Phil Ochs, Our Gramsci

I was lucky enough to see the recent documentary film on folk singer/agitator Phil Ochs in Tallahassee (Phil Ochs-There But for Fortune, dir. Kenneth Bowser, 2010) my home town (thank you, Tallahassee Film Society!) It's a sad film: a far too familiar story about American dreaming gone wrong, and the smack down of utopian hope by reality.  

I also gained new respect for Phil Ochs; we know that he was a folk singer committed to radical political change. What I didn’t know was that he had a decidedly conceptual grasp of pop culture. It reminded me of Mick Farren and Malcolm McLaren, two other politically minded artists who developed a decidedly post-hippie approach to media and pop culture, within the rock field.

I had known that Ochs was involved in Yippie: what I didn’t realize was that, after the bloody confrontation between protesters and the Chicago police at the Democratic convention in 1968, and especially after Nixon’s re-election, Ochs effectively renounced Yippie. He understood that Nixon had won mostly by running against the media spectacle of hippies running wild in the streets of Chicago, with an election campaign that pointed to the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and said, “See? Elect me, or these guys will take over." Thus Nixon won the hearts and minds of the electorate, including many working-class voters.

Nixon surmised the Gramscian lesson that politics is the art of manufacturing consent, and those who wish to gain power must master that art. I don't know whether Ochs read Gramsci, but he recognized that the same shock tactics that made the Yippies' so successful in getting screen time on the nightly TV news also resulted in Nixon’s election triumph. 

Ochs’ response to these bitter lessons was to rethink his view of the relations between politics and popular culture, specifically popular music. What progressives needed was not what they wanted: not charismatic spokespersons for an alternative culture and lifestyle, polarizers like the Yippies, but consensus builders. What they needed above all, was a New Elvis: this time, Ochs added, with the politics of Che Guevara. Ochs' dream of another Elvis was built on his deep respect for the first Elvis, whom Ochs revered not only for his music, but as a genuine, organic revolutionary. Presley represented the de facto integrated music culture of the South of his day, and thus a potent crux of progressive change. 

Ochs thought about pop music in instrumental ways, as a political tool: but also organically, hoping to build on what Elvis and first wave Rock had already accomplished. He was interested in what music could do for the Revolution; at the same time, he thought within the grain of popular culture. Ochs believed popular music could create new liberal consensus to counter native conservativism, building on the progressive aspects of actually-existing working class culture.

Ochs’ other musical and career choices post 68 – releasing a country folk album with radical anti-music industry lyrics, appearing onstage playing folk music in an Elvis-style gold lame suit—made it appear as if the singer was coming unglued (in truth, he was: sliding into a protracted bout of depression that would eventually culminate in suicide):  but these antics, like his post-Yippie musico-political strategy was carefully considered, highly theorized. They were also of a piece with the contemporary absurdist street theater of the San Francisco Diggers (whom Ochs briefly joined) and their gentler mode of provocation. The Diggers for instance, had a solemn funeral procession for the Death of hippie (by media spectacle) in the Haight, at the height of the Summer of Love. Contemporaries Guy Debord and the Situationists demonstrated a similar satirical streak in their 'detourned' comic strips, setting Lukács inspired anti-capitalist discourse in the thought balloons of cowboy cartoon characters; perhaps if Debord, etc. had followed this prankster impulse more often, rather than chase the specter of Theoretical Purity, they might have had more of an impact, and not ended up a footnote to Art History (sorry, Greil). 

What the Left, facing Nixon’s America, needed, Ochs believed, was a Great Clown: the necessary prelude to any real revolution. Always brave, and eager to sacrifice himself to a cause, for a short time before his complete collapse, Ochs volunteered for that thankless role: the part no one else wanted to play.  

PS. Although I find Ochs the pop culture theorist interesting to think about, I admit I don't care much for the music he made during these years; I still prefer the early, explicitly political, folk songs (what his friend Bob Dylan derided as “finger pointing songs”). Pleasures of the Harbor (1967) leaves me cold, although I appreciate that the record is of of a piece with some of the most interesting music being made at that the time: baroque orchestral pop albums like Pet Sounds, Goodbye and Hello (Tim Buckley), Matthew and Son (Cat Stevens),Odyseey and Oracle, even Astral Weeks.  It’s just that I would rather listen to anyone else I just mentioned than Ochs; the vocals don’t work for me in the spotlight that this musical setting places on them. However, the fact Ochs moved in this this musical direction was not only brave, but visionary, given that this subgenre of 60s rock has aged so well.