIA-instigated overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. Ochs may have had a high regard for himself ("Phil was enough of an egomaniac to take it all personally," a friend says, regarding Vietnam, Nixon and Chicago), but he knew the real thing when he saw it. (SOURCE)
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The earnestness of Ochs’s broadsides was often leavened by a sarcastic humor that he sometimes directed at himself. His 1966 song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” assailed the slightly left-of-center politics of those who wept over the Kennedy assassinations but believed that Malcolm X “got was what coming” when he was killed. Other Ochs songs that are now considered folk music classics include “There but for Fortune” (memorably recorded by Ms. Baez), the antiwar “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” and the caustically witty “Draft Dodger Rag.” (SOURCE)
The late Phil Ochs, one of the greatest singer/songwriters of the 1960s in a rarified perch with Dylan, Joni and Cohen, wasn't a household name but he was big enough to have affected a lot of people. Director/writer Kenneth Bowser's powerful documentary of his life is called Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune and it'll tweak your empathy gland while breaking your heart. Hopefully it'll also wire and inspire the viewer to go out and demand that America live up to its self-image as a nation of people who care about others. Among the many onscreen friends and troublemakers who tout Phil's complicated genius include Sean Penn, Paul Krassner, Ed Sanders, Van Dyke Parks, Abbie Hoffman, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, Peter Yarrow, and Tom Hayden. Brother Michael Ochs (who also produced), sister Sonny, and daughter and activist Meegan Ochs provide the most personal insights.
Born in Texas, raised in Ohio, Phil fused JFK-inspired New Frontier idealism and his natural musical ability and it led him to the guitar and New York City 1962 where folk music and left-wing politics created an army of singing rebels. Phil had a fluid, Irish tenor voice with a perfect vibrato and wrote prodigiously. The songs were ripped from the headlines, as they say, addressing the civil rights struggle ("Here's To The State Of Mississippi"), Vietnam ("White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land") and U.S. imperialism ("Cops Of The World"). Two of his classics -- "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and "The War Is Over" -- became anthems of the anti-war movement. He also had a razor sharp sense of black humor as heard in "Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends," his faux-upbeat examination of apathy's victims.
If there was a cause and an event, Phil was there in a heartbeat. "Phil would turn down a commercial job for a benefit because the benefit would reach more people," says brother Michael. We see scene after scene of the handsome, upbeat, stiff-spined troubadour singing truth to power and joyously quipping in period interviews. A charter member of the '60s counterculture (though not uncritical of its excesses), he helped created the Yippies with friends Hoffman, Krassner and Sanders, Jerry Rubin and Stew Albert. The Yippies' plan for a Festival Of Life to contrast the festival of death at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago resulted in blowback by the powers that be and while the whole world watched, Windy City coppers ran amuck, beating heads in, spilling buckets of blood and mocking dissent in the greatest democracy in the world. Like many, Phil was devastated. "I guess everybody goes through a certain stage of disillusionment and decides the world is not the sweet and fair place I always assumed and that justice would out," reflected a bitter Phil after Chicago '68. "I always thought justice would out, I no longer think that by any stretch. I don't think fairness wins anymore."...
By the dawn of the '70s Ochs was drinking heavily, thrashing about while still trying to Pied Piper a movement that had grown in size but was losing its cohesion. (Perhaps, ironically, because it had grown.) He appeared at Carnegie Hall dressed in a gold lame suit, maintaining that the alchemy for an authentic American revolution would mix elements of Elvis and Che. (A certain subset of predictable folkie squares didn't get it.) He sang '50s rock 'n' roll and country music and criticized the counterculture for shoving its freak flag in Middle America's face. He theorized that in order for the left to succeed, it needed to find common ground with its more conservative fellow citizens. This insight shows immense wisdom as well as perhaps a bit of delusional folly, but at least he was asking the right questions. (Within a few years Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings would indeed bridge this cultural, if not political, gap.)
The coup de grace - pun acknowledged - was the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government by the Chilean military in collusion with the Nixon Administration and the CIA. Phil's friend - Chilean folksinger Victor Jara - was brutally tortured in a soccer stadium and then murdered with countless other dissenters. While Ochs had enough spirit left in him to organize a benefit for Chilean refugees that featured Dylan and others, it appears that the one-two punch of Chicago '68 and Chile '73 revealed the enormity and savagery of The Beast - the ruling class - and drained him of hope. Empathy without hope is a dark road. Despite the victories of Nixon's ouster in '74 and removal of U.S. troops from Vietnam a year later, Phil was ravaged by booze and bipolar illness and hung himself on April 9th, 1976.
