1. Introduction: Peter Yarrow (0:56)
2. Ballad of Medgar Evers (2:44) (Ochs/Gibson) from "Newport Broadside" (77003) 1963
3. Talking Birmingham Jam (3:22) from "Newport Broadside" (77003) 1963
4. Power and the Glory (2:11) from "Evening Concerts, Vol. 1" (79184) 1964
5. Draft Dodger Rag (2:23) from "Evening Concerts, Vol. 1" (79184) 1964
6. I Ain't Marching Anymore (2:36) (Ochs/Gibson) 1964
7. Links on the Chain (5:05) 1964
8. Talking Vietnam Blues (3:42) 1964
9. Cross My Heart (4:44) 1966
10. Half a Century High (7:06) 1966
11. Is There Anybody Here? (3:11) 1966
12. The Party (8:11) 1966
13. Pleasures of the Harbor (6:25) 1966

Notes

All songs by Phil Ochs (except where indicated); Almo adm. for Barricade Music for the World (ASCAP)

Recorded at the 1963, 1964 and 1966 Newport Folk Festivals, Newport, Rhode Island; all tracks previously unreleased (except tracks 2-5)

Produced and annotated by Mary Katherine Aldin
Mixed and engineered for release by Jeff Zaraya
Cover photo by Dick Waterman, courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives
Back photo by Alice Ochs, courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives
Memorabilia courtesy of Meegan Ochs
Creative Services: Georgette Cartwright

Package Design by Susanne Smolka, Unicorn Publishing Services
Special thanks to Arthur Gorson, Meegan Ochs for our journey through her father's personal scrapbooks, Michael Ochs, and Peter Yarrow
Dedicated to Phil Ochs

Philip David Ochs was born on December 19, 1940 in El Paso, Texas. His childhood was spent moving from place to place as his Army-doctor father Jacob was transferred from one military base or veterans' hospital to another; he studied journalism in his teens, and wrote a few political articles and music reviews for his high school (Staunton Military Academy in Virginia) and college (Ohio State) papers. He discovered folk music when his college roommate Jim Glover (later of the folksong duo Jim & Jean) showed him his record collection, and Ochs soon took up guitar, combining his strong political sensibility and devastating sense of humor with music. He moved from Ohio to New York in 1962, and joined the fledgling Greenwich Village folk scene, which at the time included Dave Van Ronk, Rambling Jack Elliott, Eric Von Schmidt, Peter LaFarge, Tom Paxton, and Bob Dylan, among many others. A gifted songwriter, he soon stood out from the clutch of other talented young people because of the almost painful honesty of his lyrics.

Shortly after moving to New York he met Alice Skinner, a talented acting student and photographer, and they fell in love. Most of their friends were surprised at the speed with which the relationship blossomed and they decided to get married; after only a short time together they were wed on May 16, 1963 in New York City. The reason for that hasty ceremony soon became apparent, when less than four months later their daughter Meegan was born, on September 4, 1963. The marriage could never have worked; they were too young, they barely knew each other, and Ochs already had an overriding commitment to himself and his music. It was no contest; less than three stormy years later the couple separated, in early 1966, and Alice took Meegan and moved to California.

As he started to take his musical career more seriously Ochs began keeping a scrapbook, which soon evolved into a huge pile of scrapbooks, meticulously pasting into their pages every review, every press clipping, even newspaper ads for his performances. They remain in his daughter's hands, an interesting document of Ochs' vision of himself and what he wanted to become.

When Ochs was invited to appear at Newport in 1963, his music was already being heard by the folk cognoscenti, though not much beyond the inner circle. Folkways Records released a topical song compilation album called Broadside Ballads, containing one track by him, in early 1963; the same set included a song by a thinly disguised Bob Dylan, performing under his nom du disque of Blind Boy Grunt. Ochs had also begun to make himself felt on the Greenwich Village folk scene, and people were talking about the intense nature of his writing. By the time of his 1964 performance at Newport he was "nearly as famous as Bob Dylan," as he more than once grumbled in those days; that year saw the release not only of his first Elektra album, All The News That's Fit To Sing, but the first Vanguard Records albums from the previous year's festivals were coming on the market, and Ochs was represented on Broadside at Newport by the two tracks from the 1963 Topical Songs workshop which open this CD, "The Ballad of Medgar Evers" and "Talking Birmingham Jam." Vanguard had also tapped him for a handful of songs on its landmark New Folks album. After only two years on the scene he was a Folkways, Elektra and Vanguard recording artist.

