Phil Ochs

I thought I’d try and entice you to take a punt on this excellent, definitive oversight of the story of Rock Music – interesting, informative and fun to read. It’s different to other stuffy stuff. I lived it!

How about giving it a go? There’s another extract below.

Rock Routes: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781514873090: Books

Extract:

The Greenwich Village Folk Scene

By the end of the 1950s the fire had gone out of the US Rock Scene and many young musicians were heading into Folk Music which had developed a great deal of vitality. The Folkies had a traditionally based social Commitment and that tended to attract the more intellectually inclined and these included some of the remnants of Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation. The Beatnik’s brought poetry.

In the 1950s the hero of the Folk Scene was still Woody Guthrie but he was dieing of Huntingdon’s Chorea and was laid up in the Memorial Hospital in New York. Woody was closely attended by his close followers, people like Pete Seeger, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Peter La Farge, Will Geer, Cisco Houston and his son Arlo Guthrie, who had based themselves in New York. Their presence in the area gave an impetus to the New York Folk Movement. The Folk Scene was focussed around the same clubs in Greenwich Village which had been the centre of the Beat Generation’ poetry readings. It became the most important in the States. Regular Folkies on the scene included Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Arlo Guthrie, Danny Kalb, Tom Paxton, Bobby Neuwirth, Caroline Hester, Richard Farina, Odetta, Peter, Paul & Mary, Phil Ochs, Len Chandler and Lord Buckley. They were joined by a number of Blues and Folkblues artists who were finding acceptance with this new white audience. These included John Lee Hooker, Son House, Jesse Fuller, Sonny Terry & Brownie Mcghee and Big Joe Williams.

The radical politics of the Folk Movement had been deemed UnAmerican in the early 1950s. In the land of the free you had to think the same as everyone else. Dissent was UnAmerican. This was the era of the McCarthy purges of Communism. You were free to do as you were told. This led to such harmless individuals as Pete Seeger and the Weavers being banned and blacklisted. Their Union support was considered a communist conspiracy. They were unable to perform or appear on radio and TV. This had, of course, led to even more radicalism and the Coffee Bars and Folk Clubs became a hive of political and social exchange. Inevitably the Folk Movement became aligned with the anti-war and civil rights movements. Even so the scene was still very conservative. Performers spent their time singing traditional Folk or rehashing Woody Guthrie songs from the 1940s and 1950s.

By the 1960s the whole scene had split into two distinct camps. The more liberal performers were trying to create an adventurous contemporary style and the traditionalists were trying to keep it firmly fixed in the past. The Greenwich area of New York had become a thriving mass of small clubs and coffee bars including – Gerdes Folk City on 4^th Street, The Café Wha?, the Gaslight and the Bitter End. It was an unlikely place for the re-stimulation of Rock music but that’s what it turned out to be.

In the early 1960s the Folkies began to break into the Popular charts and become commercial propositions with Joan Baez and Peter Paul and Mary setting the pace. At this time they were largely still recording the traditional Folk Songs as there were few writers around producing new quality material. This was to change with a vengeance when Bob Dylan arrived and began writing his own songs. He began writing songs about social injustice, equality, anti-war that became known as Protest songs. They astounded everyone and pushed Dylan to the forefront of attention and popularity. When these songs received chart success and brought Folk Music to the notice of a wider audience they generated such an interest that the talent scouts were suddenly scouring the coffee clubs and signing everyone up.

They found a number of talented individuals. Apart from the established old crew headed up by Joan Baez and the Woody Guthrie acolytes of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Tom Paxton there were a host of others. These included Phil Ochs, Peter La Farge, Arlo Guthrie, Spider Koerner, Mark Spoeltra, Danny Kalb, David Blue, Dave Van Ronk, Buffy St Maria, Odetta, Caroline Hester and Richard and Mimi Farina. Richard Farina was tragically killed in a motorbike accident on the day he was celebrating the publishing of his first book. Of the others Phil Ochs was the stand out. His political stance was most extreme and he pushed Dylan closest in the realm of protest song. He wrote a large number of brilliant songs but failed to break through into mass recognition in the way Dylan had.

