D6
SU N DAY, F E B RUA RY 1 2 , 2 0 17
T H E G R A N D R A P I D S P R ES S
PHIL OCHS IS THE OBSCURE 1960S FOLK SINGER AMERICA NEEDS IN 2017 Richard Just For the Washington Post
‘A
nybody know who Phil Ochs is?” Lady Gaga called out to her audience at a free concert last summer during the
Democratic National Convention. Her set list
that day was eclectic: from the Beatles to Edith Piaf to her own gay rights anthem, “Born This Way.” But her decision to perform Ochs’ “The War Is Over,” a 1967 folk song about Vietnam, was surprising. It isn’t often that Ochs, who died four decades ago and is mostly unknown to those born since the 1970s, gets even a moment of mainstream recognition. Yet as we enter the Trump era, and a new mass protest movement begins, his music would be worthy of a revival. Taken together, his songs offer a compelling tour of the deepest questions now confronting liberals — questions about democracy, dissent and human decency in a grim political age. The song Lady Gaga performed is a good example. “The War Is Over” was composed in the middle of the Vietnam War but insists the conflict had already ended. “One-legged veterans will greet the dawn,” Ochs sang. “And they’re whistling marches as they mow the lawn. And the gargoyles only sit and grieve. The gypsy fortune teller told me that we’d been deceived. You only are what you believe. I believe the war is over. It’s over, it’s over.” Here’s how Ochs explained what he was trying to do: “Some of us have been protesting against the war in Vietnam to a point where it became sort of a mindless habit, and we seemed to be losing our effectiveness, because the administration and those in power always have longevity on their side. And at a certain point you keep saying, ‘Indecent, indecent,’ and the words lose their meaning ... So last June some of us in America declared the war over from the bottom up and celebrated the end of the war, and we’ve been celebrating ever since.” “The War Is Over” suggests how political resistance in any age can be enlivened, refreshed and perhaps even galvanized by jarring notes of artistic creativity. Yet it isn’t close to being Ochs’ most philosophical work. Ochs was clearly a hard-left progressive. His sister, Sonia “Sonny” Ochs, recently told me she thinks he would have been a Bernie Sanders supporter. One of his most famous creations — the sarcastic “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” — is a harsh depiction of the cautious center-left. And in “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” he offers an acerbic challenge to liberals who decline to protest: “Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer. But a friend of ours was captured, and they gave him 30 years. Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why. But demonstrations are a drag, besides we’re much too high. And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest anybody outside of a small circle of friends.” But Ochs’ music also puts forward ideas that transcend the politics of left and right. Buried in his gorgeous ballad “Flower Lady” is this verse: “Soldiers, disillusioned, come home from the war. Sarcastic students tell them not to fight no more. And they argue through the night. Black is black and white is white. Walk away both knowing they are right.” It was as if Ochs anticipated how the self-certainty of Fox News, MSNBC and Facebook news feeds would damage our democracy. Moreover, although he made his name in the New York folk scene, Ochs was not a stereotypically insular coastal progressive. One of his angriest songs is “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” a denunciation of Jim Crow. While the chorus — “Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of; Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of” — expresses sentiments that could have been tweeted from Brooklyn, it’s worth noting, as Michael Schumacher points out in his excellent biography of Ochs, that the singer arrived at these lyrics by getting out of the liberal bubble and traveling to Mississippi. “He met with the locals and asked them endless questions about their day-to-day lives,” Schumacher writes. “The more he saw and heard, the more alarmed he became.” It also seems likely that — his justifiably pointed words for Jim-Crow-era Mississippi notwithstanding — Ochs would have been appalled by the failure of today’s liberal elites to connect with the working-class voters of red America. He traveled with other singers to Kentucky in solidarity with striking coal miners, and he wrote a song (“No Christmas in Kentucky”) based on the trip. Later, in the wake of the 1968 election, Ochs, Schumacher writes, concluded that left-wing “demonstrators and the Democratic Party had lost touch with America’s working class — the very people they were supposed to be representing.” Perhaps the biggest lesson Ochs bequeathed for the Trump era is only tangentially related to politics. One of his most famous quotes is from the liner notes of an album: “In such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.” No matter which side you are on, it’s tempting to view art as a worthless distraction from the task of political repair. Yet thoughtful art of all kinds can serve as a counterweight to the thoughtlessness, even cruelty, emanat-
Photo courtesy of Henry Diltz
At moments of national crisis, no matter which side you are on, it’s tempting to view art as a worthless distraction from the task of political repair. Ochs’ insistence that “the true protest is beauty” could be the mantra for every liberal artist during the next four years.
ing from our politics. Ochs’ music exemplified this credo. Some of his melodies are merely catchy and fun, but others are piercingly beautiful. When I asked Zachary Stevenson — a 36-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter and Ochs devotee, who is working on a play about him — what he thought distinguished Ochs from other political singers of the ’60s, he said it was the artistry. “There are a lot of folk songs that are very simple. In many ways, that’s the standard way to go about folk songs. It’s not necessarily about inventing things too complex,” Stevenson said. Ochs, by contrast, “was an artist through and through. ... I think he had a real sensitivity to melody and song and chord structure. And so he was always pushing himself to write better and more moving songs.” For Ochs, death came at the tragically
young age of 35. He struggled with mental illness, and, in 1976, he committed suicide. Forty years later, it isn’t difficult to imagine what he would have thought of President Donald Trump. “I know he would have despised him,” Sonny told me, “and I’m sure his pen would have been running nonstop.” But it’s tougher to know what he might have made of American history since the 1970s: our leaps forward and backward; our moments of idealism side by side with our bouts of incompetence and avarice. In some ways, as Sonny points out, the enduring importance of her brother’s songs is a sign of our collective failure. “The thing that’s sad to me is how many of the songs are still relevant,” she says. “There are so many that ... still hold water. And they shouldn’t after this many years.” No single artist or activist, of course, can remedy this depressing state of affairs. But Ochs’ music could at least help Americans who care about the future of liberal democracy to grapple with the difficult work that lies ahead. As he once wrote: “One good song with a message can bring a point more deeply to more people than a thousand rallies.” The one song I would choose? “Power and the Glory.” “Here is a land full of power and glory,” goes the chorus. “Beauty that words cannot recall. Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom. Her glory shall rest on us all.” America, Ochs sings in one verse, is “only as rich as the poorest of the poor. Only as free as a padlocked prison door.” This is nationalism as it should be deployed: aspirational, ennobling, altruistic. “Power and the Glory” was brilliant enough as Ochs usually sang it during his lifetime. As it turns out, however, he wrote an additional verse, which is now frequently performed with the rest of the song. It’s a statement of faith in the American people amid encroaching political darkness: “But our land is still troubled by men who have to hate. They twist away our freedom, and they twist away our fate. Fear is their weapon, and treason is their cry. We can stop them if we try.” Richard Just is a former editor of National Journal magazine and the New Republic.