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A Poem For Phil Ochs
by Russell Brown (10/11/12) "I first heard of Phil Ochs in the pages of the 'Rolling Stone Record Guide' which inspired me to look at music more analytically. Phil never did anything without total and sincere conviction. How many people can we say that about? This particular poem is an observation on the eve of the most recent U.S. national elections, based on Phil's correct observation of America becoming increasingly more reactionary." |
As the Mayans have said, the old ways will
be dead
It’s a new day that will be a-breaking Will it be one that’s bright to dispel selfish night? Or will those with the most still be taking? We stop the one-percent, or it’s most evident It’s democracy we’ll be forsaking One way or another, we are living the revolution Certain folks, they see, you’re a commodity Just a cog in a wheel, you mean nothing So easy to replace if you fall on your face Worry not, we’ve got a million of ‘em Your blood, tears and toil, they don’t matter at all But a corporation is a person One way or another, we are living the revolution To me it is clear the new fascism’s here “Gier uber alles” seems the motto And they’ll lie cheat and steal ‘till their slanders seem real So that we, being frightened, will follow We’ll shrug while Atlas roars, we’re not scared anymore For their dreams are a thing much too shallow One way or another, we are living the revolution Facing dire admonitions from crepe-paper Christians “Taking their country back”, so they’ll tell you That “their country” died in 1865 Is a fact they can’t seem to admit to Would heaven be filled with such self-righteous shills Makes me wonder, what would Jesus do? One way or another, we are living the revolution All those who fought before, these same battles, this same war They look to us now to see whether We can take up the fight: decent wage, equal rights, Shoulder-to-shoulder, making it better ‘Till my brother stands free, there’s no freedom for me So, ‘till then, we shall all stand together One way or another, we are living the revolution First Tuesday in November may we all remember The terror they feel at our power Show them we’ll never quit, we ninety-nine-percent, We will fight, no matter the hour All their billions will pale, all their dark schemes will fail For the one thing they can’t buy is honor One way or another, we are winning the revolution |
The Legacy of Phil Ochs - by Lawrence Scanlan
"This is heresy but I don't actually much like the voice of Phil Ochs, but the idea of Phil Ochs, his in-your-face-politics, his courage and outspokenness - that's what endures.
We could use him today"
"This is heresy but I don't actually much like the voice of Phil Ochs, but the idea of Phil Ochs, his in-your-face-politics, his courage and outspokenness - that's what endures.
We could use him today"
A film on "the troubadour of the left" stirs memories both pleasant and painful
"Ah, but in such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty"
At the commencement ceremonies for Osgoode Hall law school held in June, Roderick A. Macdonald — a professor of constitutional and public law at McGill University with a special interest in social justice — was given an honorary degree. After his speech, he did something unusual.
He got out his guitar and sang the Phil Ochs song, “When I’m Gone” – which counsels a carpe diem approach both to life’s simple pleasures and to civic engagement. And when the Université de Montréal awarded him an honorary doctorate last October, the professor sang Ochs’s “There But for Fortune” — a plea for compassion — in both English and French. Macdonald has been teaching for thirty-five years and makes a Phil Ochs song part of every course.
I wanted to know why this distinguished man was citing an all but forgotten protest singer. The short answer? The singer is not forgotten.
“In the late 1960s,” Professor Macdonald told me, “people used music as a form of engagement. And Phil Ochs’s work was the most poignant, the most ironic, the most layered. Students get his work. They’re forty years removed but they see how it speaks to their challenges.”
Ochs, says Macdonald, offered lessons in what it means to live a virtuous life — and sometimes that involves swimming against the current. In the fall of 1969, Macdonald and five others crossed the border to witness and report on the trial of The Buffalo Nine — students arrested after protesting the war in Vietnam.
“If I were to resurrect one thing to define the late ‘60s,” said Macdonald, “it was opposition to war.”
*
On the night of October 15, 1969, a university student with shoulder-length hair and a red pork-pie hat walked with almost a quarter million others down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Many marchers laid burning candles at their destination — the black wrought iron gates of the White House.
