Phil Ochs - The Journalist with a Guitar

New York, 1965. Bob Dylan invites Phil Ochs into his limousine to play him some of his new songs: after all, that introverted young man was one of the few who had always backed every one of his artistic turns, and surely he wouldn't dare to criticize him. Not this time: against all expectations, Phil instead voices his doubts about “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”, unwittingly lighting the fuse. Ochs, however, wants to explain himself, justifying his reaction with the idea that Dylan might be losing the clarity of his songwriting, abandoning the protest song to become a rockstar. In response Dylan scolds Ochs for writing songs that are too openly political, for not understanding that music isn't just about social protest, but is first and foremost a crossroads of rhythms, melodies, and feelings. Despite his admiration for his colleague, Robert Zimmerman doesn't think twice before throwing him out of the car, dismissing him with a venomous line: “You're not a folk singer, Phil, you're just a journalist!”.

Dylan, however, was wrong: it was clear to everyone that Phil could be both. Proud to present himself as a singin’ journalist, Ochs never had mister Zimmerman's charisma: that good-boy face and his innate shyness certainly didn't make him the idol ready to climb the charts, even though he occasionally thought about it, torn as he was between glory and social justice, prestige and respect. Even when he was locked up in jail for a few hours, he looked more like an embarrassed kid than the revolutionary activist that his friends Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were, with whom he co-founded the Youth International Party. Yet it's well known that in music chronicles the bad boys make more noise than a stubborn journalist with a guitar in hand, ready to throw an uncomfortable truth in your face. Throughout his career, Ochs would watch Dylan from a distance, always envious of his fame yet never truly willing to compromise for success. Even in the final part of his life, when, overcome by alcohol and mental illness, he would try to reinvent himself as an eccentric cross between Elvis Presley and Che Guevara, he couldn't help talking about struggle and revolution.

I’m going to say it now

Philip David Ochs was born on December 19, 1940, the second of three children of Jacob Ochs, a doctor of Polish descent, and Gertrude Phin, a Scottish native. The birth certificate lists, by chance, the location as El Paso, California, but Phil's family was only passing through there, before settling permanently in Ohio, after years of wandering around the United States. As far as music goes, Phil had no classic road-to-Damascus moment; his passion was born in the most boring way possible: from a very young age his mother insisted he take up an instrument, and despite his reluctance, he immediately proved to have crystal-clear talent, soon becoming the lead soloist of the Ohio Conservatory of Music orchestra.

Everything proceeds as planned until, on a boring afternoon in 1956, Phil comes across an ad for the Staunton Military Academy and, desperate to escape home, enrolls in the military college in Virginia. He wants to play in the band, but after two fairly flat years he realizes his calling is to become a writer. He then enrolls in the Journalism program at Ohio University, although once again his expectations are soon let down. Too introverted to make friends, it doesn't take long before he shows up to tell his mother he wants to try life on the road and hops on the first bus bound for Miami. His adventure, however, doesn't turn out like something out of a Jack Kerouac novel: malnourished and starving, during his wandering he gets himself arrested just to have a warm place to sleep. At a certain point he inevitably finds himself forced to swallow his pride and call home to have money sent for the trip back.

Having shelved every rebellious instinct, Phil goes along with his mother and starts attending university again. This time things seem to go the right way: as it happens, Phil ends up with Jim Glover as a roommate, an amateur guitar strummer with left-wing ideas – the connection is immediate. Glover introduces his friend to folk music, to artists like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, teaching him the basics of acoustic guitar. But not only that: Ochs, who until then had been a student with little social awareness, begins in these days to radicalize his ideas, to the point of developing a genuine obsession with the Cuban revolution. The school newspaper notices too, repeatedly forced to censor his pieces. No matter, because Phil responds by founding “Word”, a self-produced and fully independent magazine.

I've read of other nations where students take a stand

perhaps even helping to overthrow the leaders of their nation.

Now I wouldn't want to go that far, we're still learning

but since I have something to say, sir, I'll say it now.

