Phil and Alice Ochs' Wedding

By Suze Rotolo

When Phil and Alice got married I was a witness at their wedding. By then Alice was visibly pregnant, and both of them were very nervous and giddy. During the ceremony at City Hall, we tried to stifle our giggles. The justice of the peace had to interrupt the proceedings to chastise us for not taking the situation seriously. No one was more serious about what they were doing than Alice and Phil. But that is precisely why it struck all of us as so funny.

Limelight 1966

By Suze Rotolo

I last saw Phil toward the end of 1966, when I ran into him at the Limelight one night before I left New York for Italy again. He was drinking a lot by then and he was bloated and disheveled, volatile and dark.

Phil began telling me a long, convoluted tale that made no sense. He laughed and cried and his manner frightened me. I tried to act as if nothing was wrong with his behavior or appearance. I gave him my address in Italy and half begged him to get away, take a long break, and come visit me. Phil Ochs had a good career and people who loved him but the demons he struggled with eventually engulfed and over-powered him. He committed suicide in 1976 at the age of thirty-six [sic - 35].

Protest Song in East and West Germany Since the 1960s

Edited by David Robb

The Fifth Burg Waldeck Festival: "Lied 68"

The focus of the 1968 festival, held from 12 to 17 June 1968, was the American protest song rather than the French chanson. The festival's new director Rolf Gekeler had visited the Newport Folk Festival in the USA in 1967 and booked the prominent singers Phil Ochs, Odetta, and Guy Carawan for Waldeck. The festival, with its fifty-one artists, eight speakers, and its neutral slogan "Lied 68" was planned according to the model of the previous years. However, as a result of the shooting of Rudi Dutschke in April and the May unrest in France it took a different course. As soon as the festival started there began to be disruptions of concerts of singers whose songs were perceived as not sufficiently political. Reinhard Mey and Hanns Dieter Husch were the first two victims. Their performances were disrupted by catcalls and other distractions by the audience. Instead of being allowed to sing, they were forced -- in the style of a Maoist People's Court -- to sit on the stage and provide justifications for their texts. The agitators were mostly members of the SDS and pupils of the Aktionszentrum Unabhangiger und Sozialistischer Shuler (AUSS). They did not agree with the festival concept and believed that the participating artists should be more clearly in line with the APO's political agenda and that their songs should reflect this. On Saturday afternoon a meeting was called for AUSS and SDS members and sympathizers. An action group (Basisgruppe Waldeck-Festival) was formed, and promptly came up with a theory on the role of the chanson in the song movement, criticizing the unpolitical stance of the festival organizers and the commercialization and lack of political relevance of the festival. The action group believed that the festival had turned into a meeting place for "singende Fachidioten." Its theories were disseminated in a leaflet that also called for Franz Josef Degenhardt's main concert on Saturday evening to be changed to a "teach-in." During the occupation of the stage, red flags and Vietcong flags were waved and the theories of the leaflet read out over the microphone. This culminated in the slogan: "Stellt die Gitarren in die Ecke und diskutiert."

[...]

Despite these controversies, the focus of public attention at the festival was the American political singers Carawan, Odetta, and Ochs. Their concerts were not interrupted and were immensely popular.

Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion

by Aniko Bodroghkozy

Other sketches, although open to various interpretations, leaned more in the direction of dissident, protesting groups, such as a segment built around Phil Ochs's song, "Draft Dodger Rag." The November 19, 1967, episode featured guest star George Segal, who joined Tom and Dick to sing the song. Dick introduced the number by saying, "We're going to sing a contemporary song about a great effort that some of the young men in our country are making." Tom chimed in, "Yes, it's a song about a problem and how, with good old American ingenuity, some people attempt to solve it." They then launched into the song, whose first verse and chorus went as follows:

I'm just a typical American boy from a typical American town,
I believe in God and Senator Dodd and keeping old Castro down.
And when it came my time to serve I knew better dead than red,
But when I got to my old draft board, buddy, this is what I said:
Sarge, I'm only eighteen, I got a ruptured spleen and I always carry a purse,
I got eyes like a bat and my feet are flat, my asthma's getting worse.
O, think of my career, my sweetheart dear, my poor old invalid aunt,
Besides I ain't no fool, I'm a-going to school, and I work in a defense plant.

