Here's a land full of power and glory

Beauty that words cannot recall

Oh her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom

Her glory shall rest on us all

Yet she's only a rich as the poorest of the poor

Only as free as a padlocked prison door

OCHS explored current issues to pass on his message, During this period he wrote, "Every newspaper headline is a potential song, and it is the role of an effective songwriter to pick out the material that has the interest, significance and sometimes humor adaptable to music... it never ceases to amaze me how the American people allow the hit parade to hit them over the head with a parade of song after meaningless song about love."

But Ochs had to contend with Dylan, the king of the folk scene. Throughout the book Eliot creates the book's pathos by contrasting Ochs' career with Dylan's. The first album, All the News That's Fit to Sing. sold 40,000 copies. It came out at the same time, Eliot notes, as Dylan's gold album, Bringing It All Back Home.

Even though Ochs couldn't match Dylan's record sales, Ochs managed to gain public and critical acceptance beyond the confines of the Village. But somewhere along the line Eliot had to justify his contention that Ochs took the sixties along with him when he went. The last two hundred pages document Ochs' rise to the post of "the Movement's poet revolutionary," and his fall through the long, long Nixon years. The only problem is that his rise was so pitifully short. Ochs had just about three years from his first major benefit at a Berkely anti-war teach-in in 1965 to the seemingly endless chain of disasters from Chicago onward before the movement slid away from him.

THOUGH clearly one of Ochs' greatest admirers. Eliot doesn't avoid the painful facts of Ochs' last eight years. Eliot's account of those last years is a telling description of personal disintegration. The era had disintegrated first and it was Ochs' shell that people saw during those last years. And so the most chilling story in the book, the story of "John Train," a vicious, violent persona that Ochs crawled into in 1975, is tragic, but it is only a personal tragedy. The larger tragedy came when Ochs sought but could never find the notes that could reach the people. His last synthesis before he descended into alcoholism and depression was to try to recreate Elvis Presley as Che Guevara.

But Phil Ochs in a gold lame suit never made it, and after a few too many deaths -- the Kennedys, King, Malcolm and Medgar Evers, Allende and Jara--Ochs lost the ability even to try. He pulled himself out of John Train with enough time left to see a few friends. Then, years after he died, he hung himself. In the end, Eliot leaves him with Citizen Kane's epitaph: "it's become a very clear picture. He was the most honest man who ever lived, with a streak of crookedness a yard wide. He was a liberal and reactionary....He was a loving husband -- and both his wives left him.... Outside of that...." Ochs said it better:

But you know I predicted it; I knew he had to fall.

How did it happen? I hope his suffering was small.

Tell me every detail, I've got to know it all, And do you have a picture of the pain."