Phil Ochs - I Ain't Marching Anymore

Pitchfork 85

Though the cover shot of I Ain’t Marching Anymore is a graveyard of grim political rhetoric—Phil Ochs slumped against a wall of torn Barry Goldwater and Kenneth Keating posters, their slogans shredded and inscrutable—the back cover essays comprise a beatnik rhapsody for the ages. Written by Ochs and the critic Bruce Jackson, they deliver the sort of earnest, overly verbose salvo only a Greenwich Village protest-folk record could deliver: a dense scrum of cheers to the Movement, jeers at the invertebrates in Congress, and navel-gazings on the quest for truth in art, with a track listing and credits seemingly wedged in as afterthought.

Midway through all the eager pulpit-pounding, though, the 24-year-old Ochs takes a turn both petulant and self-effacing, listing the most frequent complains that have been lobbed at him in his short career:

There’s nothing as dull as yesterday’s headlines.

Don’t be so ambitious.

Sure it’s good, but who’s gonna care next year?

I bet you don’t go to church.

Don’t be so negative.

I came to be entertained, not preached to.

That’s nice but it doesn’t really go far enough.

That’s not folk music.

Why don’t you move to Russia?

Which is what you got in 1965 for leaping up onto a bench in Washington Square Park and warbling your dismay at the morning’s New York Times: you were branded an ally of the communist kleptocracy, back when that sort of charge might actually end your career. (Simpler times.) But Ochs didn’t argue these accusations; he reveled in them as proof of concept, his confirmation that he was hitting the establishment where it hurt. He labeled himself a “singing journalist,” not a folk singer like the rest of his Bleecker Street fraternity (Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton), and stuffed his lyrics with the up-to-the-minute topicality and op-ed lambasting of a newsman—championing a coal miners’ strike in Kentucky one verse, decrying Marines landing at Santo Domingo the next. He called the front pages like a guerrilla newsie, merging the sardonic wit of Woody Guthrie, the chatty candor of Pete Seeger, and the lone-gunslinger bravado of Hank Williams.

And in the troubled arc of Ochs’ career—in which he began as the voice of the antiwar movement and heir apparent to Dylan, then cooled into his also-ran, then sank a bitter and penniless outcast—these cries of unpatriotism were a rare constant. He died not even knowing their extent; decades after he committed suicide in 1976, at age 35, the Freedom of Information Act unearthed a FBI monitoring dossier on him, thick as a novel.

But only a true American idealist could have written I Ain’t Marching Anymore. Ochs’ second album is a work of long-steeped fury at his country’s sins, naked in its scorn for a system showing its many fissures; still, it guards a flickering, tenacious hope that the nation can reach its potential to embrace, to empathize. It is a work of nationalistic heartbreak, the deploring of a terrible fate: the requiem of a romantic with nowhere to love. It is zealously leftist, so unequivocal as to smack of propaganda over poetry, almost wholly dependent on Ochs’ inculcating wordplay: with his twangy, octave-at-best vocal range, stevedore coffee shop strumming, and modest melodies, this album grabs your throat entirely on lyrical ferocity.

But to Ochs, there was no time for subtlety. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration was escalating involvement in Vietnam, ignoring countrywide demonstrations of dissent and returning body bags by the thousands; the racial friction of the South was exploding in bombings and riots; young Americans were still rudderless from the assassination of President Kennedy, mourning that era of profound hope and their purpose within it. Ochs absorbed it all and was a true believer in tuneful social reform; as he quipped in the program notes of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see an album called Elvis Presley Sings Songs of the Spanish Civil War or The Beatles with the Best of the Chinese Border Dispute Songs.” But until the day that happened, Ochs was here for us, offering 14 brisk tracks of fingerpicked guitar and unvarnished tenor, distilling the world’s chaos into a frightening thesis: An era of optimism and social promise was not only ending, but taking alarming leaps backward. But, he stressed, there was still time to reverse course.

He sets his agenda firmly in the title track—an opener that rouses and incites despite a pallor of exhaustion, regret, and fear. Over a simple acoustic strum with a subtly agitated back-trill, Ochs travels the bloody scope of American warfare, gazing wearily through the eyes of a soldier whose obedience has cost him his humanity. He begins at the War of 1812, where “the young land started growing/The young blood started flowing”; then he grips a glinting bayonet in the Civil War, pilots a plane through Japanese skies that sets off “the mighty mushroom roar.” When Ochs’ warrior reaches the “Cuban shore,” and sees the missiles looming overhead, he grinds down his heels at last. “It's always the old to lead us to the wars/Always the young to fall,” he laments. “Now look at all we've won/With a saber and a gun/Tell me is it worth it all?” In a few breaths, Ochs not only decries the cyclical carnage of war, he explores the individual in bloodshed with clear-eyed empathy and lays a wrenching argument for ethical subversion. “Call it peace, or call it treason/Call it love, or call it reason,” he quavers, “But I ain't marching anymore.” Here, his oft-nasal voice betrays a slight Scottish lilt, the result of his Queens-based family’s brief stint in Edinburgh when he was a child—a warm, global topnote to his treaty. Upon its release, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” became a ubiquitous anthem of the antiwar movement, and Ochs’ signature tune; when he performed it outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, hundreds of young men burned their draft cards.