Astonishing that the cops allowed it; unimaginable now. I was the kid with the hat and the hair and I will never forget the sight of all those candles burning. Massive protests were mounted that year against the war in Vietnam, each one successively larger.
Richard Nixon was home that night and later he would say how unmoved he was. His top general dismissed the marchers as “strangers alike to soap and reason.” I, on the other hand, reckoned that if enough people walked (children and seniors were on that march, which proceeded without incident), Nixon would pay heed. My “we shall overcome” faith and youthful naivete are gone now — along with most of my hair. What remains is the conviction: that the march was right, that the war was wrong, that dissent would turn the tide.
Since then, such protests have fallen in and out of fashion. But recent events — from the Arab spring demonstrations to “social justice protests” in Israel, Spain, India and Chile — suggest that an old weapon for social change is enjoying a resurgence.
*
In 1969, twelve of us had driven overnight to Washington from Glendon College, a small Toronto campus affiliated with York University. The bilingual arts college had a reputation (overstated) as a hotbed of student radicalism and that fall would host a gathering of left-leaning students and professors from all over Europe and North America. “The Year of the Barricade” attracted almost 600 participants, including American folk singer Phil Ochs, of whom Neil Young once opined, “I was inspired by Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan — in that order.”
Ochs was smart and edgy, strident and sarcastic, and though an intensely patriotic American (John Wayne was his hero), he made some of his countrymen nervous (the FBI file on him ran 500 pages). Ochs was well-informed, with a fine sense of theatre (he and his Yippie pals — with the Vietnam War raging — once sprinted the streets shouting “The war is over!” to provoke a sense of what that might feel like).
A small coterie recently sat in a screening room at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario to watch There But for Fortune — a new film that chronicles the life of the singer who hanged himself on April 9, 1976 in his sister’s house in Far Rockaway, New York at the age of thirty-five. Lifelong manic depression and addiction to alcohol in his later years had finally bested Phil Ochs.
A bold critic, he mocked Liberals (“ten degrees left of centre in good times, ten degrees to the right when it affects them personally”), he chastized the union movement for not supporting the black movement, and he derided anyone who abused power. He dreamt of a world in which blacks had the same rights as whites, in which an unjust war could be stopped if enough citizens objected, in which workers’ rights were protected and “justice for all” was more than an empty slogan.
Dylan pirouetted around politics; not Ochs. In 1968, he ignored the warnings of Chicago’s chief of police and sang for demonstrators at the Democratic convention — then watched in horror as they were savagely beaten by police, gassed and set upon by dogs. A part of Ochs, the most idealistic part, died then.
Had he lived, Phil Ochs would be seventy now. He would have been appalled to witness the militarization of North American culture — and especially sport: all those co-opting salutes to “our” troops at pro baseball and football games, the news that a college basketball game will be played this fall on an American aircraft carrier, the fighter-jet graphics on the sweaters of the revived NHL franchise in Winnipeg. In my city, we put tanks in the Santa Claus parade. No one utters a peep.
*
Andrew Raven, now an Ottawa labour lawyer, met Phil Ochs at the Toronto airport late in October of 1969. Ochs still had his boyish good looks but his hair, thought Andy, wanted a shampoo. Andy was, like me, a jock (he was captain of the Glendon College hockey team I played for) and a politico (he wore the lefty’s uniform: green military surplus overshirt with huge flapped pockets at the front).
Hoping to entice Ochs to the conference, Andy had contacted Columbia Records in the summer of 1969. Ochs’s agent (and brother) Michael told him that in the wake of Chicago, Phil was in despair. But he had a soft spot for Toronto and he agreed to fly in from Los Angeles if his expenses were covered. His first request was to be taken to Yorkville Avenue — where he had written “Changes,” one of his most beautiful songs. Yorkville is tony now but then it was the heart of folk music in this country.