For those who knew the song was Ochs's handiwork and knew that he was a well-known antiwar folksinger, the song could be read as a tongue-in-cheek support for draft resistance by any means available. However, the song allowed for a different interpretation, less sympathetic to those who evaded the draft. Just as the show's "We Protest Here" number could be read as mocking and ridiculing protesters and their methods, so too "Draft Dodger Rag" could be read as an indictment against those young men who shirked their military duty. Context was crucial. Phil Ochs's singing the song to young people protesting Selective Service at an antiwar rally opened the lyrics to their preferred meaning. However, in the context of a prime-time variety show with a still fairly diverse audience, the song's preferred meaning may not have been so evident. Perhaps aware of this, the Smothers ended the song with the proclamation, "Make love, not war!"

Although the segment was open to various interpretations regarding draft evasion, CBS's Program Practices division, which would soon become the bane of the Smothers Brothers' existence, requested a copy of the lyric sheet. A CBS memo about this episode focused particularly on the "Draft Dodger Rag" number. The memo noted that the "introduction . . . seemed complimentary to draft dodgers." (The network's censors apparently were not worried about the song itself.) The memo also mentioned that the number resulted in four letters objecting to the material. Despite the concern, the network allowed the episode to be rerun in the summer, apparently with no cuts.

U2: A Musical Biography (The Story of the Band)

by David Kootnikoff

"Bono continued to invent characters and was looking for new ways to add commentary and humor to his shtick. He came back for encores as 'Mirror Ball Man', a narcissistic hypocrite in love with his own image dressed in a silver lamé suit similar to the one Elvis had worn. Folksinger Phil Ochs once put on an Elvis suit for a Carnegie Hall concert, telling the perplexed audience that the only way to save America was for 'Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara'. Bono was a fan, and the comparison wasn't lost on him." (p. 80)

Ao Dai: My War, My Country, My Vietnam

by Xuan Phuong and Daniele Mazingarbe

Joan Baez first sang three songs. Then she said in perfect French: "Now I am happy and moved to know that Doctor Phuong is here. With her, I experienced some unforgettable moments. Where are you, Doctor Phuong?" I found myself on stage next to her under the floodlights. She took my hand. 'Thanks to you, Phuong, I overcame my fear. I became calmer and stronger. To my dying day, I will never forget those moments. Now, dear audience, I would like to sing for you this song that Phil Ochs has written in memory of those events and that I am dedicating to Doctor Phuong: There but for Fortune." After the last note, the public got up and applauded.

In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution

by Joseph Crespino

It was a remarkable transformation, one that would have been hard to imagine in the summer of 1964, when Mississippi racism seemed so galling and when protesters outside the Republican National Convention held up signs such as "Be with Barry When They Burn the Crosses" and "Goldwater for Governor of Mississippi." That year, Phil Ochs, one of the most prolific voices of the American folk revival, summed up both the outrage over Mississippi injustice and America's liberal consensus in his searing ballad "Here's to the State of Mississippi." The verses, framed around a rhymed quatrain, paid sarcastic tribute to the state. Each ended with a damning couplet and the same ringing refrain: "Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of."

The New Left Revisited

Edited by John McMillian & Paul Buhle

Equally critical to Los Angeles's uniqueness was the omnipresence of the mass cultural production system, which critics held responsible for the fakery and shallowness of mainstream culture. To those trying to create a new, radicalized culture characterized by openness to experimentation, freedom from market dictates, and tolerance, the film, television, and music industries seemed omnipresent, injecting the debilitating tedium of the constant hustle into the "underground" zones of L.A. To many observers, the culture industries colored the character of the rest of the region as well, making it a strangely disorienting and inhuman place, without grounding in "real" life. And the area's seemingly endless, centerless suburban sprawl only enhanced the sense of weightlessness. In 1964 Theodore Roszak wrote in the Free Press, "There is perhaps no modern city where the sense of community is so dissipated as in Los Angeles. . . . It lacks even the physical integrity of a metropolis. . . . In reality, Los Angeles . . . is a case study in social disorganization . . . where the bonds of community life have grown hopelessly slack." Cribbing from Nathaneal West, Phil Ochs offered an even more damning indictment in 1967: "Los Angeles is Death City. . . . It is the land of the Philistines. Los Angeles is the ultimate in the materialistic exaggeration of America. It's almost like the barbarians throwing themselves into the materialistic fires." (Open City, 9 June 1967, 3, 11, 14).

