The Prime Minister.: Phil Ochs Greatest Hits.

I bought Phil Ochs' first L.P. in the early sixties, not because I knew his music, but because of the. cover of the album. I wore what was then known as a "Donkey Jacket" and on the cover of this album was this cool looking guy sitting on the ground with one, with a wrecked city around him and THE CND SYMBOL showing boldly. Although then I was theoretically and actually working as an electronic spy at GCHQ I had left wing views, hated the Tories, had canvassed for the losing Labour Party candidate in Cheltenham and supported and marched with CND.

My two regular readers will know all about my career or failure at GCHQ as that is all listed in previous posts, but is immaterial to the subject of this blog.

So I brought the L.P. It's contents stunned me. Dylan was out and people were knocked out by his protest songs but this guy was different. He was a poet, a visionary whose voice was different,but not great, but the immediate impact was that here was a guy who had thrown himself into every line that he wrote with the intensely personal almost spiritual sense of a prophet. In fact he cared so much about what was going wrong with this world that he stood up as a patriotic American and said what is going on here is UN-AMERICAN. We are electrocuting people for crimes that they may not have committed, we are fighting war after war after war and what have we gained? Black people are being treated like vermin and other terrible crimes are being committed in the name of democracy and THIS IS WRONG and I am going to say so through my poetry, my voice and my guitar. There was no selling out, like some others, He was in it for good or good and nobody was going to stop him except himself. No thing and nobody frightened him and he really believed that through the power of song he could change this rotten, corrupt and sordid world in which we are bystanders and puppets being used by the dark side.

I will touch briefly on a few other things, but this is not the start of a biography because an excellent one already exists, called "There but for Fortune" which was written by Michael Schumacher. This blogger refuses to link to the minimum wage, non-union owners of Amazon but new or good used copies can be found at this British book sellers site. Towards the end of his short life an album was made called, "Phil Ochs Greatest Hits", an ironic title because he never had one, and on the back were the words, "Fifty Phil Ochs Fans Can't be Wrong".

Note the Elvis gold lame suit. On the L.P. are some songs of rememberance of his youth, some dream songs and a haunting piece on the death of the actor James Dean. Two years ago I liaised with his bother Michael Ochs, who has his own place in a quite different hall of fame, about getting a British television company to show a bio-doc which had been made about Phil, again with the title, "There but for Fortune" . My efforts, unfortunately we're not successful but for those of you who are sassy enough this excellent film of his life, with comments from a surprisingly diverse range of people , is available in the USA and on eBay etc. but only in the format 1 version , which is not compatible with European CD players but it has also been shown on American TV on the PSB channel.