Forty-two years later, Andy’s allegiance to Ochs is unwavering: “He reflected for me everything that was good about that time.” Andy has vivid memories: Ochs emerging from an all-Canadian wine store with four dubious bottles. Ochs in fine form playing to a jammed Ryerson Theatre (tickets were $2.50 to $3). Ochs in The Jolly Miller, an historic tavern on Yonge St. favoured by Glendonites. Ochs at the piano in the junior common room at Glendon playing “Jim Dean of Indiana” — the same song he would play repeatedly at his sister’s house in the weeks before his suicide.
*
With its vintage footage, There But for Fortune powerfully depicts a time when music and politics were all of a piece. I later borrowed the CD and watched it again. I had never shared Andy’s passion for Ochs: I thought the voice too high and nasal, the message too relentless. But actually seeing him sing, realizing how funny his lyrics were, how creative and vulnerable he was — won me over. I warmed to his tremolo and I have his songs in my head as I write these words.
*
In June, Andrew Raven’s law firm sponsored a showing of the film as a fund-raiser for the Ottawa Folk Festival and the Workers’ History Museum. Some 300 people came and heard Phil Ochs’s sister, Sonny. At Patty’s Pub on Bank Street, they sang Phil Ochs songs and many individuals were visibly affected by the evening.
Why? The film shows Richard Nixon assuring viewers that U.S. military advisors were training South Vietnamese soldiers and that all would be well when American GIs pulled out. Today, the same song of assurance is being sung in Afghanistan — this time by Canadian military personnel. The lesson? Live long enough and you can watch history repeat.
The documentary captures the hopes of the ‘60s when many (though not all, for apathy was as much the enemy then as it is now) thought they could usher in wholesale change. Vastly underestimated was the resilience of the other side. It’s painful to watch Phil Ochs unravel as his dreams for change (and stardom) are dashed. What dies in the film are innocence and naivete, so the film — for some viewers — is very personal.
I polled friends who were on that 1969 march and details emerged that I had forgotten. Marilyn Smith, a CBC-TV news producer, recalls that we chanced across two medical students who let all twelve of us “crash” on their floor in Virginia — but not before staying up half the night with us talking politics. Next morning at Arlington Cemetery we witnessed the burial of a soldier. “All very eerie and surreal,” says David Moulton, who teaches marketing in Vancouver. “Young men our age were the ones dying in Vietnam.”
*
If you care enough about something to take to the streets, at least some power can be wrested from those who hoard it. Ask Hosni Mubarak or the Shah of Iran. Iron Curtains fall and Berlin Walls tumble, so all is possible.
On the other hand, certain truths assail me: Governments lie to stay in power (Nixon and Watergate). Power corrupts (Gaddafi). Greed is insatiable (Wall St. cowboys). Governments (see power, above) will let loose the police on its own civilians (the Democratic convention in Chicago of 1968, the G-20 summit in Toronto of 2010).
It was good to read The New York Times op-ed page recently and to see Warren Buffett call for higher taxes for the wealthy and for “a billionaire-friendly Congress . . . to get serious about shared sacrifice.” Phil Ochs would have agreed. He would have said today as he said then: Stop the wars! Spread the wealth!
Interview with SONiA
by Trevan McGee of www.lawrence.com (November, 2011)
Sonia Rutstein, or SONiA, as she's known professionally has been playing with independent folk/pop group disappear fear for more than 20 years, many of those years alongside her sister, Cindy Frank or CiNDY. In 1996 Frank stopped perfuming regularly with her sister to focus on motherhood and her education, while SONiA continued to tour, write and perform her own material as well as covers as both a solo act and a part of disappear fear.
Now, the sisters have reunited under disappear fear and are touring in support of "Get Your Phil," a collection of 10 covers of Phil Ochs songs that will bring them by the Lied Center Pavillion, 1600 Stewart Drive, this Thursday. SONiA took time to talk about the album, the importance of Phil Ochs and performing with her sister again.
Trevan McGee: Tell me a bit about the new album.
