Five thousand people streamed through the streets of Manhattan. The crowd marched against the stream of traffic: It made it harder for the NYPD to follow them. Some carried briefcases and umbrellas, having been caught up in the throng on their way home from work or during an afternoon stroll. Others lifted bright placards above their heads. “God Bless You Lyndon For Ending The War,” read one. A smallish man in wire-rimmed glasses and a black military duster led the pack, singing, “I declare the war is over” in an off-pitch, nasal croon.

The man’s name was Phil Ochs, and the Vietnam War wouldn’t actually end for another seven and a half years. 

***

Phil Ochs is an American enigma. He grew up Jewish in El Paso, Texas, with his father, a veteran with crippling post-traumatic stress disorder, and mother, a nouveau riche Scottish immigrant. With only an acoustic guitar, Ochs wrote trenchant protest music and gave the ‘60s counterculture movement its most famous anti-war anthem. John Wayne and Elvis Presley, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, Victor Jara and Robert F. Kennedy were all among his idols. He drank too much. Alcoholism turned into depression, depression turned into lunacy, and all three drove him to suicide at the age of 35.

Ochs’ meteoric rise and fall are the subject of Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, a comprehensive documentary of the young musician’s life and passions, released last month on First Run Features. Director Kenneth Bowser charts Ochs’ inspirations through shifting political winds, revolutionary cultural trends, and the abrupt punctuation marks of history.  Bowser sketches a sharp portrait of a man devoted to equality, progress, and justice until his untimely death.

Most listeners first hear of Ochs after following a footnote in a Bob Dylan biography. Along with Dylan, Tim Hardin, Dave Van Ronk, and others, Ochs joined the early ‘60s “topical song” movement budding in the brownstones of Greenwich Village, an early hotbed of countercultural art and anti-war activism. Dylan became Ochs’ friend and, ultimately, his hero. “I went to NY to become the best songwriter in the country,” said Ochs, as recalled by his brother Michael, “and then I met Dylan, and I decided I’d be the second best.” But their collaborative relationship quickly developed skewed power dynamics.

In short, Dylan thought Ochs’ music was shallow rubbish, lacking emotion and poetry. (On one famous occasion, Dylan kicked Ochs out of his limousine and yelled after him, “You’re not a singer. You’re a journalist.”) In all fairness, headlines in the New York Times often inspired Ochs’ early songs: He would even go on to name his debut album All the News That’s Fit to Sing, an homage to the Times’ journalistic tagline. Buried at the back of the A-section, real world stories about civil rights abuses, inequality, war, busted economics, and crooked politics made Ochs’ blood boil. By complementing the rigid reportage of the New York Times with progressive moralizing and sardonic humor, Ochs hoped to transform the world around him.

***

“In every revolution there are clowns that precede the real stuff,” Ochs would say after the “War is Over” march. “And that’s what I am. I’m a pre-revolutionary clown.”

In 1967, Ochs took up with Theater of the Absurd dramatists after leaving New York for Los Angeles to record Pleasures of the Harbor, a stylistic U-turn from the journalistic folk of his earlier work. Straight talk, Ochs found, wasn’t reaching enough people or spurring much political change. “We spent years fighting against the war on a moral basis,” he said, “and the administration doesn’t listen at all. And then you become increasingly aware that you’re not having any effect.” Instead, Ochs planned a rally that was not only hopeful in a cynical age, but could capture the popular imagination.

“It was quite effective,” activist and friend Abbie Hoffman explained in an archival interview, “because in that moment they had to say ‘Well, what would it be like if the war was over?’” From the rally forward, the absurd would define Ochs’ career and personal life.

On the next three albums, Ochs parodied and epitomized stardom, without ever getting too popular. Ever tongue-in-cheek, he donned an Elvis-inspired all-gold lamé suit for the cover of his final album, Greatest Hits. (Despite what the name implies, Greatest Hits featured only original songs—Ochs didn’t have any hits.) He travelled the world, slumming through bordellos in Haiti, recording proto-afro-folk in Kenya, and witnessing first-hand the radical government of Allende’s Chile. It was a last-ditch chance to escape himself, the person he would become.