In the early Sixties, young Ochs makes his first appearances on stage alongside his friend, first under the all-too-telling name Singing Socialist, then simply as Sowndowners. Alongside this musical debut, he continues his academic studies until his final year, but is left disappointed at not being made editor-in-chief of the university newspaper. He therefore leaves the institute in 1962 to move to Greenwich Village, where Jim Glover had meanwhile settled. It proves to be the right choice, since in New York he finally feels at home, helped along by meeting aspiring photographer Alice, his future wife and the mother of his only daughter.

Ochs thus becomes part of the Greenwich Village folk scene fairly quickly, standing out for his passion and intransigence, qualities that catch the attention of Mike Porco, owner of Gerde's Folk City, the club where Ochs plays the first major show of his life, opening for John Hammond. For the occasion he presents himself as a "singin' journalist", claiming to draw on newspaper articles to write his protest songs.

Already present in his live set at this point is one of the cornerstones of his discography: "Power And The Glory". It's therefore no surprise that the following year, in 1963, he easily achieves official consecration when he's invited to the prestigious Newport Folk Festival, sharing the stage with Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton and Bob Dylan. His talent is also noticed by Pete Seeger, who heads backstage to congratulate that pale young man who'd walked on stage with a Gibson J-50 and a pounding headache. Neither of them knows it yet, but this meeting will spark a long friendship destined to last until Phil's death, a tragic event that will become old Seeger's greatest regret (we'll understand why at the end of this story).

His first official recordings date back to these years. Towards the end of 1963, he records "The Ballad Of William Worthy" for the compilation "Broadside Ballads Vol. 1" and, for Broadside magazine itself, previews many of his songs across various collections. In addition, he records a series of traditional compositions with the Campers on the album Camp Favorites (1963). Other demos would later turn up in various anthologies from the period, though, given his prolific output, it's likely we'll never know exactly how much Ochs recorded before his official debut, All The News That's Fit To Sing (1964), released on Elektra. From its very title, which echoes the New York Times motto ("All the news that's fit to print"), Phil Ochs's album is a collection of topical songs, a compendium of anti-militarist and socially-conscious songs, among which the splendid "Bound For Glory" stands out, a tribute to the itinerant life of hobo Woody Guthrie, embellished by the uncredited harmonica of John Sebastian.

The subjects of the first album, built around just voice and guitar, include US involvement in Vietnam ("Talking Vietnam"), the murder of a priest in the ghetto ("Lou Marsh"), the arrest of an activist-reporter ("Ballad Of William Worthy"), the assassination of Medgar Evers ("Too Many Martyrs") and the Cuban missile crisis ("Talkin' Cuban Crisis"). There's also room for an adaptation of a piece by Edgar Allan Poe ("The Bells") and for bitter reflections on Nazi crimes ("Knock On The Door"). While "One More Parade" proves to be the darkest moment, denouncing the huge number of lives lost in war, "What's That I Hear" is the positive note on which Phil announces that a better future is possible. That same patriotic spirit runs through the aforementioned "Power And The Glory", one of the most representative songs in Phil's catalogue, whose final caustic line - censored here but audible on the compilation The Broadside Tapes 1 - forcefully points the finger at governments' politics of hatred and fear, urging the listener toward rebellion.

Upon its release, despite a solid promotional campaign by Jac Holzman's Elektra, the album turns out to be something of a commercial flop. Reviews highlight his uncertain guitar style and his "webbed-hand" technique. The downturn soon spills over, almost ironically, into his private life too: his wife Alice leaves him, though they never officially divorce, to avoid falling into the trap of a second marriage. Phil reacts by doing what he does best: singing. He organizes a series of benefit concerts for striking miners in Hazard, and from there heads to the Mississippi Caravan Of Music, a consortium staging musical events to encourage African Americans to register to vote. It's during this busy, packed period that his second album comes out, I Ain't Marching Anymore (1965): where on the first record he'd kept his voice down, this time the tone rises, and the public finally starts to really listen to him. The title track would in fact become the quintessential protest anthem of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. The song dives into the country's short history, focusing on the wars it has fought, starting with the Battle of New Orleans in 1815; moving critically through the decades, Ochs also casts an eye on the long genocide of Native Americans. After listing all the recent conflicts, he declares he will never again fight or kill for the American government, calling on everyone to commit "treason": a genuine cry in favor of conscientious objection, backed in the studio by the Blues Project.