The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom

by Barbara Smith

That evening we heard Bobby Seale, a leader of the Black Panthers, speak in Lincoln Park. It is always curious to me to see a certain type of white person receive with such enthusiasm the promise of the destruction of their society by Black people, but perhaps they are so accepting because they are still naive enough to think that it will not happen.

We went after this speech to a show in the Coliseum. It was extraordinarily inspiring to see Jean Genet and William Burroughs and finally Dick Gregory (a truly gentle man) on stage speaking to us and with us. It was suggested that we proceed after the show to Grant Park in front of the Hilton, where people from Lincoln Park were already arriving.

This would be our first contact with the police and we were nervous as we walked toward the Loop. Surprisingly, nothing happened that night. At one point the police pushed us back off the sidewalk onto the grass, but this was done efficiently and without force. At one point the singer Phil Ochs was standing near us and we listened to him talk to someone for awhile and then drifted away. We also spoke to some policemen who were laconic, but not hostile. We finally went home at about 2 A.M. Wednesday. The day of the nominations had already begun.

Britpop!: Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock

by John Harris

The Labour Party's last organised dalliance with rock music had been announced to the world on the morning of 21 November 1985. At 11.30am, a crowd of 200 musicians, politicians, trade union officials and journalists gathered in a marquee, pitched on the terrace of the Houses of Parliament. They were served hot punch, and regaled by a speech from Neil Kinnock. The leader was there to place his formal approval on a new wing of the Labour Party's campaign structure: an organisation called Red Wedge. 'Can I first disabuse anyone of the idea that Red Wedge refers to my haircut,' he said, to a smattering of groans.

The name, taken from a Russian propagandist painting entitled Beat The Whites With The Red Wedge, had been suggested by Billy Bragg, who stood with Paul Weller - then in his avowedly political Style Council phase - as the new set-up's most recognisable face. The pair, along with a handful of other musicians, had recurrently bumped into each other on the platforms that often defined the life of the switched-on 80s musician. From there, it was only a short leap to formalising their alliance.

'They key event was the miners' strike,' says Bragg. 'That was the thing that heightened political awareness to such an extent than an initiative like Red Wedge could actually happen. You can't do things like that in an ideological vacuum. Red Wedge came about because we were constantly meeting one another - the same brands on different platforms, for different issues: the miners, Nicaragua, anti-apartheid, anti-racism. It was all the same people.'

Bragg also believes that the generational background of the Labour leader was crucial: without the enthusiasm of someone familiar with rock music, Red Wedge might not have come to life. 'Neil Kinnock was the first leader of any major political party who knew who Gene Vincent was; the first member of the post-war generation to lead a mainstream political party. That was really significant. He was a member of the Gene Vincent fan club, and a big fan of Phil Ochs. He knew that popular music could be used as a vehicle to spread ideas. He was aware of that. And that's really important. If it had been Roy Hattersley, I'm not sure he'd have got it quite so well. Kinnock was a bit of a rocker, in his spare time. I once saw him pick up a guitar and sing Help Me Make It Through The Night. It's a pretty hard song, that. I can't play it. I bet Blair can't play it.'

Neil Young Nation

by Kevin Chong

"The Riverboat was the pre-eminent coffehouse," said Jennings. "It was run by a German immigrant named Bernie Fiedler, who was a coffee salesman originally. Fiedler designed it to look like the inside of a riverboat, so there were pine-paneled walls with brass portholes." The Riverboat was a long narrow basement room that sat about 120 people. The seats were booths, and no seat was farther than fifty feet from the stage. It was an intimate space, especially for big-name acts like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Phil Ochs, Gordon Lightfoot, and Joni Mitchell. "There was always a lineup. On the biggest nights, Fiedler would turn over the crowd several times. There'd be a seven o'clock show and an eight-thirty show and a ten o'clock show. Visiting celebrities had to go to the Riverboat. Bernie Fiedler booked them all. He turned it into the showcase venue in Yorkville. And it was a launching pad for a lot of up-and-coming singer-songwriters."

[...]

After Four to Go came and went, Neil tried remaking himself as a folksinger. "He had his twelve-string and people would often see this tall, skinny figure walking along Yorkville Avenue. He played mostly at open mike nights at different coffehouses like the Half Beat, the New Gate of Cleve, and the Cellar." Young would cover songs by Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs and do originals like "Sugar Mountain."

