Phil Ochs

Both triumphant and sorrowful, Phil Ochs lingers as a vivid presence across chronicles of the 1960s folk resurgence and the years that followed. Working as a topical composer and performer in the mold of an earlier cohort that included Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, he remained overshadowed by Bob Dylan when it came to public acclaim for his compositions; yet in contrast to Dylan—who later appeared to bring formidable ease and skill to his craft while displaying only sporadic commitment to the movements that ostensibly inspired the lyrics—Ochs fully embraced and lived those causes, a choice that ultimately proved devastating.

Where Dylan emerged as a cryptic celebrity beginning in 1964, playfully provoking journalists and audiences alike to pin him down, Ochs took on the persona of a committed radical. He crafted material that frequently tested, and occasionally shattered, the limits of mainstream political expression in popular song while pushing the thematic reach and diction of folk poetry into fresh and strikingly fertile ground. The impact grew stronger because he delivered these ideas through a tone that sounded direct and unpretentious. Although he never produced anything as broadly recognized as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” or “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Ochs provoked outrage nationwide—and particularly in Mississippi—with “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” stirred listeners with “The Power and the Glory,” a fitting heir to Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” and “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” and stirred widespread grief over President Kennedy through “Crucifixion.” Despite the outlaw aura that began forming around him in establishment circles as early as 1965, his songs reached high-school classrooms via “The Highwayman” and “The Bells,” the latter marking an unusually early blending of folk and art-song traditions. In time he followed Dylan’s example by adopting electric instrumentation and exploring more introspective, abstract, and romantic themes, yet he retained an extra measure of credibility among engaged audiences. While Dylan, shaped by deliberate choices and personal circumstances, spent much of the late 1960s as an elusive recluse admired from a distance, Ochs stood among the crowds at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where thousands of young demonstrators, backed by a handful of courageous officials, protested the Vietnam War and faced violent suppression ordered by Mayor Daley; he later testified at the conspiracy trial of the seven accused organizers. No matter how far his musical approach evolved or how intricate his writing grew, he sustained this engagement with social issues. Beyond U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which continued into the mid-1970s, he witnessed several of his championed causes achieve partial victories as the 1970s began; yet clinical depression and alcoholism left him emotionally and creatively depleted. By mid-decade he found himself empty, and he took his own life in 1976. Only after this harrowing decline and death did proper recognition arrive for him as one of the most genuine and compassionate songwriters of his era, whether addressing political horrors or more lyrical subjects.

Ochs described himself as a “singing journalist” upon starting to perform in New York in the early 1960s. In that role he embodied the emerging practice later labeled “new journalism,” delivering confrontational commentary through melody. Born in Texas to Jacob Ochs, a physician of limited means originally from New York, and Gertrude Phin, whom his father had met while studying medicine at Edinburgh University in Scotland, he entered a household already unsettled by the Great Depression and his father’s unpredictable conduct. The outbreak of World War II and Jack Ochs’s conscription into the U.S. Army medical corps only heightened the instability. Postwar family life offered little calm, as treatment for the elder Ochs’s manic depression and the collapse of his New York practice left scant security. Phil Ochs spent his childhood in Queens, New York, the upstate town of Perrysburg, and Columbus, Ohio. During those years his tastes ran surprisingly conventional; raised in the 1940s and 1950s, he admired John Wayne, World War II hero turned actor Audie Murphy, and James Dean, and he appeared to accept many of the values they represented. An avid film enthusiast long before home video or cable television simplified access, he also devoured books filled with heroic and romantic adventures. As a teenager he already grasped the mechanics of dramatic storytelling, narrative arcs, and evocative imagery—all elements that would later shape his songwriting. In 1956 he enrolled at Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, successfully completing two years as a cadet before entering Ohio State University in 1958. Music had begun to draw him in, especially country, which later opened the door to folk. At Ohio State he resolved to become a writer and encountered the work of Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and novelists such as Jack Kerouac. Around the same period his roommate Jim Glover introduced him to the songs of Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Pete Seeger along with the leftist protest tradition they embodied; Glover, who would later form the duo Jim & Jean with Jean Ray, stayed connected to Ochs both personally and professionally for years.

