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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 wi
thout 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.”
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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.
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Video Rating: 4 / 5