The British invasion had already taken place and there was a big move by lots of young musicians back into Rock Music. All over America garage bands were springing up copying the British R&B style. Meanwhile Dylan was setting new standards in song writing by producing lyrics that were poetic and meaningful in a way that had not happened before. His popularity meant that the Rock scene was exposed to his songs and Dylan’s song writing began to influence song writing in Rock music. This suddenly took off when the Animals recorded ‘House of the Rising Sun’ (not a Dylan song but a traditional Folk song but one that had been covered by Dylan) and Manfred Mann and the Byrds started covering Dylan’s songs and giving them a Rock format. It was the birth of Folk-Rock. This disgusted the more conservative Folkies but it galvanised Dylan himself. He reached back to his early Rock roots and went electric creating a level of fury in many of his contemporary singer/songwriters and alienating a good proportion of his audience. Dylan didn’t seem to care. He had developed into a snarling James Dean who spat words like bullets at his critics. ‘Play fucking loud!’ he snarled. He had created a new level of consciousness in his writing and now his creative energy was being poured into Rock. He left behind, to the dismay of many of his supporters, the equality, civil rights and politics and created a whole new stream of consciousness poetry and ‘Mercury sound’ Rock that fostered some of his best enigmatic masterpieces.

Dylan was a fulcrum point around which the Rock Scene was to turn. The social and political awareness that he had almost single-handedly brought into being (and now just as quickly abandoned) was to create a whole new phase in Youth Culture. It spawned the West Coast and British Underground counter-culture of the late 1960s.

There are many questions that abound. Did Dylan create the times or did the times create Dylan? Did Dylan merely use, magnify and reflect what was around him or did he give it the importance that it had never previously had? In other words was Dylan an opportunist, just a ‘Song and dance man’ as he claimed or a real passionate social engineer. He remains an enigma.

In any case the 1960s were shaped by Dylan and his genius, whether contrived or innate, was there at the right time in the right place precisely when it was needed. It matters not if he was a cynical bastard who exploited the opportunity or a deeply motivated idealist. We have the songs. We have the passion and idealism it generated in us. It changed Rock Music and it changed the world whether he wanted to or not.

The way he articulated the issues, the poetry and anger that was encapsulated in his songs was expressed in a way that no one had ever done before or has managed to do since.

Rock music absorbed it and it is evident in the song writing of the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, and the work of hundreds of singer/songwriters and countless West Coast and British Underground bands. His influence transformed music and song writing.

The media called him the voice and conscience of a generation. Dylan seemed horrified. He could not bear the weight of it and deliberately sabotaged his own image and songs. By the late sixties we were wondering, when Nashville Skyline came out, whether he’d suffered brain damage in his motor-cycle accident or even if this twerp producing country ditties was the real Dylan at all and not some impostor put in there by the record company. There was no comparison between the wild-haired, dark glassed snarling trend-setter of the mid 60s and the conservative, sheepish, boring wet of the late 1960s. I guess he felt he had to undermine the gravity of his own image in order to survive the pressure. What a shame.

Rock music had been raised out of the Teen image into something more complex and meaningful. It dealt with real issues, politics and social change in an adult way. It was worth of literary examination and musical interpretation. It could be studied in universities. It had worth. Not only that but it forced the establishment to take notice because it had gravitas. It was not just trite ‘boy meets girl’ love songs to primitive rhythms, there was a social message that was causing ferment in young minds, there was genuine poetry and complex sophisticated musicianship.

Rock music had matured into a force to be reckoned with. The vitality and passion was allied to a Youth Culture that was shockingly active. ‘Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command’ Dylan had sung. Here it was in action. For the first time the political and social values of the entrenched conservative older generation came in for some heavy confrontation. Rebellion was in the air.