Buffy Sainte-Marie on fighting LBJ and being inspired by Sesame Street

"My music was coming out of the student movement, there was a message and we wanted to be heard. Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, people were doing things rich in content, but the Mamas & the Papas were not – they were professionally packaged, but what interested me was the truth."

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Red Dust and Broadsides: A Joint Autobiography

By Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and Gordon Friesen

Edited by Ronald D. Cohen

Foreword by Pete Seeger

Perhaps best known for Broadside, the influential magazine they founded in 1962, Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and Gordon Friesen have long been renowned figures on the American left. In this book, these two dedicated social activists - Sis the folk musician and Gordon the radical journalist - offer a spirited account of their personal and political odyssey. The story is illustrated with numerous photographs and drawings.

Born into poverty in rural Oklahoma, further shaped by the hardships of the "dustbowl" Depression years, Sis and Gordon were already committed to radical causes when they met and married in 1941. A short time later they moved to New York City, where they befriended Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Sis joined the folk protest group the Almanac Singers, and Gordon continued his work as a journalist.

Although blacklisted for their political views during the McCarthy era, Sis and Gordon persevered and eventually launched Broadside, which they continued to produce for almost twenty years. The magazine was instrumental in promoting the careers of many singer-songwriters, publicing the first works of such artists as Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Phil Ochs, Buffy Sinate-Marie, and Tom Paxton, as well as the works of more established figures, including Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger. Indeed, Broadside helped give birth to a musical revival that energized the country and forged a vital link between the folk music of the 1930s and 1940s and the urban folk revivalists of the 1960s and 1970s.

Excerpt

By the fall Phil Ochs became a contributor, and throughout most of 1963 we hardly put out an issue that didn't contain one or two Ochs songs.

[...]

Phil Ochs started coming within a few months and continued to come long after we discontinued the monthly meetings. He always visited us when in New York after his move to California; he still put his songs on tape for us, and Gordon and I taped long interviews with him, which we transcribed and printed in Broadside. We later recorded some of the conversations on L-P albums through Folkways Records. He spent a lot of time with us during the summer and into the winter of 1975, talking hour after hour about being under surveillance of the FBI. Phil was quite ill, so we taped none of this. But later we confirmed what he said by sending to the Freedom of Information Act for a report on him and receiving over four hundred pages.

Dylan: A Biography

By Bob Spitz

Bob was on the road when the news broke that the government of Chile had been overthrown by its military. Though the story probably eluded him, it had a devastating effect on other members of the New York folk community.

Pete Seeger, for one, had informal ties to members of the now-deposed Allende government and performed several Chilean folk songs in his repertoire. For Phil Ochs, the revolution meant a more personal and tragic loss. Ochs had maintained a close, albeit long-distance, friendship with folksinger Victor Jara, who was often described as "the Bob Dylan of Chile." As a result of the coup, Jara had been classified an enemy of the state, then dragged into Santiago's National Stadium where he was tortured and finally executed by members of General Pinochet's ruling junta.

Ochs was severely shaken by the news of Jara's death. Immediately, he set out to organize a concert to benefit the Chilean refugees and, in no small part, to embarrass CIA officials, whom he blamed for the coup. "I'm gonna pull this thing off if it's the last thing I do," he told a friend one night over drinks at Max's Kansas City. "I've already lined up the Felt Forum. And we're gonna have John Denver and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine." Ochs then proceeded to get completely wasted and passed out, a condition that augured the concert plans themselves.

Ochs was in no shape to promote a folk concert, much less sing at one. His career had been in a kamikaze nosedive, brought on by fits of self-destructive fantasy. He struggled with alcoholism, manic depression, paranoia bordering on madness, and, worse perhaps, he had lost his voice as a result of having been mugged in Africa. Unable to sing, Ochs masqueraded as a political radical until the Chilean benefit materialized, and his Janus-like personality found a new focus.

The trouble was, nobody gave a damn about Phil Ochs or his concert. As an activist, he was a Model A in an era of hatchback sedans. He was an old hippie, struggling to keep the movement alive at a time when it was already considered long dead and buried. Politics was anathema to a generation of budding art-rockers who were content to entrust it to the politicians. To them, Sixties phenomena like drugs, Woodstock, peace, were relics of primitive man. The last thing they wanted to hear about was a Marxist politician from South America and the problems of Spanish-speaking refugees. And so, two weeks before the gig, only four hundred of the six thousand seats at the Felt Forum had been sold. The way it was shaping up, Phil Ochs had a major disaster on his hands. Not only wasn't he going to raise any money for the Chilean refugees, but his friends who'd put up a fifteen-thousand-dollar guaranty for the show were going to take a whopping bath.