Michael Ochs accompanied his brother Phil to Newport in 1964. "I was going to Newport by myself that year, driving up, and Phil must have told Marjorie Guthrie about it because she called me and asked me to drive Arlo up there. I was really against it, because I didn't want to be stuck taking a "kid" up there--I was all of 21 myself but Arlo must have been about 14. But I couldn't say no to Marjorie, so I went out to Howards Beach to Woody's old house and picked him up, and we drove out there and you know, we really hit it off. He was a very advanced kid, a very funny kid and very easy to talk to, and we hit it off. And of course once we got there Arlo was welcomed with open arms because of his father, and he was treated like a king. So in the end being with Arlo was really quite beneficial. I don't remember spending that much time with Phil, we sort of went our own ways. I do seem to remember that he was very nervous, as usual, and that I got nervous for him, but once he started out he went over with the crowd so easily that I was very impressed. I had never seen him in that big a concert setting, I had only seen him in clubs before that, so it was a big crowd by comparison. And Phil loved the idea of the movement, the whole topical song movement, and there wasn't any competitive thing, he thought the more the merrier. After he started getting big he invited Eric Andersen and David Blue and people like that to join him onstage at his concerts. Dylan was the yardstick that inspired everyone to try to match, but Phil never felt any jealousy. He felt like Newport was the Academy Awards of folk music, and it was crucial to be invited to play there and crucial to do well among his peers in the folk music industry. That's part of why he was so nervous; Newport was the "best-of" concert of the whole folk movement. It was a celebration of folk music, both the old and the new, and he was part of the new."

Arthur Gorson, who today is an independent film producer, was Ochs' manager during the mid-Sixties. "In 1964 Phil and I were good friends, and I was doing the benefit concerts for Hazard, Kentucky, and I brought everyone down to Hazard, then I put on some concerts at the Village Gate with Phil and Judy Collins and Eric Andersen, David Blue, Jim & Jean, Judy Roderick and Tom Rush, so we were quite a force in the industry for a brief moment. And appearing at Newport was major for Phil. It was a showcase in several senses; first of all, in our world the Newport Folk Festival was the World Series, the gathering of the clans, the political convention of the year, the main event. There weren't many events at that time, folk music was a very small world, centered between New York and Cambridge and Philadelphia and Boston. And for Phil, being invited to Newport was like being invited to do the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. It loomed very very heavy in his life. Phil's main motivation at the time that I was managing him, I mean, we came out of politics, we weren't motivated by money, we were motivated by getting the message across to as many people as possible, and there was this huge audience; no one could resist it. And it was very very important, because there was no other place in the folk world where there was such a big audience, and that impacted upon both record sales and also bookings for our acts at the clubs and college venues which were our main sources of income at the time. Everyone was there; the guys they called the Folk Mafia, like Jac Holzman, Maynard Solomon, Albert Grossman, Theodore Bikel, and Pete Seeger were sitting around outside schmoozing. Newport was like the Cannes Film Festival of the folk world, with people sitting around schmoozing and making deals. The folk managers, who were also concert promoters, were also arrayed there, Harold Leventhal, Manny Greenhill and Albert Grossman were the real powers, and then for a moment there I became a player in that world. Newport was where you went to meet and socialize and be off duty but at the same time do business and talk about maybe signing an act or making a deal. It was a very small world because album sales were low--if an album sold 30,000 copies it would probably make money. So everything was on a much different scale. Newport was about writing songs, showing off the new music, but also about showing the reverence for the folk tradition which was presented via the old bluesmen and traditional singers who were brought there."