SONiA Rutstein: I was planning on doing a CD of Phil Ochs songs at some point in my career and now seemed like a good time to do it. As a songwriter I’m kind of an independent singer/songwriter, I’m always writing songs. I’m going back to Phil Ochs, who was a big inspiration for me to, not only write the kind of songs that I write in terms of certain topics like particular news stories that strike my eye, but the Phil Ochs/Bob Dylan method that makes you say, “What!?!” And perhaps bring attention to an issue or give some more credit to an unsung hero becoming a sung hero.
There was all of that for Phil Ochs, but I had to find my own time to do it because I’m recording my own CDs. I mentioned it to Cindy (Frank) that I was going to go in and record a CD of Phil’s music and she said, “Oh man, I would love to sing with you on that.” So the timing was right. She had graduated. She was taking classes where she lives and I live in Baltimore. I found an engineer who seemed to be the perfect guy to be the engineer. He had actually met Phil a couple of times and Phil had shown him a couple chords from some songs, one of which I was doing, “Changes.”
Cindy flew down from Seattle on Friday night and by Sunday night we had basically the CD. I had done some of the rhythm tracks before, but a lot of it just went down pretty live. It felt really good.
We had chosen all the songs beforehand to rehearse and get everything together. Cindy and I have been singing together now for most of our lives, so we got that down too.
TM: You dedicated your first album to Phil Ochs. Do you have a memory of the first time you heard a Phil Ochs song?
SR: Yes. I remember when I first heard his music ... I really liked the words of his music. I was familiar with the song “Changes” before I knew it was by Phil Ochs. It was a camp song, so it was just like, “Oooh, that’s really pretty.” I don’t think I had heard of anything else. I know Joan Baez had recorded “There But For Fortune,” but if I did hear that, it never came out strong for me.
It was really more reading his lyrics. His voice, I actually thought was a little weird when I first heard it. It’s kind of nasaled and not very rock ‘n’ roll. I was listening more to the people of the day like Cat Stevens or James Taylor or Joni Mitchell — folky stuff. Simon and Garfunkel, which I loved. His voice wasn’t really that and it certainly wasn’t Bob Dylan either. Bob sort of had a kind nasal in the same way that Phil’s was, but it was different. I didn’t really understand his singing, but I really, really liked the melodies a lot. And I liked the songs as well. I think the next thing I heard was an album called “Chords of Fame,” which was a double album. It was just him and occasionally another artist was playing and singing, but it was live and it was just guitars and vocals. It was amazing. I just loved it.
I guess the other thing that struck me about it was ... here’s a guy who’s making this amazingly great songs and I’ve never heard him on the radio. Ever. I remember thinking, “Wow, there’a whole other world out there where you can actually have a musical career and write great songs and they might not be big hits, but they can touch people deeply and that’s how it really was for me. Phil’s songs really touched me. I would just turn people on to him all of the time, I would play his songs in my car for people. Much later, after I recorded “Is There Anybody Here” on my first CD in 1994, later that year I heard of Sonny Ochs, who is Phil’s surviving older sister. She loved the version, loved our voices and I ended up doing a series of shows with her, which are called “The Phil Ochs Song Nights.”
She takes about about eight to 15 people on stage, singer/songwriters themselves, and they do one or two of Phil’s songs and one or two of their own. It’s kind of depending on his generation, but a new generation of songwriters too to create new arrangements and so on. That’s happening again in the spring. I’m doing another Sonny Ochs tour then.
TM: What informed your song choices for this album?
SR: Some of them were just songs of his that are part of my definitive Phil Ochs connection such as "Is There Anybody Here," which I've recorded before and also "Outside a Small Circle of Friends," which I've never recorded. I've done it live lots of times. I've personally performed those with just me and my guitar or with Cindy.
Some of the other songs on the CD are just the mainstay songs from Phil Ochs nights. We open with "Power and Glory" and we frequently close the nights with "When I'm gone."
The biggest critique I've gotten on the CD has been, "Why did you do 'Pleasures Of The Harbor?'" "Why didn't you do 'The Highway Man?'" Well, because it wasn't going to be 97 songs long, you know? [laughs]
TM: There are meaner things to say than, "You didn't play enough songs."
