Saturday, December 19, 2015

Phil Ochs and the "Crucifixion" of JFK

"And the night comes again to the circle studded sky
The stars settle slowly, in lonliness they lie
'Till the universe expodes as a falling star is raised
Planets are paralyzed, mountains are amazed
But they all glow brighter from the briliance of the blaze
With the speed of insanity, then he dies."

-Phil Ochs, "Crucifixion"

Phil Ochs is my all-time favorite singer-songwriter from the folk revival of the 1960s. Nothing against Dylan, it's just that I'm a child of the 70's and 80's, so my perspective is colored by those times in which I got to know him as the rocker Bob Dylan, or Lucky Wilbury. While I certainly appreciate how pivotal Dylan's folk period was for his time, Ochs appeals to me more on both a political and personal level. I first got into his music around late 2002-early 2003, just as people were collectively waking up to the coalescing bullshit in the buildup to the Iraq War. So many of his songs, such as "Cops of the World", "Is There Anybody Here", "The Power and the Glory" and "Pretty Smart on My Part" still have resonance and relevance now, even though he originally wrote them as, in his own words, "topical songs." I found myself so connected with his music at the time, I even rewrote some of his lyrics in "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" to be even more topical during the 2004 election (not realizing Jello Biafra did the same thing in the 90's). Though I've never played that version publicly, I did perform it for my Dad before he passed away, and he enjoyed it thoroughly.

Something I have found particularly fascinating the more I learn about Phil Ochs is the deep connection between him and the Kennedys. To some degree, his career began because John F. Kennedy became President. When Ochs was a student at Ohio State University in 1960, he became interested in folk music and left-wing politics, in no small part due to the influence of his roommate Jim Glover, who introduced him to folk music and taught him to play guitar. In the documentary Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune, Glover talks about how he had a bet with Ochs that Nixon would beat Kennedy in the 1960 election. When JFK won, Ochs' prize for winning the bet was Glover's guitar. Ochs briefly formed a duo with Glover called The Singing Socialists, though according to what Glover told William E. Kelly Jr., Ochs grew worried after being confronted by an angry audience member asking if they were Communists and asked to change the name of the duo to The Sundowners. Glover felt that this change "took all the fun out of it for me." He left OSU in 1961 and moved to Greenwich Village where he met his future wife Jean Ray and formed the folk music duo Jim and Jean. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because the Coen brothers movie Inside Llewyn Davis, which covered the Greenwich Village folk revival in 1961, featured a folk duo named Jim and Jean played respectively by Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan.