Many of us are familiar with such songs of the sixties
as “I Ain't Marching Anymore,” “There but for Fortune”, “Love Me, I'm a
Liberal,” and “When I'm Gone” without remembering that the author was
Phil Ochs, a singer/songwriter whose name is hardly recognized today.
Kenneth Bowser, in his documentary Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune,
makes sure that we find out. The film traces Ochs' rise from his
beginnings as a young performer in the Greenwich Village folk scene in
the early sixties to his prominence as a protest singer in the ongoing
struggle against war, racism, and injustice. An artist who developed a
sizable following, Ochs' self-inflicted death in 1976 at the age of 35
was a tragic signpost of the end of an era.
Though the documentary breaks no new ground, its format of photos, live
concert footage, and personal interviews keeps it lively and
interesting, although the quick snippets we hear of Ochs' songs make it
difficult to fully appreciate his talent. Interviews are conducted with
Phil's brother Michael who acted as his manager, folk singers Pete
Seeger, Judy Henske, and Joan Baez, actor Sean Penn, activist Tom
Hayden, journalist Christopher Hitchens, and others, but not seen is
Ochs' prominent contemporary, Bob Dylan. Bowser reveals that Dylan had
a falling out with Ochs when Bob unsuccessfully tried to steer Phil
away from what he considered to be his one-dimensional approach to song
writing and urged him to express more of his personal feelings.
As a consequence, Dylan, to put it mildly, is not spoken of highly in
the film and his estrangement with Ochs continued until Bob joined Phil
years later for a benefit concert for Victor Jara, a Chilean protest
singer who was brutally murdered by Pinochet. As has been repeated
often, the sixties was a time when young people truly believed that
energy and idealism could change society, only to be disillusioned when
powerful forces in and out of government tipped the scales in favor of
political assassinations and military adventurism. As a frustrated
protest movement splintered and gave way to the political theater of
the Yippie culture personified by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and
the Weather Underground began a campaign of setting off bombs on
government property, Phil Ochs career began to slide.
The murders of John and Bobby Kennedy, the democratically-elected
Chilean Socialist Salvador Allende, and the killings at Kent State, hit
him very hard as did the continuation of the senseless war in Vietnam.
Ochs also continued to grapple with alcoholism and the bi-polar disease
inherited from his father. His downward spiral was exacerbated when he
was attacked while walking on a beach in Dar es Salaam in Africa,
causing him to lose strength and range in his singing voice. Ochs'
behavior took on bizarre aspects when he appeared at a concert in
Carnegie Hall dressed in an Elvis Presley gold suit, shouting at his
audience, "We need to turn Elvis Presley into Che Guevara.”
Though Ochs was not a major artist in the mold of Bob Dylan whose
lyrics reverberated with poetry and breadth of vision, much of his work
was important and inspiring, a singer who reflected his times and gave
it new definition. He was “a young man with many reasons why” but when
he was no longer young and the causes he fought for were foundering,
his grip on reality started slipping and he knew that he would no
longer “suffer from the pain when he was gone.” When Dave van Ronk sang
“He was a Friend of Mine” at Ochs' memorial concert, the words of
Eminem could be heard saying, “And when I'm gone, just carry on, don't
mourn. Rejoice every time you hear the sound of my voice.”