SR: Yeah, yeah. What was the other one …. "Cops of The World," that's another one. where a few people said, "Why didn't you do 'Cops of The World'? It's so perfect for us right now."
TM: With this show coming up at the Lied Center, how much will be dedicated to the Phil Ochs album and how much will be music you and your sister have made from throughout your career?
SR: I wouldn't say I know the exact percentages, but I'll say it will be representative of both, which probably makes it around 50/50. And I also don't know how long we're performing for. I think our set is around 90 minutes, I'm guessing.
We should be able to get a chunk of everything, whether it's songs of the past and i'm sure we'll do a good representation of songs from the CD as well.
TM: Do you see any collaborations like this in the future? Would you do another collection of covers like this one?
SR: Well you know, it's funny you asked me about this because I was just driving home singing "Moon River." I love that song. [laughs]
Yes. It could happen. There are some great songs out there some songs that I just really love and shouldn't be that difficult to do this because most of the work is already done. Again, I would say a good third of the songs I already knew, if not by heart, nearly by heart.
It could happen. It think it would be all over the place because songs that I love, for instance "Moon River," or "Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters" by Elton John, I'm not sure they'd go well with each other on a CD.
My songwriting is, nicely said, a mix of many different genres and a little less nicely said, is all over the place. I've got reggae songs. I've got blues songs. I've got rock songs, I've got a couple of funny songs, country. It's not so different for me, but as a songwriter it keeps me awake and challenged. And I never would want to do a performance where things were unchallenging or be on automatic. I like keeping it fresh and to do that, it's sort of like, "What's around this corner? What rug and I lift up?"
TM: Do you know a difference in response between U.S. audiences and international audiences?
SR: Oddly enough, no. I was going to say they (international audiences) are quieter, but that's not even true. Really they just vary from club-to-club. If I'm playing a large festival in Europe it's the same kind of feeling as there is here. It's a good sound, there's people excited. It also depends on the time of day and if I'm the headliner or if I'm less known and playing earlier.
I think that when I'm performing a song, or when anyone is performing a song, there is a frequency that people are responding to and beyond the lyrics and the music and the other content, physical creation of it, there's something happening on another level and that transcends continents. It transcends thoughts and political opinions. It's something else.
by Trevan McGee of www.lawrence.com (November, 2011)
Sonia Rutstein, or SONiA, as she's known professionally has been playing with independent folk/pop group disappear fear for more than 20 years, many of those years alongside her sister, Cindy Frank or CiNDY. In 1996 Frank stopped perfuming regularly with her sister to focus on motherhood and her education, while SONiA continued to tour, write and perform her own material as well as covers as both a solo act and a part of disappear fear.
Now, the sisters have reunited under disappear fear and are touring in support of "Get Your Phil," a collection of 10 covers of Phil Ochs songs that will bring them by the Lied Center Pavillion, 1600 Stewart Drive, this Thursday. SONiA took time to talk about the album, the importance of Phil Ochs and performing with her sister again.
Trevan McGee: Tell me a bit about the new album.
SONiA Rutstein: I was planning on doing a CD of Phil Ochs songs at some point in my career and now seemed like a good time to do it. As a songwriter I’m kind of an independent singer/songwriter, I’m always writing songs. I’m going back to Phil Ochs, who was a big inspiration for me to, not only write the kind of songs that I write in terms of certain topics like particular news stories that strike my eye, but the Phil Ochs/Bob Dylan method that makes you say, “What!?!” And perhaps bring attention to an issue or give some more credit to an unsung hero becoming a sung hero.
There was all of that for Phil Ochs, but I had to find my own time to do it because I’m recording my own CDs. I mentioned it to Cindy (Frank) that I was going to go in and record a CD of Phil’s music and she said, “Oh man, I would love to sing with you on that.” So the timing was right. She had graduated. She was taking classes where she lives and I live in Baltimore. I found an engineer who seemed to be the perfect guy to be the engineer. He had actually met Phil a couple of times and Phil had shown him a couple chords from some songs, one of which I was doing, “Changes.”
