Happy birthday, Phil Ochs! I only wish you could be here to share it with us… you would be 65 today.
I’ve been a fan of yours for almost exactly 40 years, still remembering quite clearly the first sound of your voice that I experienced. Through the eighties and nineties, in the early years after you left us, many saw your music as assocated irrevokably with one time, the sixites, and having no modern relevance.
They were wrong–even then.
Today, however, your lyrics are dead on. America has regressed–a depressing reality.
You, though, were always able to lift us from depression (even if you could not, ultimately, do that for yourself). Your optimism and idealism raised us once; I hope it will be able to do so again.
This is the next-to-last of my cycle of diaries on a variety of left-wing blogs on your songs. If, on some celestial computer, you want to read the earlier ones, click here.
The song I want to talk about now is “What’s That I Hear?”:
One of the things we having missing today that was present throughout the sixties, even as we feared nuclear weapons and faced the degradation of our nation through the war in Vietnam, is a sense of optimism–about humanity and about the possibilities of the United States of America. The forces of idealism that led to the “counterculture” were quite real: many of us involved believed absolutely that we could create a new and better world, building on the great work of our American ancestors even while tearing down more recent impediments.
Phil Ochs sang to this spirit:
What’s that I hear now ringing in my ear
I’ve heard that sound before
What’s that I hear now ringing in my ear
I hear it more and more
It’s the sound of freedom calling
Ringing up to the sky
It’s the sound of the old ways falling
You can hear it if you try
You can hear it if you try.
Does that sound quaint to you? Naive? Maybe it is. But it kept us trying, striving, working for something other than our own, individual advancement. Maybe we couldn’t achieve everything we dreamed of, but the fact of working toward a dream was itself a reward.
When we become small minded, protective, grasping, we also turn mean. And mean is what the US is becoming. Just look at the way we treat people who want to join us here–we treat them as criminals for wanting to do no more than better their lives, for believing in nothing more than that a better world can be made.
No, the old ways haven’t fallen–not yet. But perhaps, if we listen more to Phil Ochs and less to George Bush, we can regain a faith that the future can be better–and better for everyone. Rather than building walls and gates, maybe we can begin to find ways of improving life for everyone.
Which would be, by the way, the best possible way of fighting a “war” on terrorism. It’s the only way that war can be won.
So am I just a throwback, silly and embarrassing? Are “we” so ‘realistic’ now that we don’t believe that a better world can be made? Oh, I hope not. For, it’s true, I do remain an idealist.
Which is why, as much as anything else, I still listen to Phil Ochs, and why his lyrics come into my mind almost every day.
