We had the anti-war folk singer Phil Ochs playing in our beach house growing up. We listened to Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell.
The album we had of his was I Ain’t Marching Anymore. I recently watched a 2010 documentary on his life, Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune. It was as much a history of the movement based out of Greenwich Village in New York as it was of the man. Ochs took his own life after the battle had been too long won. After Nixon had pulled out of Vietnam, (peace with honor). After Ochs had brought attention to the CIA/American involvement in the overthrow of the Allende people’s elected government of Chile, and after the new Pinochet regime had rounded up all the poets, radicals, the Greenwich Village equivalent within Chile, in a stadium and shot them — all. He wrote protest songs, songs for his beloved President Kennedy. Songs about the killings of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. The massacre at Kent State and the lynchings before and during the Civil Rights Movement.
He was a political artist. Art for the purpose of politics, change. He wanted America to be better, for us all to be heroes like in a John Wayne movie. He wanted the radicalized youth to have their day.
This documentary brings that time to life. All the folks we know of appear, now older: Tom Hayden, Joan Baez, Abbie Hoffman. They fought the fight. They were a voice, a movement, one which led to LBJ not seeking re-election in 1968. They declared the war over, far before it was, just to inspire how that would feel like.
After Ochs had fought what was out there, he was left to face himself. A company he could not keep.