The album closes with another of Ochs's most accomplished anthems, "Here's To The State Of Mississippi", a song about the social injustices that existed in that state, where racism was still rampant. The songwriter spares no one, taking aim at bureaucracy, institutions, churches and police, all of them guilty of stoking the climate of hatred. It's curious to note that later on he would partially rewrite the lyrics for his inquisition against Richard Nixon ("Here's The State Of Richard Nixon"), yet the meaning wouldn't change one bit.

Throughout the album the lyrics remain just as subversive, as is the case with the dixieland of "Draft Rodger Rag", recorded and released as a single by Pete Seeger in 1966, which hides beneath its catchy melody a sardonic invective against draft cards. But everywhere, Phil's perspective remains that of the chronicler who never misses the macabre detail, whether it's an execution in the electric chair ("The Iron Lady"), the death of President Kennedy ("That Was The President") or the struggles of the labor movement ("Links On The Chain").

Another highlight of the album is "The Highwayman" (based on the poem by Alfred Noyes), where Ochs's melodies bring out the drama and sorrow of the lyrical narrative. The cover of Ewan MacColl's "The Ballad Of The Carpenter" — a song that portrays Jesus as a socialist — reveals an unexpected Ochs as a superb interpreter, while "That's What I Want To Hear" carves out a place for itself as the songwriter's programmatic manifesto, through which he aims to motivate people to bring about change.

The album barely sells four thousand copies, not helped by the misfortune of being released at the same time as Bob Dylan's "Bringing It All Back Home". His reputation as an alternative artist nonetheless begins to grow, and in 1966 Phil goes on to record Phil Ochs In Concert at Carnegie Hall, an album that remains among the finest live acoustic records of the era, even though much of the music was re-recorded elsewhere to make up for recording flaws. The songs featured in the catalog are all pieces that Phil had been playing live since the very start of his career. Among them, worth noting above all is the biting irreverence of "Ringing Of Revolution", introduced by a curious meta-cinematic speech in which Ochs names the cast of his revolution: "Frank Sinatra fa Fidel Castro, Ronald Reagan fa George Murphy, John Wayne interpreta Lyndon Johnson e Lyndon Johnson interpreta Dio. Io faccio Bobby Dylan... Il giovane Bobby Dylan". Despite the laughs, the song exposes the more violent side of revolutions, underlining how they were no topic for polite conversation. Phil's sharply satirical streak also shows up in "Love Me I'm A Liberal", more recently reworked by Jello Biafra, in which Ochs explores and mocks every cliché of American progressives, guilty of never taking a firm stance.

The album also stands out for one of Ochs's first love songs, the ethereal "Changes", while "There But Fortune", already a hit thanks to Joan Baez and recorded by Phil in 1964 for a Vanguard compilation ("New Folks Vol. 2"), returns here in its author's own voice. Among the many denunciations, those aimed at the police state ("Cops Of The World"), religious hypocrisy ("Cannons Of Christianity") and the harsh conditions of migrant workers ("Bracero") stand out, while "When I'm Gone" casts a shadow over the songwriter's future suicide, while also serving as a moving testament to the expressive urgency that Phil Ochs poured into his music.

I won't laugh at the lies, when I'm dead

I won't be able to ask why, how and when, when I'm dead

I won't be able to live so fiercely as to die from it, once I'm dead

so I guess I'll have to do it while I'm still alive. 

