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Phil Ochs, Vancouver Gardens Arena, 13 March 1969: photo by Mark Millman
There But For Fortune, the Phil Ochs documentary directed by Ken Bowser, opens in New York
in January.
The film takes us back to the folk/protest epoch of the 1960s, and follows the career of Ochs
while chronicling the major social and political events of the period (civil rights, Viet Nam & c.).
Few of which the busy troubadour Ochs, spiritual offspring of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger,
did not work into a song.
It's remarked by a friend, in the film, that all Phil had to do to get a song was open the New York
Times.
Ochs' earnest sardonic lyrics, his bitter wit and biting commentary, were distinctive.
He had the voice of a crooner implanted upon a soul that was born to always be cankering about
something or other.
After some years of success, Ochs went into a bad decline, career-wise and personally. He drank
heavily. Friends feared for him.
The movie is frank, candid, unflinching on the subject of Ochs' many troubles. It's also terribly sad.
Ochs' brother Michael fearlessly confronts the issue of his brother's demons. You get the feeling
he's worked through all this before.
At a certain point about two-thirds of the way through the documentary, you get that Uh-oh, I don't
like where this is going feeling.
A fellow "counterculture" folk singer, the poet Ed Sanders, was close with Phil.
Sanders' testimony in the film is perhaps the most affecting of the many close-up talking-heads
reports.
Ochs was only thirty-five when he went out to his sister's place in Far Rockaway and hung himself.
Sanders recounts the shock of the news.
"I went out to where he was staying, you know, where he had hung himself.
"This was a day or so after it happened. He had hung himself off, I guess, a hook on the wall. I went
out there just to look at it, to re-create it in my mind.
"It was so horrifying.
* * *
"He attracted really close friendships, and that's why people [around him] were so traumatized, and
full of angst, in his later years.
"He just couldn't stop drinking. I know it was guilt. He felt guilty, you know, about his daughter and
his marriage.
"When you make mistakes there are no time machines to rectify mistakes, so mistakes are lodged
like harpoons and fish-hooks in an intelligent person's soul.
"And I think Phil couldn't get beyond those personal harpoons that made him feel, in some ways,
worthless."
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody/Outside of a small circle of friends.
-- Phil Ochs: Outside of a Small Circle of Friends, from Pleasures of the Harbor, 1967
-- Phil Ochs: Outside of a Small Circle of Friends, from Pleasures of the Harbor, 1967
Phil Ochs: All the News that's Fit to Sing (1964), front cover: image via Michael Ochs Archives
Phil Ochs: I Ain't Marching Any More (1965), front cover: image via Michael Ochs Archives
Phil Ochs, Vancouver Gardens Arena, 13 March 1969: photo by Mark Millman