Cindy flew down from Seattle on Friday night and by Sunday night we had basically the CD. I had done some of the rhythm tracks before, but a lot of it just went down pretty live. It felt really good.
We had chosen all the songs beforehand to rehearse and get everything together. Cindy and I have been singing together now for most of our lives, so we got that down too.
TM: You dedicated your first album to Phil Ochs. Do you have a memory of the first time you heard a Phil Ochs song?
SR: Yes. I remember when I first heard his music ... I really liked the words of his music. I was familiar with the song “Changes” before I knew it was by Phil Ochs. It was a camp song, so it was just like, “Oooh, that’s really pretty.” I don’t think I had heard of anything else. I know Joan Baez had recorded “There But For Fortune,” but if I did hear that, it never came out strong for me.
It was really more reading his lyrics. His voice, I actually thought was a little weird when I first heard it. It’s kind of nasaled and not very rock ‘n’ roll. I was listening more to the people of the day like Cat Stevens or James Taylor or Joni Mitchell — folky stuff. Simon and Garfunkel, which I loved. His voice wasn’t really that and it certainly wasn’t Bob Dylan either. Bob sort of had a kind nasal in the same way that Phil’s was, but it was different. I didn’t really understand his singing, but I really, really liked the melodies a lot. And I liked the songs as well. I think the next thing I heard was an album called “Chords of Fame,” which was a double album. It was just him and occasionally another artist was playing and singing, but it was live and it was just guitars and vocals. It was amazing. I just loved it.
I guess the other thing that struck me about it was ... here’s a guy who’s making this amazingly great songs and I’ve never heard him on the radio. Ever. I remember thinking, “Wow, there’a whole other world out there where you can actually have a musical career and write great songs and they might not be big hits, but they can touch people deeply and that’s how it really was for me. Phil’s songs really touched me. I would just turn people on to him all of the time, I would play his songs in my car for people. Much later, after I recorded “Is There Anybody Here” on my first CD in 1994, later that year I heard of Sonny Ochs, who is Phil’s surviving older sister. She loved the version, loved our voices and I ended up doing a series of shows with her, which are called “The Phil Ochs Song Nights.”
She takes about about eight to 15 people on stage, singer/songwriters themselves, and they do one or two of Phil’s songs and one or two of their own. It’s kind of depending on his generation, but a new generation of songwriters too to create new arrangements and so on. That’s happening again in the spring. I’m doing another Sonny Ochs tour then.
TM: What informed your song choices for this album?
SR: Some of them were just songs of his that are part of my definitive Phil Ochs connection such as "Is There Anybody Here," which I've recorded before and also "Outside a Small Circle of Friends," which I've never recorded. I've done it live lots of times. I've personally performed those with just me and my guitar or with Cindy.
Some of the other songs on the CD are just the mainstay songs from Phil Ochs nights. We open with "Power and Glory" and we frequently close the nights with "When I'm gone."
The biggest critique I've gotten on the CD has been, "Why did you do 'Pleasures Of The Harbor?'" "Why didn't you do 'The Highway Man?'" Well, because it wasn't going to be 97 songs long, you know? [laughs]
TM: There are meaner things to say than, "You didn't play enough songs."
SR: Yeah, yeah. What was the other one …. "Cops of The World," that's another one. where a few people said, "Why didn't you do 'Cops of The World'? It's so perfect for us right now."
TM: With this show coming up at the Lied Center, how much will be dedicated to the Phil Ochs album and how much will be music you and your sister have made from throughout your career?
SR: I wouldn't say I know the exact percentages, but I'll say it will be representative of both, which probably makes it around 50/50. And I also don't know how long we're performing for. I think our set is around 90 minutes, I'm guessing.
We should be able to get a chunk of everything, whether it's songs of the past and i'm sure we'll do a good representation of songs from the CD as well.