***

John Butler Train hung himself with a belt from a hook on his sister’s bathroom door on April 6, 1976.

Ochs chose the pseudonym John Train as he spiraled down what would be his last major depressive cycle. John Train claimed that he had murdered Phil Ochs and was now taking over his life. He feared the CIA was trying to assassinate him, so he carried a weapon at all times. His brother tried to have him committed, but Phil chose a brief life of homelessness instead. After a while, Ochs found his way to Far Rockaway, New York, to live with his sister, Sonny. He wouldn’t leave her house, even to buy cigarettes or booze; he stayed indoors, playing solitaire and the piano melody of “Jim Dean of Indiana” until she got home from teaching each day. One day when she came home, the piano was silent.

Dave Van Ronk visited Sonny’s apartment shortly after the suicide. He had had an argument with Ochs, a drunken affair that cut deep on both sides. Van Ronk felt guilt—for his own falling out with Ochs, and for the family that Phil left behind. “Mistakes are lodged like harpoons and fish hooks in an intelligent person’s soul,” Van Ronk said later. At Ochs’ memorial service, Van Ronk played his song “He Was a Friend of Mine,” and in that context, it was utterly heart-rending.

Ochs’ life was tragic. And like most tragedies, you can see them from a long way off. 

***

Rewind to 1975. American forces lost control of Saigon. Troops were barreling out of Vietnam. A decade of protest had finally paid off—or at least been legitimized. A celebration was in order, and this time around Ochs could truthfully say that the war was over.

More than 100,000 people crowded Central Park. Many felt lost, or confused. The evil that the counterculture movement worked so hard to undo was undone. So, now what? Undoubtedly, Ochs had the same question on his mind. As his brother Michael puts it in the documentary, “that was the last dragon to be slain.” Without a dragon, who needs a knight?

“There But for Fortune,” a hauntingly sad duet performed by Ochs and Joan Baez, was one of the rally’s final performances. It was a eulogy for an era, and for its knight.

Show me the country, where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings, once so tall
And I'll show you, young land
with so many reasons why
there but for fortune go you and I, you and I.

Images courtesy of First Run Features. 

Carl Safina’s new book The View From Lazy Point is a font of environmental wisdom on the natural world and all that affects it, including human behavior, economics, religion, and science. An ecologist who wrote the sea conservation classic Song for the Blue Ocean, Safina in his new book chronicles a year spent near and on the water, interspersing lyrical nature writing with forthright, eminently sensible commentaries on all the forces that threaten the blue ocean—and the blue planet as well.

Here is Safina on the “property rights” movement:

One can fully own a manufactured thing—a toaster, say, or a pair of shoes. But in what reasonable sense can one fully “own” and have “rights” to do what ever we want to land, water, air, and forests that are among the most valuable assets in humanity’s basic endowments? To say, in the march of eons, that we own these things into which we suddenly, fleetingly appear and from which we will soon vanish is like a newborn laying claim to the maternity ward, or a candle asserting ownership of the cake; we might as well declare that, having been handed a ticket to ride, we’ve bought the train. Let’s be serious. 

On the immorality of dirty energy:

The right and necessary things are not always decided solely on economic considerations. If ever energy came cheap, slavery was it. Slavery created jobs for slave catchers, a shipping industry built on the slave trade, and a plantation economy that could remain profitable only with slave labor. Slavery was necessary to “stay competitive.” It was the linchpin of the Southern plantation economy. But no normal person today would argue that slavery is good for the economy. We’ve made at least that progress.

Yet we hear—all the time—arguments defending dirty energy on economic grounds. Those arguments are as morally bankrupt as the ones defending slavery in its heyday. It isn’t moral to force coming generations to deal with the consequences of our fossil-fuel orgy. It isn’t moral to insist, in effect, on holding them captive to our present economy.