The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews

by Jean Genet

A few hours before going to the convention, where our free and easy ways stunned the police and made them suspicious, we took part in the peace march organized by David Dellinger in Grant Park. Thousands of young people were there listening peacefully to Phil Ochs who was singing, and to others who were talking; we were covered with flowers. A symbolic procession set off toward the slaughterhouse. A row of blacks in front, then behind them, in rows of eight, everyone who wanted to join the demonstration. No one got very far: more potbellies charged, throwing tear gas at the young people. Trucks fill with armed soldiers moved endlessly up and down the streets of Chicago.

How Can I Keep from Singing?: The Ballad of Pete Seeger

by David King Dunaway

Dylan's departure from the folk music community might have affected Seeger less had it not opened a floodgate of recriminations. A Sing Out! forum on topical song produced unexpectedly bitter responses: Pete's brother-in-law Ewan MacColl (Peggy Seeger's husband) wrote, "The folk magazines seem to compete with each other in the hunt for superlatives with which to describe Bobby [Dylan] and Phil [Ochs] and Tom [Paxton] and Peter [Seeger] and all the rest of the mostest, bestest, youngest and newest." (These were strong words, from a member of the family.) Then, a community organizer and poet, Don West, called Seeger a publicity-seeking hero.

Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada

by John Hagan

I visited Toronto for the first time in the summer of 1968 and on returning to the United States spent an August evening listening to Phil Ochs sing in Chicago's Grant Park across from the Democratic Convention hotels the night before the infamous police riot. The brutal images of the Chicago convention are still familiar to most Americans, but it is less well known that Toronto was then also a city coming alive. The American ghetto, described in Chapter 3 of this book and in the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants that led me there, was taking form in the Baldwin Street neighborhood just south of the University of Toronto. The first arrivals, the "draft dodgers," were soon joined in growing numbers by the "deserters." This area of the city was a benign but unruly communion of countercultural entrepreneurship and anti-war activism. We thought of ourselves as war resisters as well as draft and military resisters, but most of us still do not mind being called "dodgers," for this term still has a positive resonance in Canada. The mood then was a mixture of desperation and excitement; the atmosphere was electric.

The Mythical West: An Encyclopedia of Legend, Lore, and Popular Culture

by Richard W. Slatta

In 1964 Phil Ochs wrote "The Ballad of Alfred Packer." The chorus runs:

They called him a murderer, a cannibal, a thief;
It just doesn't pay to eat anything but Government-inspected beef. (Ballad of Alferd Packer Web Site)

Ochs published the song in Broadside magazine, which also featured a cartoon with Republican politicians celebrating the fact that Alfred had eaten five Democrats.

Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music

by Philip Auslander

For Ennis, the performance that epitomizes the pause point in rock was Phil Ochs's appearance at New York's Carnegie Hall in April 1970. Ochs had made a career as an unremittingly political folk protest singer and was considered one of the least compromising practitioners of that idiom. By his own testimony, Ochs was so disturbed by the political developments of the late 1960s that he "went crazy and didn't care anymore" (qtd. in Wilson 44). At Carnegie Hall, he appeared on stage wearing a gold lamé suit modeled after one of Elvis Presley's stage outfits and interspersed rock and roll and country songs from the 1950s with his usual repertoire of folk protest.

Ochs was roundly booed by much of his audience, presumably because they saw his embodiment of Elvis as a retreat from the political engagement of the 1960s back to the conformism of the 1950s against which the counterculture had rebelled. But I shall emphasize a different aspect of Ochs's performance that may also have set him at odds with the counterculture: wearing the gold lamé suit was clearly a theatrical gesture in conflict with a counterculture that was ambivalent, at best, about theatricality, especially in musical performances. Although it has long been conventional to describe the political protests and Yippie manifestations of the 1960s as street theater, I argue that the counterculture's deep investment in the idea of authenticity entailed a necessary antipathy to theatricality. This antipathy derived from three ideological commitments: the emphasis on spontaneity and living in the present moment, the desire for community, and the suspicion that spectacle served the interests of the social and political status quo.

War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia

By M. Paul Holsinger

Spanning more than 400 years of America's past, this book brings together, for the first time, entries on the ways Americans have mythologized both the many wars the nation has fought and the men and women connected with those conflicts. Focusing on significant representations in popular culture, it provides information on fiction, drama, poems, songs, film and television, art, memorials, photographs, documentaries, and cartoons. From the colonial wars before 1775 to our 1997 peacekeeper role in Bosnia, the work briefly explores the historical background of each war period, enabling the reader to place each of the more than 500 entries into their proper context.

