Subject: RE: Review: Phil Ochs Documentary for 2011
From:
Desert Dancer
Date: 04 Jan 11 - 08:44 PM
New York Times review: Aspiring to Musical Power and Glory
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: January 4, 2011
To say that the 1960s folk singer Phil Ochs dreamed big is to understate the huge scope of his ambition. As recalled in Kenneth Bowser's respectful, nonmaudlin documentary portrait, "Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune," Ochs moved to New York in the early '60s intending to be the best songwriter in the country. After meeting Bob Dylan, Ochs was forced to revise his opinion of his own potential to "second best."
Even before Ochs discovered folk music and left-wing politics through Jim Glover, his fellow student at Ohio State University, he was in the thrall of larger-than-life cultural symbols, from Elvis Presley to western movie stars like John Wayne and Gary Cooper, who embodied the concept of a world-saving hero. Not coincidentally, the folk music movement in its early days had the same messianic sense of its own importance.
The Dylan-Ochs connection, however friendly, had its tormenting underside. While Ochs worshipped Mr. Dylan (who is not interviewed in the film), his idol refused to pay him much respect. Ochs's typical songs were specific topical commentaries gleaned from poring over newspapers and magazines. Even when Mr. Dylan was addressing current events, he remained suspicious of politics as a songwriting platform and soon moved on to become the superstar that Ochs wanted desperately to be.
Ochs, who committed suicide in 1976 at 35, never understood that there was a limited audience for brainy musical editorials composed in a rigid singsong mode and sung in a droning, nasal voice with a modest range and faltering intonation. If his verses were finely wrought, his singing conveyed an emotional distance from the words.
Ochs's involvement with the civil rights and antiwar movements and his presence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention make "There but for Fortune" not only a biography but also a running history of the period's left-wing activism, replete with film clips of that decade's tragic events; the assassination of John F. Kennedy hit Ochs especially hard.
Besides family members — his younger brother and sometimes manager, Michael; his older sister, Sonny; his wife, Alice Skinner; and his daughter, Meegan, all appear in the film — the documentary's talking heads include Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Tom Hayden, Judy Henske, Billy Bragg, Ed Sanders, Christopher Hitchens and Sean Penn.
The earnestness of Ochs's broadsides was often leavened by a sarcastic humor that he sometimes directed at himself. His 1966 song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" assailed the slightly left-of-center politics of those who wept over the Kennedy assassinations but believed that Malcolm X "got was what coming" when he was killed. Other Ochs songs that are now considered folk music classics include "There but for Fortune" (memorably recorded by Ms. Baez), the antiwar "I Ain't Marching Anymore," and the caustically witty "Draft Dodger Rag."
The story told by Mr. Bowser's film is complicated and tragic. Once the songs stopped coming, Ochs's bipolar illness, worsened by alcoholism, led to acute paranoia and eventually to suicide. A contributing factor to his decline was probably his realization after the violent police response to radical demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention that the powers that be, if sufficiently irate, would lash back viciously.
While his folk singing peers embraced folk-rock in the mid-'60s, Ochs took an artier musical direction and moved to the West Coast, where he recorded his disappointingly received 1967 album, "Pleasures of the Harbor," which featured ornate, semiclassical orchestrations. The album's producer, Larry Marks, recalls that Ochs was certain it would go to No. 1 and gain him recognition as America's greatest singer and songwriter. It peaked at No. 168 on Billboard's album chart.
Poking fun at his lust for fame, Ochs, who never had a Top 40 hit, made a "greatest hits" album of new songs in 1970, for which he posed, Elvis-like, in a gold-lamé suit and followed it with a Carnegie Hall concert at which he wore the same outfit. The flamboyant, self-mocking stunt received a mixed reception.
World travels followed, including trips to Chile, where he befriended the folk singer Victor Jara, who was later murdered in the military coup, and to Africa, where he was mugged and nearly killed while walking on a Tanzanian beach. But there was no escaping his demons.
~ Becky in Long Beach
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