His biggest problem was the entertainment. So far, only Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, Melanie, and Arlo Guthrie had committed themselves to perform, and in 1975 they were comparable to the floor show at a Jewish hotel in the Catskills. John Denver was unavailable, Frank Sinatra was uninterested, and Joan Baez - to hear Phil tell it - was just plain uncharitable. Joan declined on the grounds that she had other things to do that night, which really infuriated Phil, considering she'd had her only hit single with his song "There But For Fortune."

"She's a no-class bitch!" he told Faris Bouhafa, the assistant manager at Max's, who was helping him with booking the talent. That night, at the club, the two men commiserated over an endless succession of drinks. The concert was in trouble, they both knew it, and it seemed they'd either have to come up with a last-minute miracle or pull the plug. Ochs, blinded by booze, began paging through a tattered copy of the Village Voice that someone had left on the table. In the music section, he squinted at an ad for Buffy Sainte-Marie, who was playing across town at a new club called the Bottom Line. "Hey, man, what have we got to lose? Let's go over there and see if Buffy wants to do our show," he suggested. "Maybe she can help us sell tickets."

Obviously, it was the act of a desperate man. Buffy Sainte-Marie might bring in five or ten old folkies, but a serious block of fans? Not a chance. The time was long past when a folksinger could draw a crowd in New York. Still, Ochs and Bouhafa stumbled over to the Bottom Line in the hope that they could pad the passenger list of their sinking ship.

When they arrived, Buffy was finishing the last few songs of the late show. The room was fairly light, there was a straggler or two at the bar, and Ochs walked over there to order a drink before last call. He was already drunk and reeling, barely able to stay on his feet. Then, as he inhaled the tumbler of vodka in his hands, Phil started to stare at a guy standing a few feet away from him at the bar. The last thing Faris wanted was for Phil to start up with someone, but before he could intercede, Phil was pointing with excitement. "I know that guy!" he insisted.

Bouhafa put a restraining hand on his shoulder. "C'mon, man - let's watch the show."

Too late, Phil walked over to the stranger and jabbed him in the ribs. "Hey! You're that kid from Minnesota who wrote a song about South American miners, right?"

Bob Dylan grinned at his old friend and said, "Yup."

"Well, I'm giving a benefit for those miners in two weeks and you're gonna be there!" Bob seemed startled and didn't answer. "When this show is over I want you to come over to my house and hear something."

There is no doubt that Phil's request was facilitated by the ridiculous amount of alcohol in his system. Bob and he hadn't spoken in almost ten years, and their last encounter had ended disastrously. It had been in 1966, after one of Bob's appearances at Carnegie Hall. Backstage, he played Phil the final mix of his new single, "Can You Please Crawl out Your Window," and was told it wasn't up to snuff...

Buffy Sainte-Marie

"Folk songs usually last because they're about something that future generations can understand: war, peace, love, hate... classic themes," she said. "Something like Universal Soldier, I very deliberately wrote hoping that it would last for generations and cross languages and countries, and it's still appreciated now, 40 years later."

[...]

Along with some of her own recordings, she noted the effectiveness of songs by Phil Ochs and some of Bob Dylan's earlier works.

"I think that's probably why some of us got put out of business, because they were effective," she said.

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An American Family: A Televised Life

by Jeffrey Ruoff

National Educational Television was a small organization when Craig Gilbert joined the ranks as a producer in the mid-1960s; it was run primarily by John White, president; William Kobin, head of programming; Don Dixon, head of public affairs programming; and Don Kellerman, head of cultural affairs. Gilbert was hired by Kellerman to produce a weekly program, Magazine of the Arts, and, intrigued by the politics of the counterculture, he did a show about folksingers Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, and Phil Ochs. He later produced and directed a program about sculptors George Segal and John Chamberlain. Magazine of the Arts was discontinued when Kellerman was fired and White discovered that Gilbert had been taken on without authorization.

Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader

Edited by Benjamin Hedin

Despite everything that has been written about Dylan, not a great deal is known about him for certain. Heylin's chronology of Dylan's life, for example, is an archly self-canceling document, in that every piece of information points to a larger lack of information. Here are three consecutive entries for the year 1974:

Late April. Dylan attends a concert by Buffy St. Marie at the Bottom Line in New York. He is so impressed he returns the following two nights, and tells her he'd like to record her composition, "Until It's Time for You to Go."

May 6. Dylan runs into Phil Ochs in front of the Chelsea Hotel and they decide to go for a drink together.