And on resisting consumerism:

The 1960s counterculture attempted what we need now more than ever: a spirited culture of refusal, a counterlife. … The revolution is as simple as this: Don’t buy the products by which they drain you and feed themselves. Listen to people trying to warn you, but don’t vote for anyone trying to scare you. Resist! Do the unadvertised and the unauthorized. Comb someone’s hair. Plant seeds. Reread. Practice safe sex until you get it right. Go to a museum, aquarium, or zoo. Be .org- and be commercial-free. Photograph someone you love with no clothes on. Not them—you. Walk a brisk mile to nowhere and back. Mark a child’s height on a freshly painted wall. Climb into bed with the Arts or Science section of an actual newspaper and get a little newsprint on your fingers. Eat salad. Clean your old binoculars. Hoard your money until you get enough to make a difference to charity. Go to formal dinners in great-looking thrift-store clothing and brag about how much you paid. React badly to every ad and every exhortation about what you need, as though they are lying, as though they just came up from behind in the dark and said, “Give me your wallet.” Scream when they come to rob you. You’ll never go wrong. You won’t miss anything worthwhile. The country needs your lack of cooperation.

Look for an excerpt from The View From Lazy Point in the May-June issue of Utne Reader.

Source: The View From Lazy Point  

Panel image by BaylorBear78, licensed under Creative Commons.

That culturally ubiquitous slice of youth culture known as hipsters now finds itself under the microscope of the always provocative Adbusters. The magazine’s latest issue—and, to some extent, its overall editorial mission—is predicated on the alleged cultural malaise of the past 50 years, beginning with the rise of postwar consumer culture as an inevitable byproduct of Western ingenuity. “Practical cleverness beats the crap out of spiritual wisdom on the battlefield and in the marketplace, as the West has made clear over the last 500 years,” the preface declares. “But cleverness without wisdom sooner or later destroys life.”

Douglas Haddow’s lead essay, "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization," takes it from there, positing hipsters as avatars of the narcissism and spiritual emptiness Adbusters laments, and as the probable harbingers of civilization’s decline. “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum," Haddow writes. "So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style.”

As much as the cantankerous square in me wants to see hedonistic youngsters taken down a peg, I think this essay might be giving hipsters a bit too much credit, overestimating both their cultural impact and longevity while longing nostalgically for a chimeral sense of past “cool” whose own authenticity is itself suspect. “An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather than creating it,” Haddow claims. But is this sort of inversion really so unprecedented? Are hipsters the first generation to practice it? And isn’t it more accurate to say that all youth everywhere, not just hipsters, end up doing both the creating and the consuming of culture, with the advertising and entertainment industries serving as mediators?

Yes, the commodification of cool is obnoxious, but it’s not novel and it’s not an agent of the apocalypse. Casting oneself and one’s peers as the “last generation, a culmination of all previous things”—as Haddow does, in his essay’s dour conclusion—displays the same narcissism and myopia as the culture he’s skewering. Hipsters are really nothing more than the latest manifestation of the disaffected, nihilistic youth population that mutates into a new form with each generation. They’re an obnoxious but essentially innocuous pocket of youth culture whose era is already waning, especially now that hipsterdom has been thoroughly assimilated into mainstream culture, branded, and codified into a household word. The hipster fad is now so ubiquitous as to be almost meaningless: everyone and no one is a hipster.

Besides, I’m immediately suspicious of any author who posits the “end” of anything. Hipsters represent the end of Western civilization? Really? Alarmist generalizations are guaranteed to sell magazines and generate angry emails to the editor—in fact, the inevitable debate will probably be more interesting than the article that inspired it. But ultimately, I suspect hipsters are simply kids in a phase they’ll eventually grow out of, just like the Gen-Xers, punks, hippies, beatniks, and flappers before them.

Image by Joseph Mohan.