"Not everyone has the constitution to follow his dream," said a friend of mine about Ochs. Trying to save the world while juggling the ups and downs of manic depression is a daunting gig, one that Phil couldn't handle. But Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune most prominently succeeds here in 2011 - in what thus far has been The Little Century Of Horrors - because it reminds us of the urgency and nobility of empathy. It's a remarkable chronicle of one man's pursuit of justice through music in the 20th Century while serving as a lesson for the 21st. (SOURCE)
*
TRAILER:
( http://philochsthemovie.com/ )
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Comment from Youtube: "Why does no one else see Phil Ochs as the poet/seer that I do? I am forever angry that he was not here to hold my hand through Reaganism, Bushism, Clintonism and the rest. Phil saw the true America, the one I'm tired of trying to find."
The life, times and music of protest singer Phil Ochs, is the subject of a new documentary. It's called "Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune."
Phil Ochs arrived in New York city in the early 1960s and immediately began performing downtown in the Village, the center of the folk movement.
Unlike Dylan, whose respect he craved, but apparently never got, Ochs' songs were almost entirely politically based and were not exactly mainstream. Consequently, Ochs never reached the heights of fame that he desperately desired. He wanted to be the spokesperson for his generation. Although he had a small loyal following and released a number of albums, he never achieved widespread popularity.
Sort of a musical journalist, Ochs would comb the newspapers to find topical material to rail about in his songs. Among his targets, the Vietnam War, civil rights activism and the misdeeds of numerous presidents. (SOURCE)
- - - - -
A warts-and-all portrait of a singer and his celebrity, "Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune" is an overdue look at the '60s folk movement's anti-Dylan -- a songwriter who almost singlehandedly launched the pop-musical protest against the Vietnam War, but whose early death had the tragic cast of a 19th-century ballad. Briskly constructed and rich in Ochs' music and period notables, Kenneth Bowser's film will be a must for the artist's fans, but its fresh take on an overexamined decade should also appeal to Kennedy-era completists. Expect robust life on cable/DVD following limited theatrical runs.
Like any singer-songwriter defined by the Greenwich Village-based folk scene of the early '60s, Ochs could not -- and still cannot -- escape the shadow of Bob Dylan. Indeed, it's the contrast with Dylan (the one essential figure missing from the film) that best defines Ochs himself: Whereas Dylan was the songwriter-as-poet, Ochs was the troubadour/journalist, delivering metaphor-free reports on current events; where Dylan's sound was raspy and defiant, Ochs' voice was tremulous, almost needy. And as audiences grew hipper, angrier and cooler ("Phil was never cool," a friend says), his sound fell out of fashion, as did the naivete and earnestness of so many singers from the period.
Ochs was no innocent, however: As the docu and its characters attest, the singer's appetite for success and celebrity -- whetted by his eminence during the early folk years -- made him a little desperate. His friends and admirers, who include ex-Fugs leader Ed Sanders, '60s firebrand-cum-Congressman Tom Hayden and even the usually acerbic Christopher Hitchens -- seem more than willing to concede this fact, so long as Ochs gets his due as a musical force. It's significant, if not particularly emphasized by the film, that the Ochs numbers that have endured (including "There But for Fortune," "I Ain't Marching Anymore," "A Small Circle of Friends") are the ones that transcended specific times and events, unlike the music that initially made his career.
Bowser presents quite the gallery of talking heads, including a few who appear from beyond the grave -- among them journo Jack Newfield and Yippie pranksters Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who address Ochs' fierce political commitment, his insistence on singing in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention of 1968 (the advance publicity for which kept virtually all other performers at home) and, later, his disillusionment with what happened -- or rather, didn't happen -- as a consequence of Chicago.
Ochs had already been changing musically, moving away from the vocal-guitar formulae and adding strings. Again, like Dylan, he alienated the faithful by not giving them what they expected, with commercially disastrous results; his ironically titled "Greatest Hits" album, the cover of which featured him in an Elvis-style gold lame suit, bombed. And his attempts to carry the irony into live performance was met by humorless folkies who yelled "Bring back Phil Ochs!" Drinking, something Ochs had no talent for, became his refuge. And as his friends and family attest in the film, Ochs had alienated many of the people who loved him by the time he hanged himself in 1976.
