What a comprehensive write-up about Phil Ochs that was written by Richard Just and actually got published in the "Fake News" Washington Post on January 24, 2017! It was a great and sympathetic review of Phil Ochs and his songs! It was just very odd that it would be inspired by Lady Gaga singing Phil's "The War Is Over" and that it happened in the Washington Post!
In fact, the Washington Post recently published a "Fake News" Black List or "Smear List" that included many brave and bold reporters that people have relied on for years to get news that is suppressed or ignored by the corporate empire media. For example, Robert Parry, who exposed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote about his shock and dismay at finding WaPo placing his Consortium News and Black Agenda Report on that hit list of 200 targeted news sites! Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt by Robert Parry at Consortium News, November 27, 2016.
In fact, the Washington Post recently published a "Fake News" Black List or "Smear List" that included many brave and bold reporters that people have relied on for years to get news that is suppressed or ignored by the corporate empire media. For example, Robert Parry, who exposed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote about his shock and dismay at finding WaPo placing his Consortium News and Black Agenda Report on that hit list of 200 targeted news sites! Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt by Robert Parry at Consortium News, November 27, 2016.
That observation being necessary to note, one can still applaud the recognition allowed for one of the country's greatest and long-ignored American anti-war and social commentary singer-songwriters. Of all the political singers covered at Broadside Balladeer Blog, Phil Ochs is this writer's all time favorite! It is noteworthy as well to mention that Phil Ochs Legacy Lives On In The House of Woody (Vic Sadot 8-10-15 at Broadside Balladeer Blog).
Titled "Why Phil Ochs is the obscure ’60s folk singer America needs in 2017 - And Lady Gaga should singone of his songs at the Super Bowl", the article was written by Richard Just in The Washington Post January
24, 2017. It says that Richard Just is a former editor of National Journal magazine and the
New Republic. Those publications are not even "left" liberal. They are right "liberal". And those publications are part of the new "liberal" McCarthyism being deployed in the wake of the defeat of the most corrupt and hawkish war criminal that ever posed as a "liberal", namely the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, architect of mass murder and destruction in Libya and Syria. It reminds me that the right wing pro-war group called "Up With People" had embaced Phil Ochs' patriotic song "The Power & The Glory". See “The Hidden StoryOf The Up With People Singers, the gigantic 1970s singing ensemble which
operated almost as a cult, performed at the Super Bowl and met with presidents
and the Pope, and was quietly funded by corporations such as Exxon and
Coca-Cola that were eager to put forward a youth-y alternative to
authority-questioning counterculture.” So it is fitting that Richard Just would want Lady Gaga to sing that song at the Super Bowl, especially since the pro-slavery verses in the US national anthem came out as part of the refusal of San Francisco 49's quarterback Colin Kaepernick to stand for the anthem.
Some Excerpts from the Richard Just article in WaPo: “Anybody know who Phil Ochs is?” Lady Gaga
called out to her audience at a free concert last summer during the Democratic
National Convention. Her setlist that day was eclectic: from the Beatles to
Edith Piaf to her own gay rights anthem, “Born This Way.” But her decision to
perform Ochs’s “The War Is Over,” a 1967 folk song about Vietnam, was
particularly surprising… The song Lady Gaga performed is a good example. “The
War Is Over” was composed in the middle of the Vietnam War but insists that the
conflict had already ended. “One-legged veterans will greet the dawn,” Ochs
sang. “And they’re whistling marches as they mow the lawn. And the gargoyles
only sit and grieve. The gypsy fortune teller told me that we’d been deceived.
You only are what you believe. I believe the war is over. It’s over, it’s
over.”… Ochs himself was clearly a hard-left progressive. His sister, Sonny,
recently told me she thinks he would have been a Bernie Sanders supporter. One
of his most famous creations — the sarcastic “Love Me, I’m a Liberal ” — is a
harsh depiction of the cautious center-left… When I asked Zachary Stevenson — a
36-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter and Ochs devotee, who is working on a
play about him — what he thought distinguished Ochs from other political
singers of the ’60s, he said it was the artistry. “There are a lot of folk
songs that are very simple. In many ways, that’s the standard way to go about
folk songs. It’s not necessarily about inventing things too complex,” Stevenson
explained. Ochs, by contrast, “was an artist through and through. . . . I think
he had a real sensitivity to melody and song and chord structure. And so he was
always pushing himself to write better and more moving songs emotionally.”
Phil singing "The War Is Over"
If Phil had lived to this year, I think Phil would have become immensely unpopular, including with writer Richard Just, for attacking "liberalism" as "represented" under Obama-Biden-H.Clinton because overall it became an even more malignant form of hypocritical "liberalism" than the kind practiced when he wrote "Love Me I'm A Liberal" in 1966.