Ochs may have dropped out of journalism school (at Ohio State, where his fervent political columns got him demoted from the school paper), but he retained a penchant for interviewing strangers whenever he performed, from uptown street corners to dirt roads in the deep South. Early into Side A, on “In the Heat of the Summer,” Ochs recalls scenes from the Harlem riot of 1964, his reporter’s eye for detail gleaming in the “loudspeaker drowned like a whisperin' sound” and “uniforms shoving with their sticks/Asking, ‘Are you looking for trouble?’” While touring the summer folk festival circuit, he passed through Mississippi shortly after the abductions and murders of three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—as they registered African Americans to vote. Ochs marched up to their neighbors, pen and paper in hand; their unease and obstinance informs “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” a scorched-earth screed that implicates rural communities for resisting social progress and denounces the lack of education and options that perpetuate the spiral of intolerance.

“Talking Birmingham Jam” is a brutal lament of the violence in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when black residents demonstrated in opposition of the city’s Jim Crow racial segregation laws. In response, President Kennedy sent the National Guard to enforce integration in its schools, catalyzing the Civil Rights Act—and the city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, replied with attack dogs, high-pressure water hoses, and club-wielding cops. “Well, all the signs said ‘Welcome In’/Signed by Governor Wallace and Rin Tin Tin/They said come along and watch the fights/While we feed our dogs on civil rights,” Ochs seethes in a conversational sing-song lifted from Guthrie, excoriating Connor and George Wallace. “You see Alabama is a sovereign state/With sovereign dogs and sovereign hate.” His words echo powerful ones Martin Luther King, Jr. penned the year before, though it’s not known how deliberately. “The silent password was fear. It was a fear not only on the part of the black oppressed, but also in the hearts of the white oppressors,” Dr. King wrote of 1963 Birmingham. “There was also the dread of change, that all too prevalent fear which hounds those whose attitudes have been hardened by the long winter of reaction.”

While I Ain’t Marching Anymore arrived at a fractious moment in American history, it also landed at a strong pivot for Ochs’ beloved Greenwich Village protest-folk microcosm: it was the beginning of the end for this bohemian idyll. Ochs had moved to New York three years earlier, where the same liberal ire that made him an outcast in Ohio ingratiated him instantly with the other young troubadours at the Bitter End and the Gaslight. He played peace rallies at Carnegie Hall with Dylan and palling around with Van Ronk and Paxton afterward at dimly lit poker tables, sprawling in shoddy apartments to tease out new songs. He crashed on the couch of Jim Glover, his college roommate, with whom he’d once formed a band called the Singing Socialists; Glover was now half of the sweetheart folk duo Jim and Jean. (If they sound familiar, their name and saccharine charisma—plus Ochs’ frequent irascibility toward them—were imported wholesale into Inside Llewyn Davis.)

Dylan and Ochs were the heaviest hitters in the New York scene, and their reputations preceded them; in this time, they were described by Melody Maker in England as the “king of protest” and “the president,” respectively. They shared a mostly cordial rivalry, one with the hierarchy firmly apparent. As the Ochs biography Death of a Rebel details, Ochs revered Dylan openly, but Dylan was mercurial in return; he once raved of Ochs, “I just can't keep up with Phil. And he's getting better and better and better,” but was also quick to call him a “turncoat” and “opportunist” for wanting fame as nakedly as he did. (Once, Dylan allegedly kicked Ochs out of a limousine, hurling the “you’re just a singing journalist” epithet back in his face as the final indignity.) But for several years, both musicians coexisted in the same topical nexus. They both flourished at the landmark 1963 Newport Folk Festival; Pete Seeger, upon hearing them perform at a counterculture newspaper office, predicted vast fame for both. In one of many overlapping lyrical examples, they both bemoaned the death of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1964: Dylan on “Only A Pawn in Their Game” (from The Times They Are a-Changin’), Ochs on “Too Many Martyrs” (from his debut, All the News That’s Fit to Sing). And both were well-known volatiles; Dylan was the imperious prodigy simultaneously enjoying and bemoaning society’s quick deification of him. Ochs, one year older, envied his recognition openly and had a likewise-sticky reputation as a hothead alcoholic, a handsome narcissist who’d beaten girlfriends and alienated friends.

By 1965, Greenwich Village folk had begun splintering into their separate schools of folk ideology: Ochs believed folk songwriting should affect reactionary change in politics via blunt broadcasting of information and resistance, while Dylan teased out philosophical truths through personal ruminations, and daubing that canvas with larger social metaphor. That year, as Ochs continued to file his topical acoustic briefs sourced from Newsweek and The Village Voice, Dylan fully sniffed at it, “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival and releasing Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. (Consider the former’s oblique Side A protest, “Maggie’s Farm,” a rollicking yet not-so-dissimilar bray of sedition as “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”—though, in this case, Dylan was protesting against protest folk.) Commercial favor tipped to Dylan’s rock rancor; it would not bend back toward Ochs’ bleeding headlines. As Christopher Hitchens summarized in the Ochs documentary There But for Fortune, “Phil’s very tough, grainy songs…were far more political and tough-minded than the much more generalized, accessible ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ There was a difference between people who liked Bob Dylan—anyone could like Bob Dylan, everybody did—and those who even knew about Phil Ochs.”

