Phil Ochs

Yesterday’s newspaper is today’s fish wrap

Listening to Phil Ochs in the Concert for Amchitka reminded me of the old quote from Bob Dylan about his friend Phil Ochs.

Both Dylan and Ochs were folk singers in the early 1960s. Both were middle-class Jewish lads who drifted to New York and Greenwich Village during the folk boom. Phil Ochs was there before Dylan and had already been established on the folk circuit before Dylan arrived.

Dylan said of Ochs “I just can’t keep up with Phil. And he just keeps getting better and better and better” (Melody Maker)

Dylan and Ochs had a friendship and bond that included work. They would spend time together at the New York Public Library scanning the papers for stories. Each would try to write protest or broadside from a different story. Dylan wrote The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll from a news story in that manner.

Yet Ochs was quickly overshadowed by Dylan. Bob Dylan was not a journalist. He wrote songs, many of enduring value because Dylan could transcend the material and add something timeless to the story.

One of Ochs’ more familiar songs is the anti-war protest “I Ain’t Marching Anymore“. Popular in its day, I hadn’t heard it until Thursday when I downloaded the Amchitka concert. The song scans the famous wars of history and condemns them as wrong. It’s an anti-war protest song.

“For I marched to the battles of the German trench
In a war that was bound to end all wars
Oh I must have killed a million men
And now they want me back again
But I ain’t marchin’ anymore” @ Phil Ochs

Dylan wrote “With God On Our Side” a similar anti-war song that has endured for four decades. Here’s his account of World War II.

“When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.” @ Bob Dylan

Dylan’s lyrics are full of irony and minimalism. We don’t hear about the war until its over and then only the reference to the Holocaust.

“With God on Our Side” has an anthemic quality that has stood the test of time. Rich in ironic jingoism and faux-patriotism, it rings with echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald in lines like

“Oh my name it is nothin’
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest”

Phil Ochs songs were covered by dozens of artists at the time; however, very few of them are heard decades later.

Journalists write news and news is quickly forgotten. I was a journalist once, when I started writing decades ago. I do not count myself among journalists today by choice, although some of what I write daily is journalism.

To be a journalist is to be forgotten, each story a pedantic recitation of facts that is thrown out with the next story. Next, next, next.

I’m not sure how I got myself into the ship of fools called the Press Gallery of the PEI Legislature, probably because I needed the press pass. It was clear the Liberal government was going to use the press gallery to filter who they allowed at the bar.

Other than that and with no disrespect for PEI journalists, I did not want to be in their press club. They are reporters who hack out story after story. It’s a job.

They are constrained by corporations, profits and politics. The Internet has freed us with technology. We don’t need those corporations anymore.

This is what I like to do. I write and although it may never be something of lasting value, that is the attempt I make.

I’m trying to move the ball forward. Success would be nice but in the great scheme of things it is trying that matters.

Related story – Press gallery votes to suspend blogger