By the close of the 1950s the change was total: the former admirer of John Wayne and Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, now led campus demonstrations against compulsory ROTC. Ochs relocated from Ohio to New York in the early 1960s and quickly became a prolific creator of the topical, left-leaning protest songs then in fashion. His earliest recordings, appearing on Broadside, Folkways, and Vanguard compilations that captured his Newport Folk Festival appearances, sounded somewhat austere and quickly dated, though they revealed genuine fervor, sincerity, and greater command of language and melody than much of the surrounding folk-boom output. With the 1964 Elektra debut All the News That’s Fit to Sing—a pointed play on The New York Times slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—Ochs began to find a distinctive voice: limited in range yet more melodic than Dylan’s, its sharp accusations softened by a warm delivery and underlying empathy. Backed on second guitar by Danny Kalb, later of the Blues Project, the album featured “Power and the Glory,” “Bound for Glory,” and an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells.”

The follow-up, I Ain’t Marching Anymore (1965), displayed improved solo playing and more daring material. That record supplied the antiwar movement with two anthems in the title track and “Draft Dodger Rag,” plus the moving civil-rights statement “Here’s to the State of Mississippi.” Through “The Highwayman,” drawn from Alfred Noyes’s poem, Ochs also revealed expanded compositional range and produced a piece that, despite the political controversies surrounding his work, found its way into countless high-school classrooms—serving, on a smaller scale, the same function “Puff the Magic Dragon” performed for Peter, Paul & Mary by opening doors in mainstream America. The folk audience embraced him as the most promising singer-songwriter since Dylan’s 1962 debut; although he lacked Dylan’s daring linguistic precision and structural inventiveness, his words, delivered in a voice that might have belonged to the boy next door, carried a quiet rage, indignation, and irony that landed with equal force.

Across his Elektra albums Ochs confronted antiwar, civil-rights, labor, and social-justice themes, with In Concert (1966) standing as the strongest. That release, which ironically contained little actual live material because his voice failed during the performance being taped, found him still writing topical songs yet treating them with musical and lyrical sophistication that remains striking decades later. His social critique grew sharper in pieces such as “Canons of Christianity,” “Cops of the World,” and the satirical “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” while he also explored non-political subjects with comparable or greater success on “There But for Fortune” and “Changes,” his most celebrated love song.

In Concert marked Ochs’s final acoustic album and the end of his association with Elektra. The years 1965–1966 proved turbulent as the musical terrain shifted dramatically beneath him. The arrival of folk-rock, exemplified by the Byrds and Dylan’s electric-band turn, drained vitality from the folk boom; younger listeners, after brief hesitation, drifted away, shrinking the audience to a fraction of its 1963–1964 size. Ochs had also come to view the studio itself as an instrument, following Simon & Garfunkel’s example, and began conceiving songs beyond the constraints of acoustic guitars and a pair of microphones. He knew Elektra, only then venturing beyond folk into rock, would not provide such support. He had already tested electric rock with a strong though unsuccessful single version of “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” In 1967 he decisively shed his acoustic troubadour image, signed with A&M Records, moved to Los Angeles, and recorded Pleasures of the Harbor, an album that completely recast his sound. The record introduced timbres new to his work and to popular music generally, alongside an exceptional collection of songs, at least two of which—“The Crucifixion” (later commonly known without the article) and the title track—rank among the finest of his career. It also yielded a promising single, “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” a biting satire on social apathy that proved as infectious as it was caustic. The single faltered commercially, however; references to marijuana and pointed jabs at government provoked FCC warnings that kept most stations from airing it. Instead it circulated underground as both joke and rallying cry, comparable to Country Joe & the Fish’s “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.”

Pleasures of the Harbor possessed undeniable beauty and emotional weight—perhaps the richest single collection Ochs, or most anyone emerging from the folk world, ever assembled—yet it was not flawless. Ambitious arrangements sometimes overpowered his modest vocal range and the underlying melodies, while the lighter baroque-rock textures occasionally felt overly refined. At times Ochs seemed to strain for elevated poetic effect, and the more elaborate production choices occasionally worked against the material.