Excerpt

OCHS, PHIL (Songwriter-Folksinger). No single songwriter more clearly expressed the anger and frustration felt by thousands of college-age youth over the United States' participation in the war in Vietnam than did Phil Ochs. His name was synonymous with protest, and his 1964 "I Ain't Marchin' Any More" became the rallying cry of millions of students determined not to participate in the war. "Peace," "treason," "love," or "reason" - it made no difference what one's rationale for refusing to fight might be, Ochs sang, as long as, in the end one could state forcibly: "I Ain't Marchin' Any More." His "Cops of the World," penned two years later, fiercely pilloried the nation's armed forces, and that same year's "Draft Dodger Rag" made clear his position in regard to joining such units. When he went to Washington, D.C., in October 1967 to protest the war at the Pentagon, he sang his own "I Declare the War Is Over" to uproarious applause from a mostly youthful audience of fellow protesters.

Despite his anger at the government's role in Southeast Asia, Ochs had an unbounding faith in the American democratic system. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy and his own arrest at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, however, his optimism waned drastically. Though more than 50,000 persons cheered him in May 1975, when he and other folk singers in New York City celebrated the official end of the war in Vietnam, Ochs grew deeply depressed. A year later, he committed suicide at the age of thirty-four. Five long-playing albums of his musical work, much of it nonpolitical and some quite lyrical, remain, but it is as the 1960's and the antiwar movement's quintessential protest singer that Ochs will always be remembered.

See:

Schumacher, Michael. There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs. New York: Hyperion, 1996.

Taboo Tunes: A History of Banned Bands & Censored Songs

By Peter Blecha

From ancient Rome through the 1980s "Explicit Lyrics" labelling crusade and on to the infamous Taliban regime, repressive governments and self-appointed moral guardians have sought to limit musical expression. In this extensively researched ode to scandal, Peter Blecha recounts the travails of musicians who have dared to air "unacceptable" topics. Filled with several centuries' worth of raunchy sex ditties, morbid murder ballads, blasphemous satanic songs, paeans to intoxicating substances, and radical political anthems, Taboo Tunes lays the censors' stories bare.

Far from merely a recounting dusty history, Taboo Tunes casts a much-needed spotlight on current concerns over civil liberties and artistic freedom in the post-9/11 world.

Excerpt

Take the case of poor Phil Ochs. Here was a notable protest singer, a veteran of myriad civil rights and peace rallies, an effective rabble-rouser, and a genuine thorn in the side of the Establishment - a fact greatly appreciated by his fans, though less so by the FBI. After having been a recording artist with a major label contract for a half-decade (and with several albums to his credit), by 1968 he had yet to score with any kind of "hit" record. That's when he finally came up with his best-ever shot at scoring on the charts - a brilliantly cynical masterpiece featuring sing-along lyrics about the hypocrisy of modern society, all wedded to a fun, rollicking, ragtimey tune called "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends." Upon its release, the darn thing was embraced by a promising number of radio markets and began climbing a few regional sales charts. Hopes were high among fans that he'd finally gotten the shot at the "big time" that he'd always deserved.

But then the tides suddenly shifted. Overnight, it seemed, various stations began axing the song from their playlists. Initial word was that the disc was being shunned on the grounds that it "promoted drugs" - a criticism which, for once, was technically accurate since the lyrics did feature a comparative evaluation ("Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer"). This explanation seemed a bit disingenuous though, especially when stories began to filter out that Nixon was leaning on the (theoretically independent) FCC, who were strong-arming radio managers and advising them to shun Ochs in general. While it can be debated which of Ochs's ideas troubled them the most, it is certain that the drug lyric issue could be the most easily employed as a rationale for governmental intervention. This would not be the first time, nor the last, that a political gadfly has been trumped by the playing of the drug card.

[...]

Since 1978, the Freedom of Information Act has allowed the public to review many secret government files, and through that process it was revealed that as far back as 1963 the FBI had taken an interest in protest singer Phil Ochs. As a regular at civil rights rallies - and an early and outspoken critic of the undeclared war in Vietnam in tunes like "Draft Dodger Rag," "I Kill Therefore I Am," "What Are You Fighting For?", and the classic "I Ain't Marching Anymore" (of which Ochs quipped, "The fact that you won't be hearing this song over the radio is more than enough justification for the writing of it") - Ochs had become a real thorn in the Establishment's side. According to agency Director J. Edgar Hoover, it was Ochs's "propensity towards violence and antipathy toward good order and government" that won the singer his place on their dreaded Security Index.