My attempt at updating the song was certainly not the only one attempted, and will not be the last. Mine was focused on the song being a "Love Me I'm A Liberal" embrace of the lies of 9/11, the Middle East wars for Oil and Apartheid Israel, and the repressive laws justified by 9/11. See also
No one can really predict what Phil Ochs would have written if he had managed to get off alcohol and did not commit suicide. I believe that if Phil had accomplished that, then he would continued to issue broadside ballads that targeted the terrible and deadly hypocrisy of the American Two Party Monopoly system. He is likely to have been upset that the Black "liberal" President Barrack Obama did not prosecute those who tortured men never charged in any court to get 25% of the footnotes put in Philip Zelikow's "9/11 Commission Report" cover-up (they got the "Knock on the Door" treatment!); that Obama expanded the Bush-Cheney wars to several more countries, including the widespread use of drones and proxy terrorist armies; that they not only did not do as he pleaded in "My Life": "Take your tap from my phone and leave my life alone!", the fake "liberals" under Obama gave the NSA the right to spy on everyone, gave NSA head Clapper a pass to lie to Congress and the America people about it with impunity, and that Obama went along with giving "Homeland Security" the means to militarize the local American police to create "capstone" false flag events; and that the "liberals" are now expounding a McCarthyist red-baiting tactic on Russia to cover up their own complete bankruptcy as corporate and AIPAC suck-ups. One writer who gives me reason to believe how Phil Ochs may have progressed is Peter Feld in "How I discovered what Phil Ochs thought about Israel" in the April 10, 2016 Mondoweiss.
Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune - The Movie
Continuing with Richard Just's article in the Washington Post, he wrote correctly that: "Ochs wrote perhaps his two most haunting melodies for “Changes,” a song that isn’t about politics but rather about love, and “When I’m Gone,” which is glancingly about politics but really about living well alongside the ever-present prospect of death:
“Won’t see the golden of the sun when I’m gone. And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I’m gone. Can’t be singing louder than the guns when I’m gone. So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here. All my days won’t be dances of delight when I’m gone. And the sands will be shifting from my sight when I’m gone. Can’t add my name into the fight while I’m gone. So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here."
As he once wrote: “One good song with a message can bring a point more deeply to more people than a thousand rallies. And that - the moral power of one good song - is why I have a pitch for Lady Gaga. In two weeks, she is slated to perform at the Super Bowl. To sing just one Phil Ochs song - to introduce millions of people to his ideas and poetry — would be both a glorious act of cultural transgression and an enduring gift to American democracy. Which song should she choose? My suggestion would be “Power and the Glory.”
“Here is a land full of power and glory,” goes the chorus. “Beauty that words cannot recall. Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom. Her glory shall rest on us all.” America, Ochs sings in one verse, is “only as rich as the poorest of the poor. Only as free as a padlocked prison door.”
This is nationalism as it should be deployed: aspirational, ennobling, altruistic. "Power and the Glory” was brilliant enough as Ochs usually sang it during his lifetime. As it turns out, however, he wrote an additional verse, which is now frequently performed with the rest of the song. It’s a statement of faith in the American people amid encroaching political darkness:
“But our land is still troubled by men who have to hate. They twist away our freedom, and they twist away our fate. Fear is their weapon, and treason is their cry. We can stop them if we try.”
Overall, I do appreciate that this article was written with so much respect and appreciation of Phil Ochs, and that some editor at the Washington Post allowed it to see the light of day. Unfortunately, Phil is not well-known to the young writers of today. But like Woody Guthrie became the heroic inspiration for the singer-songwriters celebrated in Broadside: The National Topical Song Magazine from the early 1960's to the mid 1980's, it is hoped that the songwriters of coming generations will see how Phil Ochs paved the way for them to be outspoken critics of war profiteers and slimy propagandists who manipulate the masses. - Vic Sadot
This interview with Phil Ochs from May 1973 was on an old reel to reel tape and it was not found again until 2008 when I was getting ready to move to California and had to sort through everything.
The other main item I like to share with people is the story I broke about "Phil Ochs FBI File" at the request of Gordon Friesen and Sis Cunningham. They got over 400 pages by filing a Freedom of Information request, but they were both feeling the infirmities of old age and asked me to go through it and come up with a report. What an honor! PHIL OCHS FBI File re-published at vicsadot.com in 2010. Originally published as the
cover story of Broadside: The National Topical Song Magazine in 1982 after
Gordon Friesen got over 400 highly redacted pages by using the Freedom of
Information Act.
1973 Audio Becomes 2015 YouTube Video: "Phil Ochs
May 1973 Interview by Vic Sadot & Rich Lang" (30:10) Truth Troubadour
YouTube Channel. Phil talks about Nixon, Watergate developments, the TV show he
was on the day before, and his travels in South America.
Changes (Phil
Ochs) is one of 4 licensed songs used on the "Truth Troubadour" CD released on Dec 2, 2016 and performed
by Vic Sadot & Eric Golub. Hear it in full in the playlist posted at the CD
Baby YouTube page for the entire 18 song CD!
United Fruit (Phil
Ochs) Vic Sadot & Eric Golub on Truth Troubadour CD released on Dec 2, 2016 at CD Baby YouTube
Playlist.
In addition to the Broadside Balladeer Blog about political songs, Vic Sadot writes Truth Troubadour Blog – 9/11 Truth & Deep Politics and Berkeley Calling Blog - Free Speech in Berkeley & the Bay Area
In addition to the Broadside Balladeer Blog about political songs, Vic Sadot writes Truth Troubadour Blog – 9/11 Truth & Deep Politics and Berkeley Calling Blog - Free Speech in Berkeley & the Bay Area