TM: Do you see any collaborations like this in the future? Would you do another collection of covers like this one?
SR: Well you know, it's funny you asked me about this because I was just driving home singing "Moon River." I love that song. [laughs]
Yes. It could happen. There are some great songs out there some songs that I just really love and shouldn't be that difficult to do this because most of the work is already done. Again, I would say a good third of the songs I already knew, if not by heart, nearly by heart.
It could happen. It think it would be all over the place because songs that I love, for instance "Moon River," or "Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters" by Elton John, I'm not sure they'd go well with each other on a CD.
My songwriting is, nicely said, a mix of many different genres and a little less nicely said, is all over the place. I've got reggae songs. I've got blues songs. I've got rock songs, I've got a couple of funny songs, country. It's not so different for me, but as a songwriter it keeps me awake and challenged. And I never would want to do a performance where things were unchallenging or be on automatic. I like keeping it fresh and to do that, it's sort of like, "What's around this corner? What rug and I lift up?"
TM: Do you know a difference in response between U.S. audiences and international audiences?
SR: Oddly enough, no. I was going to say they (international audiences) are quieter, but that's not even true. Really they just vary from club-to-club. If I'm playing a large festival in Europe it's the same kind of feeling as there is here. It's a good sound, there's people excited. It also depends on the time of day and if I'm the headliner or if I'm less known and playing earlier.
I think that when I'm performing a song, or when anyone is performing a song, there is a frequency that people are responding to and beyond the lyrics and the music and the other content, physical creation of it, there's something happening on another level and that transcends continents. It transcends thoughts and political opinions. It's something else.
"The Critic of the Dawn - Phil Ochs and the future"
Huw Spink
"I first got into Phil through hearing Billy Bragg's song I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night. I hadn't the foggiest who Phil was but I figured that if Billy wrote a song like that about him he must be pretty special. I wasn't wrong.
The thing that really gets me about Phil is the sheer depth of his writing. He was so in tune with his time, so clued up, so impassioned by what was going on that his songs, even so many years later, are positively dripping with ideas.
This is an extended version of the thing that I wrote for the Home page of this site. Just a little example of where just one little idea in Phil's songwriting can lead to"
When Lindsay and I decided to set up this website we thought it would be nice to come up with a name that somehow symbolised what it was that the site represented – the living, creative legacy of Phil Ochs. So we searched his song lyrics for some reference to his legacy, to his vision for the future. And what did we find?
Nothing. Or precious little anyway.
Name me one Phil Ochs songs that deals with the future? That even mentions the future? Sure, the past gets a good old going over and the present is well…present. But the future?
Do What I Have To has a fleeting mention of “a million more when we’re gone” while The Doll House has the suitably enigmatic “the future was mine and the present surrendered”.
It’s as if, to Phil, there was no future, or at least there was no future that he could envisage. In his early songs he seems too wrapped in fighting current evils to stop and consider the future. His later songs are so wrapped up in bleakness that a future seems an impossible luxury.
To Phil there was always an end, a stop, a finale. Indeed in Rehearsals For Retirement with its line “If I’d have known the end would end in laughter, I’d tell my daughter it doesn’t matter” shows an almost callous disregard for the very idea of a future.
How can someone so wrapped up in the need for change, in the need for change for the better, be so uninterested in the future so as to not even acknowledge what would be after he had ceased to be?
Think about When I’m Gone. Behind its obvious beauty and go-getting attitude is a total disregard for the future, an almost wilful lack of acknowledgment that there will even be a future. It is a song very much for the here and now. Even in The Floods of Florence, a song that is very much about what the artist leaves behind (and the eternal nature of art) Phil can’t bring himself to join such esteemed company. Where Picasso, El Greco and D.W. Griffith live on, in the case of the troubadour - “the melody dies”.
There’s a word that keeps cropping up in Phil’s songs, a word that is never fully explained but remains deep with meaning. A meaning that perhaps helps explain his apathy with regards addressing the future.
Dawn.
