There But for Fortune Makes Us Long for Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune (2010)

Directed by Kenneth Bowser

First Run Features, 98 mins.

* * * * *

If you need more confirmation that life is unfair consider this: the guy who didn’t give a shit, Bob Dylan, became the most famous “protest” singer in American history, and the guy who did, Phil Ochs, evokes scarcely a nod of recognition from anyone under the age of fifty. Kenneth Bowser’s tight, well-paced documentary will drive home the pity of that. It will also make you wonder where the new Phil Ochs might be lurking. Alas, the material Phil Ochs was singing about in the 1960s--military adventurism, corporate fat cats, racism, crooked politicians, injustice, hypocrisy--remain stains on the flag. As Jello Biafra observes in the film, all he had to do was change a few names and “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” became as fresh as when Ochs recorded it in 1966.

Phil Ochs (1940-1976) was a complicated man. He was an unlikely rebel who was born in Texas, loved country music, went to a military academy as a youth, and never even heard of folk music until he hit Ohio State and met Jim Glover in 1959, who introduced him to the music of Woody Guthrie, The Weavers, and Pete Seeger. Ochs dropped out of OSU, moved to Greenwich Village, and began to think about the world. From 1962 through 1968 Ochs was a veritable musical newspaper, the latter providing most of the source material of the songs that ceaselessly flowed from his pen. As a parade of people attest in the film--including Joan Baez, Tom Hayden, Ed Sanders, Christopher Hitchens, and siblings Michael and Sonny--Ochs hoped that music could help change the world by speaking truth to power. His 1967 street theater “The War Is Over” prank will remind contemporary audiences of what a flash mob could be, if it had politics. Watching the first half of this film is like taking a musical tour through the Sixties--JFK, the civil rights movement, LBJ, the Rev. King, RFK, Vietnam, Chicago 1968…. There was little that Ochs did not document in song and as astonishing number of his crank-‘em-out efforts are as poetic as anything Dylan wrote. Is there a better song about the Kennedy assassination than “Crucifixion?”

Bowser does more than just give us a soundtrack, though. We see Phil Ochs warts and all, the biggest blemish being an unfilled desire for acceptance. An alcoholic father whom died young led Ochs to see President Kennedy as a substitute parent. He also sought friendship with Dylan, whom he adored, only to be rebuffed and insulted. He married, fathered a daughter, but was too restless and disillusioned for domestic bliss. (His wife, Alice, and daughter Meegan make moving remarks in the film.) Above all Ochs wanted the public to adore him, but his admirers remained a small circle of friends rather than Dylan’s legions. Singer Judy Henske asserted that Ochs became “as famous as he should have been” with his material and talent. You may disagree with Henske (who?) after watching the film, but there’s little denying what happened after 1968: Ochs slowly unraveled.

First came the disillusionment of Bobby Kennedy’s death, the election of Richard Nixon, and an odd foray into highly orchestrated songs--dubbed by one wag as “baroque folk.” In 1970 Ochs pulled a gold lamé suited Elvis spoof that no one got and which alienated many. (It was eerily prescient of Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here mockumentary.) Then a trip to Chile to find a new hero to replace Dylan: singer/activist Victor Jara, followed by several years of writer's block, a 1973 mugging in Tanzania that left him with damaged vocal chords, descent into the bottle, and paranoia real and imagined. (He was right that the CIA was complicit in Jara’s murder, and out to lunch in the belief that it also engineered his assault in Africa.) By the time the Vietnam War actually ended, Ochs was joyless, spent, and delusional, which is how he spent his remaining days before his suicide in April of 1976.

Kenneth Bowser’s faithful and honest portrayal of the Phil Ochs narrative is dramatic, poignant, and tragic--a portrait of a principled artist who found it difficult to live up to his own high standards in a world in which all his heroes were felled by the forces of evil. But what wouldn’t we give for such a voice today? Ochs had a hair-trigger Bullshit Meter and one can only salivate to contemplate what he would have written about nitwits like Limbaugh, Palin, Boehner and, yes, faux liberals such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. I long to hear someone sing: “It’s always the old that lead us off to war/It’s always the young to fall/Tell me what we’ve won with a saber and a gun/Tell me was it worth it all…. “ (Phil Ochs, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”)