Death of a Rebel

by Marc Eliot

Anchor Press, 316 pages

"The child was created to the slaughter house he's led.

So good to be alive when the eulogies are read.

The climax of emotion, the worship of the dead

As the cycle of sacrifice unwinds." "Crucifixion"--Phil Ochs

THEY ADVERTISED this book: "The Sixties died on April 19, 19 6." Phil Ochs dangling from his belt jammed in the bathroom doorway; it marked the end, we are told, of an era that blew away with his ashes.

But I don't know. The sixties died long before Phil Ochs wandered into his sister's bathroom in Far Rockaway, New York. And Marc Eliot makes a good case that Ochs did too. Phil Ochs went down slowly, painfully, and the actual moment of his death only confirmed what Ochs had guessed from the evidence of Chicago, or Kent State, or Chile. And by the time Ochs actually made his final break, the parts of his life that might have made his death the tombstone of his time had long since withered away.

When I mention his name now people stare blankly. Some of them even think that "A Small Circle of Friends" is just a cute movie title.

Actually, it's the title of the song Ochs wrote for Kitty Genovese. People don't remember her either, but she was murdered in New York while a crowd of people stood by.

Ochs wrote about her, and Billie Sol Estes, and the Vietnam war, and John Kennedy. As journalism student in college he sang the news the papers weren't printing. Yet his first three records sold less than 70,000 copies. Ochs finished his life never reaching the heart of the country his songs sought to transform.

Eliot's biography captures the tragedy of Ochs' life as well as anything written about him yet. It does what biographies are supposed to do; it provides a detailed account of Ochs' life from beginning to end. Through Phil Ochs' life Eliot tries to capture the essence of the '60s. However, it becomes the story not of the death of an era, but of its still-birth.

Eliot describes the ever deepening frustration Ochs endured as his songs and his career failed to reach the minds of his contemporaries. It all began, though, in 1962 in the Greenwich village folk clubs, which then featured singers like Peter Yarrow, Dave Van Ronk, and Bob Dylan. It was a time when "anyone with a pocketful of tunes, a guitar, and the guts to get up on stage was singing folk music." Ochs started out with songs like "One More Parade and "The Power and the Glory."

"The Power and the Glory" Ochs claimed, "was the best song I will ever write." It wasn't, but it expressed his life's central theme: an abiding love for the United States and a lifelong hatred for the repression perpetrated in its name.

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."