But one of the film's more poignant chapters arrives toward the end of the film, recounting Ochs' friendship with Chilean singer and martyr Victor Jara, who would die at the hands of Pinochet thugs following the CIA-instigated overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. Ochs may have had a high regard for himself ("Phil was enough of an egomaniac to take it all personally," a friend says, regarding Vietnam, Nixon and Chicago), but he knew the real thing when he saw it. (SOURCE)
- - - - -
The earnestness of Ochs’s broadsides was often leavened by a sarcastic humor that he sometimes directed at himself. His 1966 song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” assailed the slightly left-of-center politics of those who wept over the Kennedy assassinations but believed that Malcolm X “got was what coming” when he was killed. Other Ochs songs that are now considered folk music classics include “There but for Fortune” (memorably recorded by Ms. Baez), the antiwar “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” and the caustically witty “Draft Dodger Rag.” (SOURCE)
The late Phil Ochs, one of the greatest singer/songwriters of the 1960s in a rarified perch with Dylan, Joni and Cohen, wasn't a household name but he was big enough to have affected a lot of people. Director/writer Kenneth Bowser's powerful documentary of his life is called Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune and it'll tweak your empathy gland while breaking your heart. Hopefully it'll also wire and inspire the viewer to go out and demand that America live up to its self-image as a nation of people who care about others. Among the many onscreen friends and troublemakers who tout Phil's complicated genius include Sean Penn, Paul Krassner, Ed Sanders, Van Dyke Parks, Abbie Hoffman, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Baez, Billy Bragg, Peter Yarrow, and Tom Hayden. Brother Michael Ochs (who also produced), sister Sonny, and daughter and activist Meegan Ochs provide the most personal insights.
Born in Texas, raised in Ohio, Phil fused JFK-inspired New Frontier idealism and his natural musical ability and it led him to the guitar and New York City 1962 where folk music and left-wing politics created an army of singing rebels. Phil had a fluid, Irish tenor voice with a perfect vibrato and wrote prodigiously. The songs were ripped from the headlines, as they say, addressing the civil rights struggle ("Here's To The State Of Mississippi"), Vietnam ("White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land") and U.S. imperialism ("Cops Of The World"). Two of his classics -- "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and "The War Is Over" -- became anthems of the anti-war movement. He also had a razor sharp sense of black humor as heard in "Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends," his faux-upbeat examination of apathy's victims.
Click to viewIf there was a cause and an event, Phil was there in a heartbeat. "Phil would turn down a commercial job for a benefit because the benefit would reach more people," says brother Michael. We see scene after scene of the handsome, upbeat, stiff-spined troubadour singing truth to power and joyously quipping in period interviews. A charter member of the '60s counterculture (though not uncritical of its excesses), he helped created the Yippies with friends Hoffman, Krassner and Sanders, Jerry Rubin and Stew Albert. The Yippies' plan for a Festival Of Life to contrast the festival of death at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago resulted in blowback by the powers that be and while the whole world watched, Windy City coppers ran amuck, beating heads in, spilling buckets of blood and mocking dissent in the greatest democracy in the world. Like many, Phil was devastated. "I guess everybody goes through a certain stage of disillusionment and decides the world is not the sweet and fair place I always assumed and that justice would out," reflected a bitter Phil after Chicago '68. "I always thought justice would out, I no longer think that by any stretch. I don't think fairness wins anymore."...
By the dawn of the '70s Ochs was drinking heavily, thrashing about while still trying to Pied Piper a movement that had grown in size but was losing its cohesion. (Perhaps, ironically, because it had grown.) He appeared at Carnegie Hall dressed in a gold lame suit, maintaining that the alchemy for an authentic American revolution would mix elements of Elvis and Che. (A certain subset of predictable folkie squares didn't get it.) He sang '50s rock 'n' roll and country music and criticized the counterculture for shoving its freak flag in Middle America's face. He theorized that in order for the left to succeed, it needed to find common ground with its more conservative fellow citizens. This insight shows immense wisdom as well as perhaps a bit of delusional folly, but at least he was asking the right questions. (Within a few years Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings would indeed bridge this cultural, if not political, gap.)
The coup de grace - pun acknowledged - was the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government by the Chilean military in collusion with the Nixon Administration and the CIA. Phil's friend - Chilean folksinger Victor Jara - was brutally tortured in a soccer stadium and then murdered with countless other dissenters. While Ochs had enough spirit left in him to organize a benefit for Chilean refugees that featured Dylan and others, it appears that the one-two punch of Chicago '68 and Chile '73 revealed the enormity and savagery of The Beast - the ruling class - and drained him of hope. Empathy without hope is a dark road. Despite the victories of Nixon's ouster in '74 and removal of U.S. troops from Vietnam a year later, Phil was ravaged by booze and bipolar illness and hung himself on April 9th, 1976.
"Not everyone has the constitution to follow his dream," said a friend of mine about Ochs. Trying to save the world while juggling the ups and downs of manic depression is a daunting gig, one that Phil couldn't handle. But Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune most prominently succeeds here in 2011 - in what thus far has been The Little Century Of Horrors - because it reminds us of the urgency and nobility of empathy. It's a remarkable chronicle of one man's pursuit of justice through music in the 20th Century while serving as a lesson for the 21st. (SOURCE)
*
TRAILER:
( http://philochsthemovie.com/ )
- - - - -
Comment from Youtube: "Why does no one else see Phil Ochs as the poet/seer that I do? I am forever angry that he was not here to hold my hand through Reaganism, Bushism, Clintonism and the rest. Phil saw the true America, the one I'm tired of trying to find."