“WE own half the world, oh say can you see/ The name for our profits is democracy/ So, like it or not, you will have to be free/ ‘Cause we are the cops of the world, boys/ We’re the cops of the world.” These are the concluding verses from a topical song composed more than half a century ago.
Its author would not have been best pleased to learn that it has lost none of its topicality in the interim. Among the American singers-songwriters of his generation, Phil Ochs was the fiercest critic of his country’s foreign policy. He did not resent the label “the singing journalist”; in fact, his first LP, punning on the New York Times motto, was titled All the News that’s Fit to Sing. The title track of the second, I Ain’t Marching Anymore, provided the anti-war movement with one of its most resilient hymns. “It’s always the old to lead us to the war,” he sang, “It’s always the young to fall.”
But if he kept one eye focused on what the US was getting up to in foreign lands, the other one remained sharply trained on domestic events. Here’s to the State of Mississippi was a seething excoriation of the southern redoubt that seemed deeply determined to cling on to American-style apartheid. Each chastising stanza ends with the admonition: “Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of/ Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of”.
A decade or so later, he breathed new life into this song by replacing every mention of “Mississippi” with “Richard Nixon”. In the noughties, Eddie Vedder of the band Pearl Jam rewrote it as Here’s to the State of George W. Phil would have been thrilled, but by then he hadn’t been around for quite a while. Forty years ago this week, Phil Ochs hanged himself. He was 35 years old.
The anti-war American singer committed suicide 40 years ago.
Ochs had inherited bipolar disorder from his father, and as his behaviour became increasingly erratic, family and friends tried to persuade him to seek the clinical attention he clearly needed, but he always managed to talk his way out of it.
There’s a degree of irony in the fact that two of Ochs’ biggest successes as an activist came in his last years. Appalled by the US-backed coup in Chile in 1973, he toiled relentlessly to organise An Evening with Salvador Allende some months later, where Allende’s last speech was read out in between songs more or less appropriate to the occasion, by the likes of Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk and, more surprisingly, Bob Dylan. Ochs and Dylan had been friends and rivals, and the latter, already a legend, was disinclined to get involved in political gestures, yet some of Ochs’s enthusiasm had clearly rubbed off.
Ochs had visited Chile in 1971, and in Santiago had befriended the singer-songwriter Victor Jara. The hugely popular Chilean performer’s brutal murder by Gen Augusto Pinochet’s soldiers struck a particularly deep chord in Ochs. Jara and Allende’s widows were both in the audience at the Felt Forum in New York’s Madison Square Garden on the night of May 9, 1974.
Barely two years later, friends of Phil congregated once more at the Felt Forum, this time to bid him farewell. Among those who paid tribute was former US attorney-general Ramsey Clark — who, coincidentally, became intimately embroiled not long afterwards in efforts to save the life of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. At the Forum, he admirably summed up Ochs’ outstanding characteristics by describing him as someone who “lightened our hearts but steeled our resolve”.
A year earlier, Ochs had presided over another triumph. Since 1967, he had been organising The War is Over rallies in relation to the Vietnam conflict. By 1975 the war really was over, and hundreds of thousands turned up in Central Park to hear Ochs, Seeger, Joan Baez, Odetta and Harry Belafonte, among others, celebrate Vietnam’s hard-won triumph.
By then it wasn’t uncommon for Ochs to openly contemplate suicide, although his friends were not sure whether he was serious. His hopes that America could be changed essentially died outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police bashed up peaceful protesters. Ochs was unscathed, but something inside him died.
A key reason why Ochs never found the stardom he yearned for was because he remained keenly wedded to his principles. “If there’s any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara,” he once noted — and at one point he tried to cast himself in that role. It was inevitably doomed to failure.
But the rich recorded legacy Phil Ochs left behind is well worth revisiting not only for the insights it offers into a volatile decade, but also for the signposts to a better tomorrow.
Published in Dawn, April 6th, 2016
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.