Beyond his career as a singer, Phil Ochs also stood out for his involvement in the civil rights movement. He was so deeply committed to the cause that when John F. Kennedy – a president Ochs admired yet also criticized for his military interventions – was assassinated in 1963, he confided to his wife that he was certain he too was about to die. His readings of Mao Tse Tung in 1967, however, cost him his contract with Elektra, who disliked the eight poems printed on the back cover of the album Phil Ochs In Concert, accompanied by the exclamation: “Is this the enemy?”. A question that was perhaps ironic, because it didn't matter how beautiful his poetry was: aesthetics could certainly not erase all those millions of deaths. But the reason hardly mattered, because the label failed to grasp his irreverence and decided it had put up with quite enough. Phil Ochs had crossed the line and now found himself forced to leave New York and move to California with his brother (hired as his new manager), in search of another record deal. 

The world began in Eden and ended in Los Angeles

Once on the West Coast, Phil tried to adapt to the new musical trends, working on a slicker production for his albums in order to move beyond the voice-and-guitar pairing he'd been associated with in recent years. This resulted in A&M's release of Pleasures Of The Harbor (1967), an album that stands out from his earlier catalogue for its use of keyboards and an orchestral section. Initially Phil envisioned something halfway between “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Pet Sounds“, with each song meant to receive its own distinct treatment. Although some of the compositions carry no protest ambitions whatsoever (“Cross My Heart,” “Miranda”, “The Party”), the greatest triumph to emerge from Pleasures Of The Harbor remains the sharp-witted “Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends”. A song that stays true to the classic Ochsian tradition of topical songs, even as Lincoln Mayorga's ragtime-style piano creates a stark contrast with the brutal narrative of the lyrics, which address the public apathy Kitty Genovese was subjected to in 1964, when she was stabbed to death in the street outside her apartment building under the unmoved gaze of dozens of onlookers. That same indifference also runs through “Flower Lady”, which can be read either as a portrait of war's effects on ordinary people, or as a critique of how often we're too wrapped up in our own troubles to notice those less fortunate.

The album closes with the new Phil Ochs's opus magnum, the baroque “The Crucifixion”, a highly ambitious composition that abstractly links political assassinations from Jesus Christ to John Kennedy. Written in his classic alliterative meter and arranged with the contribution of Joseph Byrd (United States Of America), it's the track that best sums up the whole of Phil Ochs's musical and literary vision, musically retracing a “cycle of sacrifice” in which people first build their idols and then celebrate their destruction. Among the acoustic versions of the song worth noting are the one on the Farewell And Fantasies (1977) box set and the live rendition on There And Now: Live In Vancouver 1968 (1990).

Unfortunately for Ochs, the album doesn't get the reception it deserves: critics don't see it as a good direction for a folk purist, while pop fans don't even notice the record exists. Despite the mixed reviews, the album turns out to be Ochs's best-selling work, even though it only reaches number 168 on the Billboard chart. Phil, however, doesn't lose heart and keeps fighting for the social causes closest to him. He takes advantage of the summer of love to proclaim that the war is over with his “The War Is Over”, four years before John Lennon and Yoko Ono would do the same in their song “Happy Xmas”. Unlike the couple, who would use the tools of advertising to spread their message, Ochs instead takes to the streets and organizes a series of themed protest festivals (the VD Days) designed to make noise.

When the song is performed live in public for the first time, on June 23, 1967, it sparks a heated protest in Los Angeles that doesn't end in the constructive way Ochs had hoped: what began as a peaceful ceremony is turned by the police into an episode of urban guerrilla warfare. The incident that permanently shatters Phil's optimistic outlook, however, takes place in Chicago. A close friend of activist Jerry Rubin, Ochs had gone to Chicago to play at the Festival Of Life, the event staged in opposition to the Democratic Convention. The Yippies then hit upon a brilliant idea: putting forward their own candidate. Phil Ochs, Stew Albert and Jerry Rubin thus find an Illinois farmer willing to sell them a large pig for just twenty dollars, which the singer-songwriter pays for out of his own pocket. On August 23, 1968, they hold a press conference outside Chicago's Civic Center to announce the presidential campaign of “Pigasus”.