May 7. Dylan visits Ochs at his apartment and agrees to perform at the "Friends of Chile" benefit.

What happened during the rest of the first week of May? Where was he going when he ran into Phil Ochs? Dylan's life story sometimes feels as if it has been pieced together from centuries-old manuscripts that were charred in a monastery fire. "Between January and June 1972 there is no evidence that he was in New York at all," Heylin writes in his attempt at a full-scale biography, Dylan: Behind the Shades. Heylin, a skeptical Englishman who is known for a history of American punk, is at least willing to admit what he doesn't know, and his book is the most readable and reliable of four biographies.

Songs of Phil Ochs

"Ochs is a major new writer worth watching."
Robert Shelton, New York Times

"Phil Ochs has reached maturity as a . . . writer that few acquire in a lifetime of work."
Josh Dunson, Sing Out

Contents

Introduction (4)
Foreword (5)
What's That I Hear (7)
Hills of West Virginia (8)
There But For Fortune (9)
Bound For Glory (10)
Draft Dodger Rag (11)
William Moore (12)
Talking Plane Disaster (14)
Talking Vietnam (15)
Thresher (17)
Lou Marsh (18)
Remember Me (19)
Firehouse 35 (20)
No Christmas In Kentucky (21)
Celia (22)
Links On The Chain (23)
That Was The President (24)
What Are You Fighting For (25)
Automation Song (26)
Power And Glory, The (27)
Another Country (28)
Too Many Martyrs (29)
I Ain't Marchin' Anymore (30)
Iron Lady, The (32)

Introduction

I got interested in politics after wasting a couple of years drifting through college. Around the same time, I became interested in learning the guitar, and luckily won an old Kay in a bet on the election of John Kennedy for President. As a journalism major, I was writing for several campus papers, so it was pretty natural to slip some of my ideas between the chords I was learning.

This book contains about a fifth of the songs I've written since then. Many people have asked me how I write a song, and after thinking about it for a while, I decided that all my good songs were written subconsciously. That is to say, I'm never able to sit down and decide that I'm going to write a song. Rather, a song idea will come out of the blue and I'll get the proverbial light-bulb sensation. But I always try to keep my mind conditioned to thinking of new ideas. When I get one, my brain almost acts like a reflex muscle in following up a new thought. Sometimes I have stayed up past daylight pursuing a song idea until it was trapped in rhyme. But once you get the original idea, the rest is relatively easy, --- and rewarding. Some of the most exciting and satisfying moments of my life have been in the writing of a song.

I hope this book will inspire some readers to try their hand at songwriting. You'll never know how good you might be without a few honest attempts. I think many potentially good songwriters have been still-born by their own inhibitions.

Most of my early songs were straight journalistic narratives of specific events, and the later ones have veered more in the direction of themes behind the events. All of them, though, are trying to make a positive point, even the ones that deal with tragic events. However, I do have to concur with some of the right-wing groups that consider topical songs subversive. These songs are definitely subversive in the best sense of the word. They are intended to overthrow as much idiocy as possible, and hopefully, to effect some amount of change for the better.

I'd like to dedicate this book to the memory of Joe Hill, the Wobbly songwriter who received his royalties in the form of bullets from a firing squad.
PHIL OCHS

Foreword
by Gordon Friesen

To me, this first book of songs by Phil Ochs marks an important milestone in the current development of fresh new directions for American song. It brings between two covers the already solid achievement of a young poet-songwriter who is contributing much to the present revitalization of the nation's "folk-type" singing tradition. Phil Ochs is one of the most significant leaders, I think, of the band of young creators who are boldly taking America's folksong revival down new and exciting roads.

This whole group of young men and women, almost spontaneously it seems, began writing "contemporary folk songs" about two years ago. Their output has been terrific; this book represents only a small portion of the songs Phil Ochs has written in that time. And not only writing them, but getting them printed and recorded and sung all over the country. Their influence has extended in widening circles until now we see a concentration on "songs of protest" even by the established commercial folk music groups, to many of whom "songs with a message" were something to be strictly avoided only a few months ago.

This new trend was summed up recently in a statement in the Saturday Evening Post by folksinger Carolyn Hester. Indicating why she (and by inference many another folksinger today) was switching from the old traditional ballads to singing more and more of the newly-composed "topical folksongs", Miss Hester said: "People are demanding more of a folk singer. You must stand up and say what you believe, what you think ... Writers --- that's what's new in folk singing today."

