Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs's birthday was this past Wednesday. He would've been 72 years old. He hung himself with a belt in 1976. One of my family stories is that my dad tried to talk him out of it.

I listened to his music all the time when I was growing up. I loved his protest songs, they seemed so hard-hitting and pertinent. Songs like "The Ballad Of William Worthy" was one of his story-telling songs, where he just basically took a current news story, and told it like it was. Then, songs like "Here's To The State Of Mississippi", while not about current news stories, were just as hard-hitting and pointed.

But he also wrote songs about other things that moved him. They weren't all fiery, angry protests. When Woody Guthrie died, he wrote "Bound For Glory". And after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote "That Was The President".

He also wrote funny songs, like "Draft Dodger's Rag", "Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends", and "Love Me I'm A Liberal", that were still political, but were more rowdy and something you might sing while holding a beer and dancing on a table.

After his first three albums though, I think it really started to get to him that Bob Dylan was so much more successful, and respected so much more as a poet than he was. But I don't think Phil Ochs really understood what poetry was all about. I think he thought of poetry as something that relied on obscure imagery and indecipherable metaphors.

So, when he started to shift his music to be more along the lines of what he considered poetic, the result seemed to be that his songs stopped making any sense. I still loved listening to them, but I didn't understand a lot of them anymore. Songs like "Crucifixion" were lovely to listen to, but that's all. They didn't speak to me on any other level. Clearly it was a song about Jesus and Christianity. But it seemed to be using too many flowery images, without clarifying what it really meant, and not even making the flowery imagery very beautiful. I much preferred his earlier songs about Christianity, such as "The Ballad Of The Carpenter" or "Canons Of Christianity", which made so much sense to me.

Another later song of his that I didn't really understand was "When In Rome" (and part 2). I could appreciate it on some level, but like "Crucifixion", a lot of the song just passed by me without registering, even after many listenings.

Not all of his songs from that period were inscrutable. I could still relate to plenty of them, and I loved songs like "The Ballad Of Joe Hill", "The War Is Over", and "Jim Dean Of Indiana".

Some of his later songs are very directly depressed and defeated. These also tend to be in line with his earliest work, clear and less flowery. Songs like "Rehearsals For Retirement" are very dark. One of these songs is the final track of his final album, which I'd never heard growing up. But years later, when I finally did hear it, I almost couldn't bear to listen to any more of his music. It was called "No More Songs". It was devastating.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he'd been able to get the right meds for his bipolar disorder, or whatever it was. I imagine him being like Dylan - still around, still making music today. Still relevant. And I imagine him having a lot to say about current events, and things like the Occupy movement. I don't think anyone in our pop-culture today ever made any sense out of the Occupy movement. But I think Phil Ochs would have been able to do it really well. He'd have been right there in Zuccotti Park, making up songs, and telling it like it was, and being a voice for a movement that ultimately never did find its own voice. Or at least, hasn't yet.