Songs of the Vietnam Conflict

By James Perone

Excerpt

Historian Ray Pratt describes "Draft Dodger Rag" and its contemporary "I Ain't Marching Anymore" as quickly having achieved "anthem status" in the peace movement. Pratt also writes that Ochs's albums All the News That's Fit to Sing, containing "One More Parade," and I Ain't Marching Anymore, containing both "Draft Dodger Rag" and the title song, became "essentials of the record libraries of activist students and early opponents of the war" (Pratt 1998, 176).

"Draft Dodger Rag" consists of several stanzas, each constructed of two identical eight-measure phrases, in which the singer details a litany of ailments and perversions he has that, he hopes, will make him unfit for military service. The "Rag" is actually misnamed; it contains no classical ragtime syncopations at all. What it does contain is a boom-chuck style guitar accompaniment (in Ochs's recordings of the song) suggesting the left hand part of a piano rag, and the type of dotted rhythms found in the post-ragtime, early jazz piano work of Jelly Roll Morton. In terms of the anti-war movement and the war resistance movement, the song's appearance coincides with the first of the publicized draft-card burnings related to Vietnam and the start of mass attempts to avoid the draft by seeking Conscientious Objector status and various types of deferments. The history of this resistance movement is detailed in journalist/draft resister Roger Neville Williams' book The New Exiles: American War Resisters in Canada (Williams 1971).

Easily Phil Ochs's best-known and best-remembered composition on the subject of the Vietnam Conflict, "I Ain't Marching Anymore" found a home at numerous anti-war rallies from 1965 through the end of the war. Ochs's magnum opus was printed in Broadside #54 (January 20, 1965) and Sing Out! 16/1 (February-March 1966). While right-wing writers called the song "notorious," "un-American propaganda" (Noebel 1966, 225, 226), and "subversive" (Allen 1969), a presumably left-wing writer in a letter to Broadside stated, "Phil Ochs speaks more than any other American I know of today for a segment of American youth which is discontented and restless and can not find the channels through which to register their discontent and bring about needed changes" (O.S. 1965, 12). Ironically, at about the time of the publication of "I Ain't Marching Anymore," Ochs himself told a Village Voice interviewer, "I'm writing to make money. I write about Cuba and Mississippi [and presumably Vietnam] out of an inner need for expression, not to change the world. The roots of my songs are psychological, not political" (Eliot 1979, 93).

Despite the reasons for Phil Ochs's songwriting, despite the deep feelings some listeners had about songs like "I Ain't Marching Anymore," despite the concern expressed by right-wing writers over the politics of Ochs, and despite the commercial popularity of folk revival and folk-rock in the early and mid-1960's, even an anti-war classic like "I Ain't Marching Anymore" made virtually no commercial impact. In the case of Ochs, context reigned supreme, and the context for Ochs's music was live performance, primarily at peace rallies. The more politically charged the atmosphere when Ochs performed his anti-war songs, the better they were received. As noted rock critic Greil Marcus writes, "That's why when Phil Ochs gets up to sing protest songs to people getting ready for a demonstration, telling them that they are right and that their opponents are wrong, he always sounds flat and empty compared to the singing that begins when the cops move in" (Marcus 1969, 91-2). By the time of "I Ain't Marching Anymore," Ochs was supplanting Bob Dylan as the favorite protest singer of the anti-war movement. As sometimes Broadside contributor Paul Wolfe wrote in reviewing the two musicians and their impact in the protest movement, the comparison between Ochs and Dylan at the time was "meaning vs. innocuousness, sincerity vs. utter disregard for the tastes of the audience, idealistic principle vs. self-conscious egotism" (Wolfe 1972, 148).

"I Ain't Marching Anymore," an up tempo protest number, usually sung by Ochs to his own guitar accompaniment, finds the musician picking out various American snapshot battles of the past, the Battle of New Orleans, the German trenches of World War I, the dropping of the atomic bomb, and so forth, responding that with what he has learned about the futility of war, he has decided that he will not march anymore. The song's chorus clearly paints war as a generational issue, with the older generation always being responsible for initiating wars, and the younger generation always suffering the deaths associated with those wars. The song was important not only at the more general peace rallies, but played an important role in the early resistance movement, voicing the feelings of draft resisters and military deserters.