Having stepped out one evening for some air

I was blessed by the greeting of a blood-red moon:

darkness was falling over Lincoln Park.

The evening of August 25 brings 7,500 demonstrators into the city, many of them gathered at Lincoln Park. The police, on orders from Mayor Richard Daley, greet them with batons and tear gas. It's an act of shocking violence, but even though “the whole world is watching” (as the crowd chants in front of the cameras), the silent majority stays just that – silent, and the outrage Ochs expects never materializes. Quite the opposite: according to polls, a large share of the public even justifies the violent response from the armed forces. Phil is also arrested on this occasion on charges of conspiracy against the state, and forced to testify in a trial that immediately reveals itself to be nothing but a massive media circus. He isn't convicted, but the FBI's attention toward him reaches its peak. Ochs knows this all too well and responds by cracking jokes from the stage aimed at the undercover agents mingling among the audience at his concerts.

Amid this climate of McCarthyism and suspicion, the album Tape From California (1968) is released, once again produced with arrangements by Larry Marks. Besides the aforementioned “The War Is Over”, there are eight tracks in which Ochs's compositional ambition aims high, toward a jazz-tinged baroque-folk atmosphere: standouts in the catalogue include the thirteen-minute “When In Rome”, influenced by the surrealistic mood of Bob Dylan's “Desolation Row” and by Elia Kazan's film “Viva Zapata”, and the celestial “Flood Of Florence”, which uses the Florence flood as the basis for a long-running metaphor on humanity, embellished with flute and harpsichord.

Ochs returns to the subject of the Vietnam War in “White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land”, which draws up a bleak reckoning of ten years of fighting. The singer-songwriter's great passion for cinema shows up instead in “Joe Hill”, a long, cinematic ballad recounting the story of Joel Emmanuel Hagglund, the Swedish union organizer and folksinger from the early part of the century. While that track is dominated by Ramblin' Jack Elliott's drunken-sounding guitar, in “Half A Century High” (already part of Ochs's repertoire since 1966) it's worth noting the unusual pairing of a voice distorted through a bullhorn with the sinister sound of the harpsichord.

And it seems that there are no more songs

The events in Chicago, the death of Martin Luther King, and the election of Richard Nixon at the end of 1968 leave Phil Ochs deeply embittered and disillusioned with the political scene. During these years he slides into a dangerous depressive spiral, made worse by his abuse of alcohol and drugs: a painful testament to his state of health in those days is offered by the aforementioned Canadian live recording There And Now (released posthumously in 1990). In this period full of anger and resentment, Ochs releases Rehearsals For Retirement (1969), an album that's bleak from its very title, with songs like: “I Kill Therefore I Am”, “Where Were You In Chicago?” and “The World Began In Eden And Ended In Los Angeles”. Completing this rather funereal picture, the cover image shows a photograph of his own tombstone, bearing the laconic inscription: “Phil Ochs, American, born El Paso, Texas 1940; died Chicago, Illinois, 1968”.

Backed this time by a steady band – Lincoln Mayorga (piano), Bob Rafkin (bass and guitar) and Kevin Kelly (drums) – Ochs recorded what was intended to be the album of his life. Compared to the previous two albums, the production on Rehearsals For Retirement is relatively less intrusive. In the control room for the third and final time is once again Larry Marks, but this time the baroque orchestration adopted previously is set aside in favor of a more restrained, though no less evocative, arrangement. The undeniable protagonist – how could it be otherwise – is Phil's disillusionment with activism and his sense of despair toward society, aspects already reflected in the opening track “Pretty Smart On My Part”, where the cheerful melody is merely a disguise for unsettling lyrics, in which Ochs takes on the persona of a paranoid American who sees anyone different from himself as a threat, whether a hitchhiker or a beautiful woman. Any doubt that Ochs's anguish had been largely triggered by the events in Chicago is put to rest by “William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park And Escapes Unscathed”. Ochs later paints his loss of faith in more personal terms in “My Life”, his vibrato foreshadowing both his own painful end (“My life now is death to me”) and the exasperation of being spied on (“Prendetevi tutto ciò che possiedo/ prendetevi la cimice sul mio telefono/ e lasciatemi da solo”).

