Blogcember: Phil Ochs primer

This one was suggested by ironed_orchid and seconded by princealberic, and, I have to admit, is the one thus far I’m most excited to write about. I kind of feel like I have blogged about Phil Ochs before, but maybe not enough. Also I have new readers.

So, I don’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens (in fact I devoted a fairly large number of posts to trash-talking him over the years), but I love what he has to say in this interview, which is part of the excellent Phil Ochs documentary “There But For Fortune.” (Which you should all totally watch, by the way.)

“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.”

That’s the most hipster diss ever, but it’s true. Both Dylan and Ochs were played extensively in my house when I was growing up, but for some reason it was Dylan who remained in the cultural zeitgeist, whereas I went years without remembering who Ochs was until I was collecting songs for a mixed CD about the Spanish Civil War and found, appropriately enough, the chilling and gorgeous Spanish Civil War Song. While I knew that the singers on all of the other songs were dead, this one sounded fairly modern, so I figured I’d contact him to see if it was okay to use it on the CD. To the internet! Wherein I discovered that, no, he was also dead, at a tragically young age no less, and also he was the same guy who wrote that Draft Dodger Rag song that my mum used to play when I was a kid.

Hence, at age 20 or so, I re-discovered the awesomeness that is Phil Ochs.

( This is long. )