PHIL OCHS: THERE BUT FOR FORTUNE directed by Kenneth Bowser. 137 minutes. A First Run Features release. Opens Friday (February 18) at the Bloor. See Indie & Rep Film listings
I knew that Phil Ochs had a Toronto connection, especially because of his 70s performance at progressive Jewish compound Camp Naivelt.
But Kenneth Bowser, whose documentary on Ochs opens at the Bloor this week, tells me the gifted singer/songwriter had an even stronger connection with local concert impresario Michael Cohl. And for Bowser, it paid off.
“I started shooting on my own dime and collected a lot of footage,” recalls Bowser, explaining that it was hugely expensive to clear the rights to some of the archival footage.
“So Michael Cohl calls me. ‘I hear you’re working on a film about Phil Ochs. I had a coffee shop in Toronto, and he used to play my place. I loved the guy, loved his music. What can I do to help?’
“‘Help me raise some money.’
“‘I’ll put up the money,’ says Cohl.
“‘Really? It’s not the Rolling Stones.’
“‘I know. I made my money. Whatever you need, I’ll do it.’
“And he paid for the film.”
The documentary tracks Ochs’s artistic development in tandem with the political movements that motivated him and that he in turn inspired.
“Phil’s life was a perfect mirror of what went on in the 60s and the 70s,” says Bowser, whose previous works include a documentary on the filmmaker Preston Sturges and a series on the iconic TV comedy show Saturday Night Live. “It reflects the thrill and excitement of knowing we would change the world, that we were going to make things right, through the battles and the disillusionment and the disappointment at what the country hadn’t lived up to.
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Bowser uses Ochs’s songs to fashion a clear story arc that traces the rise and fall of the movement organizationally and emotionally.
“All I had to do was hook into that vein and follow it.”
Though Ochs is known most for protest songs like I Ain’t Marching Anymore, he was inspired most by people as unlikely as Elvis Presley and John Wayne.
“He knew how to combine Merle Haggard’s blue-collar world and Elvis Presley. He’d be thinking, ‘You need to be entertained while you’re getting your political nutrition? I can go down that road.'”
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In fact, Ochs himself might have embraced the label “protest singer,” but Bowser won’t put him into that musical straitjacket.
“If you follow his music, he wasn’t just a protest singer. I mean Pleasures Of The Harbour, what is that? What is Tape From California? Rehearsals For Retirement is one of the most deeply felt albums about a passionate man encountering a cynical universe.”
But through all of his changes – Changes is the name of what many feel is Ochs’s finest song – Ochs clung to the ideal of America.
“He understood that politicians get you into wars, and soldiers die. He loved America and was invested in the idea of social justice and the best the United States could be.”
Ochs suffered from manic-depression, which ultimately led to alcoholism and to his suicide in 1976. Bowser says his bipolar disorder may sometimes have been a creative boon.
“He wrote Crucifixion while he was in the UK travelling from one town to another. He wrote it in one sitting and didn’t change a word. He would hit periods of time when he would just soar. When you’re in that manic thing, you grab onto ideas, you get excited.”
But, I tell Bowser, it feels like the film puts Ochs’s history of mental illness in the background.
“I didn’t wish to play anything down,” he insists, “but what I saw was a perfect storm – the political events, his career as a performer, his alcoholism, his manic-depression, the assassinations, the rise of Richard Nixon. Everything spun in a perfect way, one hammer blow after another, until he was on his knees.
“Phil’s in Africa, in South America, he went to Asia. He had a sense on the ground of what things were like. His friendship with Victor Jara [the Chilean singer and activist who was murdered by the military during the 1973 coup against Allende] – how many friends can you see killed, how many progressive governments can you watch fall, how much can you take before you feel helpless?”
