Lib at Large: Daughter, '60s luminaries recall life and music of Phil Ochs
in new documentary
by Paul LiberatoreMarin Independent, marinij.com
March 4th 2011 2:24 AM
MEEGAN OCHS WAS a 12-year-old student at Mill Valley Middle School when her
father, the folksinger and political activist Phil Ochs, took his life.
On April 9, 1976, he hung himself in his sister's beachside house in Far
Rockaway, New York, when he was just 35, cutting tragically short the
incandescent career of one of the most important and influential voices of
the 1960s protest movement.
Meegan, now 47 and living in Woodacre, remembers her mother taking the
telephone call that delivered the heartbreaking news.
"My mother started crying, and I had a very strong feeling that something
had gone wrong with my dad," she recalled one recent gray morning at her
woodsy home on a steep, San Geronimo Valley hillside. "I didn't want to hear
about it. We eventually talked about it, but at the time I kind of shut
down."
Considered more topical and political than his friend and rival, Bob Dylan,
Ochs wrote "There But for Fortune," "I Ain't Marching Anymore," "Draft
Dodger Rag," "The War Is Over," "Outside a Small Circle of Friends" and
other politically pointed songs torn from the headlines of that turbulent
era.
Meegan Ochs is one of many who share their memories and reflections of her
father in a new documentary, "Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune," opening
March 18 in Marin at the Smith Rafael Film Center and at theaters in San
Francisco, Berkeley and San Jose.
Co-produced by Ochs' brother Michael,
who lives in Mill Valley, the film features interviews with Tom Hayden, Joan
Baez, Billy Bragg, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Sean Penn, Jello Biafra,
Christopher Hitchens, Marin music producer Erik Jacobsen and a host of other
political and musical luminaries from the '60s.
Meegan's mother, Alice Ochs, who died this past November after working for
many years as a supervisor for the Novato Post Office, remembers her late
husband in the film as a young father who had his problems, but adored his
baby daughter.
"She was the joy of his life," she says on camera. "It was safe to love a
child."
Dylan, who used to accuse Ochs of being more of a journalist than a
musician, criticizing him for not writing more from his own heart and
experience, appears in vintage film clips, but he declined to be interviewed
for the documentary, and is conspicuous by his absence.
"That's the one thing about the film that's disconcerting to me," Meegan
said. "My dad and Dylan had a very complicated relationship, but I really
feel they had enormous respect for each other. I wanted him to be in the
film to express that. I really feel my dad would be sad with that part of
the film."
After the dark days of 1968, when assassins bullets
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUAH0C1NcCI
killed Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the Chicago police
brutalized protesters at the Democratic National Convention, Ochs, the
guitar-strumming voice of a generation, spiraled down in alcohol-fueled
depression.
He traveled to Chile and to Africa, where he was mugged on a beach,
strangled and left for dead. His clarion voice, he said, had been ruined in
the attack.
Two months before his suicide, he paid his last visit to his daughter and
her mother in Mill Valley.
"That last time he came was an epic trip," she said. "He was
manic-depressive, and he fluctuated between being rational and not being
rational. But I think he really made an effort to keep it together when he
was with me. He took me to the flea market in Sausalito and bought me a set
of encyclopedias, and a kitten that he named Rimbaud. I was 18 years old
before I learned who Arthur Rimbaud was. I believe the encyclopedias and the
cat with the French poet's name were little seeds that he planted for me. I
think he knew that would be the last time I'd see him."
Aside from his singing and songwriting, Ochs was an activist and organizer
of numerous anti-Vietnam war rallies, a legendary benefit concert for
Chilean refugees and other events for various civil rights and peace and
justice causes.
Meegan appears to have inherited her father's talent for bringing people
together around a common cause. For the past 18 years, she's been special
events director for the Southern California ACLU.
"That's what I got from him," she said. "In 1971 my father performed at the
ACLU Bill of rights dinner, which is the annual event I've produced since
1993. Someone brought me a picture of my dad performing at what is now my
dinner."
"There But for Fortune," directed by Emmy-Award-winner Ken Bowser, "is very
telling of my father's life and very telling of the '60s," she said. "What
my father went through on an emotional arc is very similar to what the
country was going through. The '60s were a very painful coming of age for an
entire generation, and my dad was in the heart of that."
Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at [email protected]; follow him on
Twitter at http://twitter.com/LibLarge. Follow his blog at
http://blogs.marinij.com/ad_lib.
Original Page: http://www.marinij.com/diningandfood/ci_17522411%3E
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