But serious-minded as Ochs was, he was not without his gallows humor—the secret weapon of I Ain’t Marching Anymore. “Draft Dodger Rag” is a droll riff on shirking the call to Vietnam, spry with the impishness of a boy claiming fang marks on his homework. Ochs spits out any and every excuse that will get him discharged from duty: “I've got a dislocated disc and a wracked-up back/I'm allergic to flowers and bugs,” he wheedles. “And when the bombshell hits, I get epileptic fits/And I'm addicted to a thousand drugs.” Not all his cop-outs have aged well, exactly, by progressive standards (“I always carry a purse” sets off a modern air-raid siren), but it’s an endearing novelty. And as with all Ochs’ songs, there is a galvanizing point staked into the sand: the draft fell disproportionately to the poor, the uneducated, and minorities. Another lighter offering, comparatively, is “That’s What I Want to Hear,” a call to arms for the exploited and whiny (inert liberals being a favored punching bag of Ochs’). “You tell me that your last good dollar is gone/And you say that your pockets are bare,” he sings at a sharp but not-unkind clip. Soon enough, “Now don't tell me your troubles/No, I don't have the time to spare/But if you want to get together and fight/Good buddy, that's what I want to hear.” It is a call to action but, notably, not to knee-jerk jingoism; mobilization is easy in the first flush of fear but resistance, if taken to conclusion, will always be a pyrrhic victory. Here, Ochs tapers one of his core, conclusively patriotic theses: that he, and his listeners, should be willing to lose some comforts to keep the world turning.

The most affecting moment of the album is “That Was the President,” Ochs’ eulogy to President Kennedy that speaks to the shattered disillusionment of his generation. It’s sung as softly as an echo across wooden pews. “Here’s a memory to share, here's a memory to save/Of the sudden early ending of command,” he sighs. “Yet a part of you and a part of me is buried in his grave/That was the President and that was the man.” It aches with lack of resolution; it’s a memorial to the idealism the president fostered, whose administration itself shuttered in unfulfilled promise of its progressive agenda. (There is more than a wisp of the paternal here; Ochs’ father also died in 1963.)

Ochs’ music after I Ain’t Marching Anymore would be pocked by outside influences; he jealously watched less overtly political colleagues like Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary reach national fame, and struggled to reconcile his ardency for social reform with his craving to be a star. He watched artists advance on his back; Joan Baez’s cover of his compassionate tune “There But for Fortune” charted in the Top 50 in both America and the UK, higher than he’d ever managed. Frustrated, he retreated from earnest topicality; his next full studio album, Pleasures of the Harbor, folded in lush, Sinatra-strings and ragtime piano, adding a poppier bend to his dour character studies of empty socialites and downtrodden flower vendors. He became disillusioned with demonstrating; he and his Yippie party cohorts staged a protest at 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, during which they nominated an actual pig for president (name: Pigasus), but the mirth ended in a massive, era-defining riot between protesters and police. He retreated from New York, his wife, and his daughter, drinking heavily, heaped his flagging idealism on the communist uprisings of Fidel Castro and the Marxist Chilean revolutionary Salvador Allende. His erratic creative path onward included self-funded, unsuccessful tours through South America and Africa (where he was arrested for performing at a political rally in Uruguay, robbed and strangled in Tanzania), and attempting to replicate Elvis Presley’s 1969 comeback show in Las Vegas with his own mystifying performance in gold lamé at Carnegie Hall. He dabbled more in symphonic pop and recruited Van Dyke Parks for a country-western turn (sarcastically called Phil Ochs’ Greatest Hits), all of which fell flat commercially.

Abetted by his rampant alcoholism and persistent writer’s block, Ochs slid into a bipolar breakdown; not even the end of the Vietnam War, and its ensuing celebratory concerts, could rouse him from his nosedive. He adopted an alternate identity called “John Train” and went on paranoid rants onstage, insisting he had murdered Phil Ochs and the CIA was after him. (The miserable irony of the FBI’s monitoring.) He slept on the streets, got arrested, attacked friends. On April 9, 1976, amid the gaudy patriotism of the Bicentennial Celebration, he hanged himself at his sister’s home in Queens.

But for a moment, Phil Ochs existed in pure conviction. I Ain’t Marching Anymore reminds us to resist the dangers of acquiescence, to take to the streets to demand the country that still persists in our hearts, even if it’s not before to our eyes anymore. It would be easy to stop marching in apathy or in defeat, but Ochs pushed for something greater: a righteous, excruciating, beautiful reclamation. Small wonder his powerful polemics have been covered and updated by the Clash, Neil Young, Jello Biafra: His fight was never just his, never just of his time. And in the right hands, it will never die.