I saw a Facebook mention of a PBS "American Masters" special on 1960s protest singer Phil Ochs and was distressed when I checked local listings and realized I’d missed it.
Then I remembered we live in the Internet age and looked online. Sure enough, the program is still viewable on the PBS website, and I settled in to watch to watch a brilliant but flawed icon of my younger days finally get his due.
My contemporaries were mostly defined musically by whether they preferred the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but I was more drawn to the folk music that was making a comeback against the backdrop of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
In Hilo it was easy to get albums by mainstream folk acts such as the Kingston Trio, Chad Mitchell Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary, but edgier singer-songwriters like Ochs and Bob Dylan were seldom found.
We learned of these emerging artists only when the popular groups started covering their songs, and we’d hunt down their original albums on trips to Honolulu.
The young Dylan wrote generational anthems that eventually made him a megastar, but I was more attuned to the grittier Ochs.
I wasn’t as radical as he was or as conspiratorially minded, but I shared his unbridled outrage over the violence against Southern blacks and the idiotic Asian war. More than other protest singers, Ochs got in your face. He named names. Most remarkably, he did it with a sense of humor.
The heart of his brilliance was in his three albums for Elektra between 1964 and 1966 — "All the News That’s Fit to Sing," "I Ain’t Marching Anymore" and "In Concert" — which contained still-relevant titles like "There but for Fortune," "Too Many Martyrs," "Power and the Glory," "Draft Dodger Rag," "Here’s to the State of Mississippi," "Cops of the World," "Santo Domingo," "Changes," "Canons of Christianity," "Love Me, I’m a Liberal" and "When I’m Gone."
As described on "American Masters," Ochs was hatching great ideas during that period faster than he could record them. Soon after, he began the slide caused by alcoholism and bipolar disorder that ended in his suicide at 35.
I hadn’t given Ochs a good listen for quite a while until I converted my music collection to MP3 a few years ago. I realized then that he’d taught me more about writing political commentary than any college professor.
The lessons were many: Write with attitude, speak plainly and with a strong voice, never equivocate, keep it to one main idea at a time, pack punch in every line, view both sides critically, never miss a chance to make a point with humor.
The Ochs special can be viewed at www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters.
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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