The catalog proves to be well-balanced, managing to make the different personalities fighting inside the singer-songwriter coexist. So, while the country-rock waltz of "Does Not Lenny Live Here Anymore" fits perfectly with the album's dark atmosphere, painting a picture of the country's alienation, songs like the oath against the flag in "Another Age" and the metaphor about the submarine USS Scorpion in "The Scorpion Departs, But Never Returns" offer a glimpse of Phil's musical future, decidedly glossier and more rock-oriented, in the style of Johnny Rivers.

The album closes with the title track, once again highlighting the piano arrangement, as Phil watches the wreckage of his America wash back to shore ("if I'd known it would all end in laughter/ I'd have told my daughter it didn't matter"). 

Despite the album's solid craftsmanship, Rehearsals For Retirement once again proves disappointing in terms of sales. Surely, among the mere twenty thousand buyers of the record, a copy must have ended up in the hands of the FBI, which notes in Ochs's file the song "Pretty Smart On My Part", where he sarcastically claims he wants to kill the president.

If there is any hope for America, it lies in a revolution; and if there is any hope in a revolution, it consists in managing to turn Elvis Presley into Che Guevara.

From this point on, it's all downhill. Something inside Phil had indeed died in Chicago, just as the cover's tombstone proclaimed. Ochs convinces himself that the average American has no interest in protest songs and decides to focus his efforts on the music he listened to in his youth, adopting a more rock'n'roll style or, more precisely, what he called "a mix between Elvis and Che Guevara". He then orders a gold suit from Nudie Cohn, Elvis's tailor, and it's in this outfit that he would appear in the following years and on the cover of his album Greatest Hits (1970). The reference to the King of Rock is also evident on the back cover, in the garbled motto "50 Phil Ochs Fans Can't Be Wrong". The comic twist is that this record contains none of Ochs's greatest hits, but is instead a collection of rock'n'roll tracks where Phil's melodies are buried under the production, with Van Dyke Parks (already working with the Beach Boys) erecting a rigorous wall of sound, complete with backing choirs and an endless array of guests.

Among the ten tracks there's room for the ghost of James Dean ("Jim Dean Of Indiana"), the artist's wish to exile himself ("One Way Ticket Home", featuring Ry Cooder on mandolin) and a moving account of his adolescence ("Boy In Ohio"). The pursuit of fame, as desired as it is avoided, comes to a head with "Chords Of Fame", but it's the finale that leaves everyone with a bitter aftertaste: in the fanfares of "No More Songs" the grimmest of omens looms.

Nobody likes the idea of a communist Elvis, so much so that he's often booed during his concerts. When he's asked to perform again at Carnegie Hall in March 1970, he shows up with the gold suit and his backing band, leaving everyone stunned. The audience thinks it's a joke, until the singer launches into amedley of Buddy Holly hits. That night, nothing seems to go right: during the break Ochs even cuts his hand on a piece of glass, and the show is ended early due to a suspected bomb threat (none was ever found). Despite its poor outcome, Phil begs the label to release the concert tapes as an album, but it refuses. To appease him, it's released only in Canada as a market test (Gunfight At Carnagie Hall), butmore than twenty years would pass before it was distributed in the United States.

Faced with this ostracism, Ochs chooses to take a break and travel abroad in search of inspiration. In 1971 he travels to Chile to meet Salvador Allende and becomes friends with Victor Jara, a folk singer and supporter of the Marxist president. The encounter proves moving, but his memories are tainted by the arrests he suffers in Argentina and Bolivia. Expelled from both countries, he's forced to return to the United States, where he's personally invited by John Lennon to perform at the John Sinclair Tribute Rally, a benefit concert to help the poet and activist who had been unjustly imprisoned.