Away from Phil’s songs dawn is a symbol of hope, of beginning, of optimism, of newness. Take this verse by Maurice Browne –
“Spirit of Dawn, from the dwelling
In the uttermost eastern sky,
Where the sons of the morning are telling
Their rapture, as sunward they fly
On the wings of their ecstasy....
With footsteps of flame and of yearning
Darkness and solitude spurning
Come, through the firmament burning:
The world is waiting--and I.”
Ruskin wished that “every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life”. To Harold Monro it is the “child of the day”. To Leonora Carrington it is “the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.” Peaceful, benign, hopeful.
Such images are so rare in Phil’s songs and yet the image of the dawn is one he would return to time and time again. Whenever Phil starts getting a bit poetic it seems to rear its pretty head. As with so many things Ochs, he veers from the usual, finding something new and personal in a tired old idea.
In Changes (perhaps Phil’s first unapologetically poetic song) we find “golden drops of dawn” that sweep away the “moments of magic” of the night before.
In Morning, the break of day brings not life and freshness but a melancholy – “lonesome morning reverie, all the life’s gone out of me”. Sure, it’s a song about a hangover, but in typical Phil style it seems to be about so much more.
In How Long (with its refrain “there is no future in the past”) he sings “Why the fear of the coming of the morning?”.
A key lyric in The Crucifixion is “God help the critic of the dawn”. What is the dawn he refers to? And why should we herald its critics? Willa Cather refers to dawn as “a crimson fire that vanquishes the stars”. Yet in Phil’s song the night and the stars represent order and peace and tranquillity and it is the dawn that shatters that; the cold light of day illuminating all the peril that the dark had shrouded.
In White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land Phil sings “red blows the bugle of the dawn”, the “red” being an obvious sign of threat, of danger. Again and again the dawn appears as a hostile, negative image.
In The War is Over he sings that “one-legged veterans will greet the dawn” – these gnarled figures cocking a snook at threat, at injury, at war, at the dawn.
In I’ve Had Her he sings “to possess her misty madness you would gladly duel the dawn”. Again the dawn is something to be vanquished, something adversarial – but something formidable also.
In My life he sings of being “like the drifter with his laughter in the dawn”. It’s a madcap image. An image of someone who has perhaps ceased to care.
Similarly the “dawn of another age” in Another Age is far from a welcome, pleasant dawn. That it’s preceded by “pray for the aged” suggests a threat to the world order that is anything but benign.
In No More Songs (one song to end them all) Phil’s sings that the “drums are in the dawn”. These drums are the drums of doom, like an advancing army hell bent on destroying the sense of optimism that the notion of dawn previously embodied.
The ultimate dawn appears in his unreleased All Quiet on the Western Front (one of Phil’s less subtle end-of-the-world songs) whose final verse finds Phil impatiently awaiting God, or anybody, to bring about the end of the world;
“I sit on my back porch I sing on my song
I wait for the earthquake to come with the dawn
If there was a God wouldn't take him so long
And it's all quiet on the western front”
A million miles away from Blake’s “dawn that sleeps in heaven” here is the dawn as a harbinger of doom, the dawn as the end.
This is perhaps the flip-side of Phil’s engagement with his times. Like no other he appeared wrapped, almost straight-jacketed, by his era, by wanting to influence and change what he saw around him. Beyond that he struggled to find a purpose. It reminds me of End of the Century by the Ramones where in a similar fashion they couldn’t see past the immediacy of time and place – “it’s the end, the end of the Seventies, it’s the end, the end of the century”.
And yet…here we are. The future Phil couldn’t envisage is here and now. We may be left to imagine what Phil would make of it all, but at least we are here. And what’s more Phil is here too. In his songs, in his words, in his ideas. As they as they are still here, then so is he.
There is still war, there is still injustice, there is still poverty and bigotry and hatred.
Listening to Phil Ochs won’t make these things go away, but what it might do is make these things a little easier to understand, remind us that this shit isn’t new and maybe inspire us to try and do something about it.