Ochs' second album, I Ain't Marching Anymore, was recorded in 1965, but by the time of his final appearance at Newport in 1966 his writing had shifted ground. Arthur Gorson recalls: "Phil was very hurt that he wasn't invited [to Newport] in 1965. We didn't even get passes, we sort of snuck in with Paul Krassner, and we were there in the 7th row when Bob Dylan came on with the electric band, and we cheered." The audience's response also showed Ochs the handwriting on the wall. Following in the footsteps of Dylan, who had turned his back on the overtly political nature and strictly acoustic setting of his early material to reach successfully for a wider audience, Ochs too started writing different kinds of songs. He really spread himself when he did so; listeners will notice that early songs like "The Power And The Glory" and "Draft Dodger Rag" are slightly more than two minutes long, brisk, concise and punchy, while later material sprawls out to more than three times that length, with "Half A Century High" clocking at over seven minutes and "The Party" running over eight.

His career continued, with most of his commercial success coming in the post-Newport years, and gradually other artists began recording his songs. "There But For Fortune" was a minor chart hit for Joan Baez, going to #50 in 1965, and spending seven weeks on the charts; in 1983 it was also recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary, who had been performing it live for several years. Another love song, "Changes," was covered by Jim & Jean in the early days, and later by Crispian St. Peters and Gordon Lightfoot. Folk-rockers also turned to his material; "Flower Lady" was recorded by the English duo Peter & Gordon, and most recently "Is There Anybody Here" by Disappear Fear.

After leaving Elektra he signed with A&M, for whom he recorded into the Seventies. Politics and music were still, always, inextricably entwined in his life, and he campaigned vigorously and hilariously for causes and candidates in whom he believed. It was Ochs who bought and paid for Pigasus, the pig who was nominated for President by the Yippee Party during the wild 1968 election fracas that also found him singing at the Democratic Convention. It was Ochs who testified at the Chicago Seven's trial, and was forbidden by the judge to sing "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" on the witness stand. But gradually the roar died down, the records sold less and less, and a profound depression seemed to take over. He couldn't bear being irrelevant, being ignored, being a has-been, but the relentless march of time and the ending (at last) of the Vietnam War quickly reduced his songs, once red-hot and topical, to stale and pointless jabs. In the aftermath of a war everyone wanted to forget as quickly as possible, no one wanted to listen to songs putting down Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. He sank further and further into depression, and when a 1974 trip to South Africa resulted in a mugging that left his vocal chords badly damaged, it must have seemed as if there was really nothing left to live for. The words had all dried up long ago, and now the voice was gone too. A series of excesses, documented elsewhere, followed. Finally even those died away, and with most of his bridges burned behind him and few friends left to turn to, he moved into his sister Sonny's house in Far Rockaway, NY. Although divorced and working hard to raise three kids on her own, Sonny let him stay; he was very little trouble, mostly watching TV all day and teaching the children card games in the evenings. Nobody realized what was going on inside him until it was too late. On April 9, 1976, when alone in the house, he hung himself. He was survived at the time of his death by his daughter Meegan Ochs, his mother Gertrude Ochs (who has since passed away), his brother Michael Ochs, and his sister Sonny Tanzman and her children. His body was cremated, and his longtime friend Andy Wickham took his ashes to Scotland and scattered them from a small turret in the Queen Anne's Post of Edinburgh Castle in Scotland.

Folksinger Peter Yarrow, who introduces this CD, says of him today, "Phil Ochs has sometimes been compared to Bob Dylan. In many ways these were apt comparisons, but Phil, in his writing and his activism, lived the soul of the hope as well as the sorrow and heartbreak of his times. He was ultimately and quintessentially political, as a person and an artist. His amazing sensitivity, humor and compassion brought him to the edge of the envelope. It was his glory and his demise. He died tragically and much too young. He also left us an inestimable gift." The best part of that gift, his music, is documented on this release. He's in his prime, at his peak and excited about the Newport Folk Festival experience that was so vital to his career. It's a good way to remember him.

Mary Katherine Aldin
March, 1996