Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
Bob Dylan, or at least the idea of him, is the lurking, mocking
background chorus in this beautiful, bittersweet look at postwar
America's foremost agitprop singer/songwriter. For all that Phil Ochs
could have achieved in his lauded but still overshadowed career, there
stands Dylan, the one who came up through the same West Village
coffeehouse folk scene but who had no problem jettisoning its politics
once he realized that greater commercial reward was there for the taking
without the encumbrance of protest. As Christopher Hitchens points out
in the film, there was a difference between those who liked Dylan and
those who even knew about Ochs --
anybody
could be into Dylan, Ochs's songs were for those who cared.
Cared about what? The Ochs who comes through in Kenneth Bowser's
documentary is the kind of active dreamer that societies need to have
around in times of national crisis, to put some poetry to the pain and
to stand up as an emblematic fighter for a better humanity. Coming up in
the New York folk scene of the early-1960s, Ochs seemed to be almost
more of a reporter than singer, having to do little more than flip
through the newspaper to find stories of wrongs that needed righting and
that could be sung about.
His unadorned, strum-heavy guitar playing -- represented here by a deep
wealth of incredible live footage dug up by Bowser -- didn't seem to
vary much from one song to the next, nor did the style of his deeply
mellifluous voice, it was the words that counted. More to the point than
some of his gauzier cohorts like Joan Baez (the seeming den-mother of
the movement, interviewed here), Ochs went right after the big issues of
the day, from civil rights to the military-industrial complex. Instead
of plaintive whingeing, Ochs went for direct, cutting statements, as in
"I Ain't Marchin' Anymore."
Ochs also had an acerbic sense of humor, displayed here not just in the
many interview snippets, where a self-effacing shyness does battle with
a coy trickster sensibility, but also in lyrics that didn't just go
after the predictable targets of conservative power but took on
contented see-no-evil left-wingers in songs like "Love Me, I'm a
Liberal" ("I cried when they shot Mr. Kennedy / As though I'd lost a
father of mine / But Malcolm X got what was coming"). Of course, this
same quicksilver inability to be categorized, not to mention his
conflicted feelings about whether to try and go commercial like Dylan or
keep the folkie faith, conspired to confine him to the margins of
popular memory.
Additionally, that constant tug and pull, along with Ochs's already
precarious mental state, made him particularly ripe for becoming a
casualty of the era as the great idealists were gunned down, one after
the other. Ochs's friend and compatriot Pete Seeger tells how Ochs was
spiritually crushed by the 1973 fascist coup in Chile where socialist
president Salvador Allende (whom Ochs greatly admired, having spent time
traveling and playing music in the country) was assassinated. Having
Seeger, that gentle bard, quietly relate the story of Pinochet's bloody
massacre (which also took the life of Ochs's friend and Chilean
counterpart, protest singer Victor Jara) brings a particularly tragic
note to an already brutal tale, and leads right into the bitter endgame
of Ochs's life.
Bowser's keenly contrived film is admiring, but while it doesn't exactly
interview friends and family-members eager to talk about what a bad guy
he is (no surprise, given that Ochs's brother Michael is one of the
producers), there is no desire here to sanctify the man. The worst that
could be said about the film is that it glosses right over things like
Ochs's seeming abandonment of his wife and child, who make brief
appearances at the beginning and end, with hardly any mention of what
they were doing in between during the 1970s. But that is a small
complaint for a film that shows with such poignancy and loss Ochs's
rare, heartfelt, and utterly non-Dylan-like brand of greatness.
--
http://www.filmcritic.com/reviews/2011/phil-ochs-there-but-for-fortune/
Via InstaFetch
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