I was the victim of a world that went insane

The following year Phil travels to Africa, where he records two tracks with the help of local musicians. The result is an extremely rare 7-inch of genuine world music (credited to Phil Ochs And The Panafrican Ngembo Rumba, now available on the compilation "American Troubadour"). The first side, "Bwatue", is recorded in Congo in a local language; the second, "Niko Mchumba Engamba", is instead sung in Swahili. However, Africa, like Chicago, proves to be just another step toward suicide: one morning, while walking on a beach in Tanzania, Phil is violently mugged in an attack that ends in an attempted strangling. Following this assault he suffers serious damage to his vocal cords, though it's his mental health that suffers the most: Ochs in fact believes the attack may have been orchestrated by government agents (a paranoia that's in some ways justified, considering that after his death a 500-page file on him would surface). During this difficult period his siblings begin to glimpse a side of him they had hoped never to see: Ochs's father had in fact taken his own life after suffering from bipolar disorder, and they feared the same could happen to them. Of the three siblings, however, Phil would be the only one diagnosed with the illness. The attack suffered in Tanzania only worsens his psychiatric problems, causing him to succumb to alcoholism and delusions, to the point of starting to carry a weapon, convinced people were out to get him. In his final years he would then begin identifying himself by the name John Butler Train, claiming that Train had killed Ochs: a cruel fate for a man who wanted to change the world but who, in the end, couldn't save himself from his own demons.

In 1972 Ochs writes "Kansas City Bomber" for the soundtrack of the film of the same name, but the track fails to win favor with the producers and is dropped, eventually being released as a single to general indifference. A small disappointment that foreshadows the much bigger one of September 11, 1973, when the Chile coup (backed by the CIA) leads to the deaths of his friends Salvador Allende and Victor Jara. The singer-songwriter then decides to organize a benefit concert for Chilean political prisoners in order to draw the attention of the American public ("Friends Of Chile", May 9, 1974). Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie agree to play for the occasion, and Bob Dylan redeems himself by rushing in to support Phil, knowing the concert would otherwise have been cancelled due to poor ticket sales. The two singers share the stage for a few songs, publicly reconciling after several years, as also shown by Ochs's appearance in Dylan's film "Renaldo And Clara".

We watched them rise to power, but we turned our heads away.

It had already happened before and it can happen again…

Will you prove to me that I didn't die in vain?

On April 30, 1975, when the Vietnam War finally reaches its longed-for end, Phil Ochs invites the public to a musical event titled "The War Is Over", in which his song finally becomes the anthem of the celebration and no longer just a mere utopia. Unfortunately, Ochs's mental stability is by this point already compromised. The few friends he has left try to help him, but in the end only his sister Sonny remains, taking him into her home and arranging for him to see a psychiatrist. For a while things seem to be going well, but one morning, while Sonny is out grocery shopping, the singer-songwriter decides to take his own life, hanging himself in the bathroom. It's April 9, 1976, and tragically, the first to discover what had just happened is his nephew David, only 5 years old.

As fate would have it, Pete Seeger happens to be in New York that very same day: on the morning of the suicide Ochs calls him because he wants to talk, but the guitarist is in a hurry to catch his train and puts off the meeting. This regret would torment him for the rest of his life, even though it was by then clear to everyone that it wasalready too late to save him from an inescapable fate: Phil Ochs had in fact chosen to die once all the causes he had fought for had either been resolved or, quite simply, no longer mattered to anyone.

Recommended bibliography:

Francesca Ferreri – When I’m Gone. Phil Ochs e l’utopia della speranza (Pacini, 2014)

Michael Schumacher – There But Fortune: The Life Of Phil Ochs (Hyperion, 1997)

Marc Eliot Thomas – Death Of A Rebel (F. Watts, 1989)

Mimmo Franzinelli – Rock & servizi segreti (Bollati Boringhieri, 2010)

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