In Memoriam: Phil Ochs

Somewhere amidst the songs left on those warped and tortured LP's, there must be a phrase that would make it all make sense, a line that would justly eulogize a poet who had lost his audience, a poet who had lost his song. But I find nothing. Nothing explains the man behind the music, the man behind the clipping, "Folk Singer Kills Himself," that tells us Phil Ochs, 35, committed suicide by hanging.

He was a second rate musician, his voice had a high pitched nasal snarl. And still he won us over. He sang the words we wanted to hear, words that were plastered on every button, every wall, on every corner of every newspaper in this whole goddamn country. And one day he disappeared, or was it faded away, as if all the protests, the moratoriums, were in themselves mere apparitions of a confused and yet explained history.

In the sixties, though, Ochs became the heir apparent to the singers and songwriters of the union halls, a mid-century, middle class Joe Hill. And he was just what we needed.

So what if the songs were all clichés. Those were better days, before our skin thickened to an asbestos hide, before our sensibilities were dulled. Back then we believed the insanity was just a phase, that a better and brighter world would surely come, led by the thousands of gifted leaders spawned of the Age of Aquarius. And we sang along with Phil, him bolstering even the most solid doubts, making us feel righteous by singing of a nation we loathed, of a society baked in hypocrisy, the perfect target for all our post-adolescent fears. It seemed so simple then. We were right. They were wrong.

And we watched him too, with hundreds of thousands of others in D.C., while the whole world was watching the endless marches on the Pentagon, for Haiphong, for Cambodia, they all blend into one now. The same faces. The same banners, made from mother's queen size bed sheets. The same backdrop, that white, antiseptic Mr. Clean skyline, the capital of the American Dream, then the birthplace of a burgeoning new republic.

I once talked to Phil Ochs briefly, while an aspiring young college journalist. I had hoped to find the story behind that aging folkie, forgotten by his flocks. The interview never came off. He had to take an early plane out of Detroit for New York, for the city where he had let us all down, where he had jumped on stage all spangled and sparkling like a space-age Elvis. Like Dylan at Newport with his Fender and The Band, they booed Ochs off the stage at Carnegie, not understanding the joke, and they booed him out of the theatre and out of their consciousness, exiling his records to their bottom drawers where all the other ancient, scratched memories lay. I wanted to talk to him about that too. But I only got through a quick phone call. He seemed quiet, shy and reserved. And he told me only one thing, something I remembered upon hearing the gruesome news, that he had been found hanging by the neck in New York, a ghostlike morsel of his former self.

He told me he had hopes that the good old days, as he called them, would come again, that people would once again rise up for the rights of the Third World, for the rights of the oppressed. And he would be there singing. "And if they don't," he warned. "And if they don't, they'll be the ones who will be sorry."

Martin Porter