Among these new writers Phil Ochs stands at a certain apex, because many of the streams of this movement to restore vitality and meaning to our country's songs (and not only "folk", but song in general) converge in his work. We find in Phil's songs, for example, the bitterness of a Bob Dylan, but redeemed by a sharp sense of humor. Even the love song rises to a new level in Phil's hands. It is true that the love songs composed by many of these young writers, Dylan, Len Chandler, Eric Andersen, Peter La Farge, tower high in their realism above the sentimental ersatz in which American popular song has been wallowing since the 20's. But Phil, in his lyrically and musically beautiful "Celia" -- based on the real life Pomeroy case -- adds something quite significant: he makes of it specifically a love song of our special times, when so many dark forces keep a man and a woman apart.

Meaningful song, of course, is not alien to America; it has only seemed that way these past few decades. Songs crying out against injustice and reaffirming a faith in liberty and reason exist from Revolutionary days straight on through the 1800's and through the labor struggles, Great Depression and World War two of this century. Such songwriting waned, along with virtually all creative activity in general, in the stifling atmosphere of McCarthyism. But even during that dark period the spark of topical song was kept alive by such composers as Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Malvina Reynolds, Ernie Marrs and others. And standing tall behind them, the influence of the giant, Woody Guthrie.

It is against this background that the Phil Ochses, the Dylans, the Chandlers, the Tom Paxtons, the Buffy Sainte-Maries, began working. They have come far in a short time. Phil, only 23, is already being listed in Who's Who; recognition of his poetry also has come from abroad. (The world-famed French poet and novelist, Luis Aragon, paid homage to Phil in his latest volume of poetry). Two years ago, Phil was a student at Ohio State University vitally interested in journalism because he felt he had so many things to say. But his dim experience with the campus press left him unconvinced that there was much freedom of expression in the newspaper world. So he turned to one of the traditional areas where a man can still stand up and say how he feels about things -- folksinging. He began to put his ideas into song.

But songs must have a considerable dimension above and beyond editorials. This is something Phil never loses sight of. As folk music critic Robert Shelton said in a recent New York Times article "(Phil Ochs) is a fighter who uses ridicule and humor as his weapons. He comments in song on Cuba, Vietnam, militarism, civil liberties and civil rights, but with such a flair for lyric-writing that his songs rarely sound like pamphleteering."

"But all is not criticism. He has learned some of Guthrie's patriotic affirmation, especially in 'The Power And The Glory' and 'What's That I Hear?' ... Ochs is a major new writer and singer worth watching."

Another ingredient absolutely essential to good songs is good music. And that you will find too in this songbook of Phil Ochs'. Music critic Josh Dunson, writing in the New York publication BROADSIDE, where Phil's songs -- and those of many of the new young songwriters -- first appeared, says Phil has created "some of the most beautiful tunes produced by topical singers to date. 'Bound For Glory,' the restrained and thoughtful tribute to Woody Guthrie; 'Lou Marsh,' the ballad of the New York Youth Board worker killed last year; and 'The Automation Song,' a deftly painted picture of the plight facing America's working man, all are moving and lasting compositions..." (Incidentally, it is in Phil's song about Woody that many listeners find most comparison to Woody's own songwriting; they in "Bound For Glory" the same spirit which pervades "This Land Is Your Land.")

These songs of Phil's and others in this book are already becoming quite well-known, through the singing of them by professional performers like Joe & Eddie, Joan Baez, Ronnie Gilbert, the New World Singers, and amateur groups and individuals, especially on college campuses, in various parts of the land. Quite a few have also been recorded, by the Goodtime Singers, Pete Seeger, Phil himself on Broadside Ballads Vol. 1 (Folkways), on Vanguard's "New Folks Vol. 2", and his solo Elektra album, "All The News That's Fit To Sing" ("Hey! these are good songs," Pete Seeger said after listening to Phil's L-P).

Phil, like Dylan and the others, is a "working" singer as well as a songwriter, earning a living by performing his own material. He has appeared at Town Hall and Carnegie Hall, has sung the circuit of clubs, haunts and coffeehouses. When he can, he travels for a firsthand look at the things he wants to write songs about; his Hazard, Kentucky, songs came out of several visits to the impoverished miners' families there; on a trip to Atlanta, Ga., he absorbed the feeling behind the Negro people's struggle for freedom.

What we have here is an admittedly condensed sketch of the forthright young American who created the songs in this book. You will get much more of a picture of him from the songs themselves. Read them, sing them, enjoy them, listen and learn from them.

(Mr. Friesen is a contributing editor of the topical folk music publication "BROADSIDE").