From 1967 through 1970 Ochs’s path consisted largely of daring personal and artistic leaps accompanied by crushing setbacks. He had not abandoned his political convictions, appearing at the violence-marred 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Tape from California, issued that year, featured more restrained production than its predecessor and served its songs better. It also restored the activist Ochs after the poetic excursions of Pleasures of the Harbor; “White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land” (a song whose relevance persisted into the twenty-first century under George W. Bush), “Joe Hill,” and “The War Is Over” felt like classic Ochs even as they reflected his evolution. The cinematic narrative quality of “White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land” made it play like a film inside the listener’s mind; he had progressed from singing journalist to musical essayist and singing screenwriter. Another link to his acoustic era, “Half a Century High,” previously performed at Newport in 1966, appeared here in shorter, slightly simplified form, opening with one studio effect that proved unnecessary yet remaining nearly as memorable as the title track—an autobiographical narrative and the strongest original rock song he ever wrote. The Chicago convention’s collapse, the splintering of the antiwar movement between moderates and radicals, and the country’s turn toward pro-war candidate Richard Nixon pushed Ochs’s convictions to the limit. By 1969’s Rehearsals for Retirement, fatigue and disillusionment had begun coloring both his writing and delivery. Despite isolated transcendent passages, the album—whose cover featured a tombstone bearing Ochs’s name—found little audience and was soon deleted. Difficulties intensified with the facetiously titled 1970 release Greatest Hits, whose material quality noticeably declined, though the record still contained searing, sadness-steeped highlights: “Chords of Fame” (later covered superbly by Melanie), “Jim Dean of Indiana,” and the ominous “No More Songs,” virtually a self-written farewell.

Greatest Hits proved to be Ochs’s final studio album. He remained active, releasing a live LP—initially available only in Canada—that stirred debate through its unusual blend of originals and unexpected covers of Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly songs performed in a gold lamé suit. At the time he sought to fuse rock-star persona with topical material, aiming, as he put it, to “turn Elvis Presley into Che Guevara.” The 1950s-revival gambit met with poor reception from listeners accustomed to a folk troubadour, but that was among his lesser problems. His supply of new songs had dried up, and severe alcohol and psychological troubles had taken hold. A mysterious assault in Africa permanently damaged his voice.

He managed a pair of unsuccessful singles in the early 1970s, yet by mid-decade he was largely inactive and suffering profound depression. The Nixon administration’s role in the military coup against Chile’s popularly elected communist president Salvador Allende devastated him, and even Nixon’s 1974 resignation failed to lift his spirits. He performed a few concerts—one 1974 benefit for former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s Senate bid, the sole member of Lyndon Johnson’s cabinet to oppose the Vietnam War, later surfaced as a bootleg and demonstrated his continued ability to move an audience—yet he spiraled downward. He participated briefly in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and was reportedly filmed performing four songs for the film Renaldo and Clara that ultimately went unused. In early 1976 he hanged himself at his sister’s home in Far Rockaway, Queens. He never reached half a century in age, yet he possessed wisdom beyond those years; countless fans who knew him only through his songs, and there were far more by the end than he likely realized, continue to feel his absence.

In the decades since—following a period of relative obscurity in the late 1970s when only devoted followers mourned him—Ochs’s songs and stature have steadily expanded with minimal assistance from mainstream media. Greatest Hits appeared briefly as a budget reissue in the early 1980s before vanishing again. At the dawn of the CD era A&M issued a poorly mastered Best of Phil Ochs that failed to justify its title. Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, under the late Herb Belkin, gave Gunfight at Carnegie Hall—previously available only in Canada—its first official U.S. CD release in the late 1980s. Vanguard later released Live at Newport, a compilation of his festival appearances that included early acoustic renditions of four later-career songs. A low-budget biographical film, Chords of Fame, directed by Michael Korelenko and starring Bill Burnett, appeared in limited release in 1984; its highlight was an a cappella performance of “Crucifixion” that often moved audiences to tears. In the mid-1980s Sean Penn expressed interest in portraying Ochs on screen, a project that never materialized and which he has since aged past pursuing. Far more significant were two previously unreleased recordings that surfaced on Rhino in the 1980s: the studio collection A Toast to Those Who Are Gone and the live set There and Now: Live in Vancouver 1968, both filling major gaps; the live album in particular remains essential. A multi-artist tribute, What Did I Hear?: The Songs of Phil Ochs, appeared as a double-CD set. In 1996 Rhino issued the comprehensive triple-CD retrospective Farewells & Fantasies, featuring extensive previously unheard archival material. Around the same time Universal compiled Ochs’s A&M output on the excellent double-CD American Troubadour, released only in Europe. Beyond the music industry—apart from the efforts of Ochs’s younger brother Michael Ochs, now a renowned archivist and producer—it has been fans, aided by college radio, occasional alternative stations, and dedicated reissue specialists at Collector's Choice and Hannibal Records, who have kept his catalog available and his legacy alive.