The final sequences of Kenneth Bowser’s moving 2011 documentary Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune are painful. Family members, artists who were friends of Ochs’s, such as Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, and others, speak about the last phase of his life. He was only 35-years-old.
It was a suicide with some warning. Beforehand, he revealed to the writer Bruce Pollock why it had become increasingly difficult for him to write songs. The reasons were his alcoholism and the political situation. “Basically, I and America were both going downhill at the same time,” he wrote to Pollock.
The student protest movement had almost completely collapsed. His songs were no longer selling. He was broke. The mental illness he had inherited from his father became more pronounced. The coup in Chile in 1973 and the assassination of his friend Victor Jara sealed his fate. Phil Ochs was ill and weary of life. The musician and political activist, born on Dec. 19, 1940, in El Paso, Texas, died on April 9, 1976.
But back to 1965. “Rolling Thunder” was the U.S. government’s code name for the bombing campaign using napalm and cluster bombs against targets in North Vietnam. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara spoke of “1,000 civilians killed every week.” Ochs, then 25, released his second studio album. The title track, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” quickly became the anthem of the anti-war movement in the U.S. It expressed the anger of an entire generation that refused to be sacrificed in the war.
In the song’s final verse, Ochs criticizes the U.S. union leaders who supported the war against Vietnam. This didn’t stop him from playing benefit concerts for the striking coal miners in Harlan County, Ky. He also clearly names the United Fruit Company’s actions against socialist Cuba in the song and ends with the lines “Call it peace or call it treason. Call it love or call it reason, but I will not march anymore.”
Ochs admired Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. In 1966, his third album, “Phil Ochs Live in Concert,” was released. Joan Baez’s cover version of “There But for Fortune” became a Top Ten hit. The superpower USA, which wanted to impose its “American Way of Life” on everyone else, is the subject of “Cops of the World,” and “Santo Domingo” addresses the brutal aggression against the Dominican Republic (“The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of S.D.”).
Analogies to the current situation are striking, given the U.S. military presence off the coast of Venezuela. His songs are distinctly anti-imperialist. For Ochs, not all soldiers are the same. With “When I’m Gone,” he created a beautiful, melancholic ode. In it, Ochs reflects on the brevity of life and how necessary it is to fight for social justice while one is still alive.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Ochs studied journalism at Ohio State University after finishing high school. While attending college, he became interested in politics. Like anyone who could hold a guitar, Ochs moved to Greenwich Village, N.Y., the mecca of the folk scene, in 1962.
He had dropped out of college during his final semester, around the time he met and married Alice Skinner. Their marriage, which didn’t last long, produced a daughter, Meegan. He worked for Broadside magazine, an underground publication for political songs, and there he met Bob Dylan.
By 1963, he was already so well-known that he was invited to the prestigious Newport Festival along with Dylan, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, and others. He described himself as a “singing journalist” who could turn almost any headline into a song, and his works increasingly reached a mass audience.
“All the news that’s fit to sing,” a play on the New York Times’ motto (“All the news that’s fit to print”), was the title of his 1964 debut album. Ochs perfectly captured the essence of the topical song: Poetry becomes news. He was the undisputed rising star of the protest song scene.
For a time, he and Dylan shared the same manager, and Dylan remarked that he couldn’t compete with Ochs: “He just keeps getting better and better and better.” Pete Seeger and others warned that Dylan would ultimately find himself artistically stuck in a dead end.
At the 1965 Newport Festival, Dylan, to the dismay of the folk community, first unleashed a rock version of “Maggie’s Farm.” Ochs defended Dylan, unlike Seeger. While Ochs remained committed to folk music and its explicit political lyrics, Dylan’s lyrics became increasingly cryptic. This approach proved commercially very successful.
Ochs, on the other hand, threw himself further into political activism, organizing two large anti-war demonstrations in Los Angeles and New York.
In 1968, several events unfolded rapidly. Ochs performed at the Waldeck Festival in Germany in June, then returned home in time for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There, he procured a pig named Pigasus, which he nominated as a presidential candidate along with the satirical leftists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. They considered both major U.S. parties to be pro-imperialist.
The establishment struck back, though: Phil was imprisoned, and the reactionary Richard Nixon became president. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy further shattered any remaining hopes for progressive change in the eyes of Ochs. This mood is already evident on the cover of his darkest album, “Rehearsels for Retirement.” A symbolic gravestone bearing his likeness reads: “Phil Ochs, Died in Chicago 1968.”
Despite significant personal problems, he performed in Vancouver in October 1970 alongside Joni Mitchell and James Taylor. The proceeds funded Greenpeace protests against the nuclear tests on Amchitka Island in Alaska.
In 1971, Ochs visited Salvador Allende’s Chile and performed with Victor Jara. Following the coup in Chile two years later, he organized a benefit concert for persecuted Chileans, supported by Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Dylan.
Then, when the Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, Ochs organized a “War Is Over” rally in New York City with Harry Belafonte, Odetta, Joan Baez, Seeger, and other artists. Over 100,000 people gathered in Central Park. Ochs and Baez sang “There But for Fortune” together, and he concluded his performance with the song “The War Is Over.”
Less than a year later, Ochs’s personal war with depression and mental illness was also over.
Unsere Zeit
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