The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music

By Philip H. Ennis

Philip Ennis presents a major social and cultural study of the origins and evolution of "rocknroll." With masterful command of general trends and telling details, he describes the artistic, economic, and political context that nurtured this radically new popular music. This "seventh stream," which drew from existing forms of pop music, began as a youth movement of rebellion and remains a worldwide banner of youth in search of alternatives. "Rocknroll" emerged, he shows persuasively, from the successive meeting and melding of the other six "streams"--pop, black pop, country pop, jazz, folk, and gospel. He chronicles how these were shaped by struggles over musical property rights, and by the new technologies of radio and phonograph record. The most decisive clash was between the New York based music publishers and the radio broadcasters. Their decades long contest resulted in many cultural changes. The basic unit shifted from sheet music to the phonograph record. The radio disc jockey in small, independent radio stations became the new focal point for all the popular musics. New venues, audiences, and talent appeared throughout the nation. The appearance of "rocknroll" marked a significant cultural moment, argues Ennis. This "seventh stream" was part of an explosive efflorescence in all the American arts after World War II. Its early stars--Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley--built a pantheon of performers with deep roots in all the other streams.

Excerpt

For Dylan, the incompatible elements of art, commerce, and politics in the folk-rock antagonism were resolved almost instantly in 1964. He couldn't get over the fact that the Beatles had eight of the top ten songs. The following views, reported by Anthony Scaduto, state both Phil Ochs' and Bob Dylan's stance at this crucial moment.

[Ochs:] I thought then that there was no end to what he [Dylan] could do now. I thought that he could become Elvis Presley on that level. Essentially he could physically represent rural America, all of America and put out fifteen gold records in a row. . . . My feeling at that time was that he did want that. . . . What happened then was the Beatles got in the way. Dylan wrote the lyrics, and the Beatles captured the mass music.
[Dylan to Ochs:] The stuff you're writing is bullshit, because politics is bullshit. It's all unreal. The only thing that's real is inside you. Your feelings. Just look at the world you're writing about and you'll see you're wasting your time. The world is, well . . . it's just absurd.

The bitchy tone of these words is probably not characterological. The interpersonal style of that Village club scene, set by the manners of the various scene-makers, ranged from southern-spiced barbs and New York brusqueness, through the normal show business character assassination, to black confrontational rhetoric. Whatever the motivation, Dylan and Ochs were responding to severe pressures. The folk stream was being devoured by the pop stream. Everyone in both camps was highly nervous about choosing the terms of the meal. Few could maintain a completely graceful composure under the stress, when hundreds of thousands of dollars were at stake in every record and a real shot at the big time was in the offing. The battleground was mainly over the integrity of the performer, his choice of songs, his inclusion of profanity, and issues of dress and manners. The rules of the game played by the pop stream were not the same as in the folk stream. Art, commerce, and politics had different meanings, were given different priorities. Dylan was clear, again according to Scaduto, on where he wanted to be. It was with the kids, and they were wise to the futility of student protest.

[...]

Emblematic of this moment of dissolution and the courage of some parts of the rock life to fight it, and fight in the same terms that had spawned rocknroll in the first place, was the action of Phil Ochs, one of the veteran folk singers of the early 1960s New York Village scene. He had been a stalwart and cheerfully unyielding singer-songwriter at the political end of the rock stream, a friendly antagonist of Dylan, but committed to the fusion of music and politics. After nearly two years of recovering from the defeats of 1968 at the Chicago National Democratic Convention, he returned to Carnegie Hall for a solo concert. John S. Wilson, senior jazz critic of the New York Times, reviewed the event. Its reprinting here in full is merited, I think, not only because of the drama of the evening but because it illuminates rock's pause period more fully than any other (fig. 12-3).

Ochs' personal musical development, from Elvis to the Kingston Trio and then to politics, was probably the route taken by millions. His plea to acknowledge and continue the journey may have succeeded that magical evening in Carnegie Hall. The gold lamé suit (see figure 12-4), also worn by Elvis, certainly was a shocker. It didn't work anywhere else, though, and it worked for him only partially and painfully. After several years of touring and a benefit concert in 1974 for victims of the Chilean junta with Dylan, he committed suicide in 1976.