For Phil Ochs

from Cold Iron by David A. Harley

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about

Phil Ochs hanged himself in April 1976, after several very troubled years.

The lyric is fairly literal. I did hear the ‘tail end of the news’ on a local station in Berkshire, where I was living at the time. The ‘song I’d learned from you’ was Ewan MacColl’s Ballad of the Carpenter, which I still sing from time to time, and the album I bought was “I ain’t marching any more“.

The song is here because hearing that album proved to me once and for all that the choice wasn't between blues or folk pastiche and rock or pop, and that I was really a lyricist who (mostly) wrote his own tunes, not a tunesmith. While I can't think of a song here that sounds like Ochs (or Paxton, or Dylan), that school of political writing was as important to me initially as the British writers among whom I probably feel most at home. If I hadn't heard Phil Ochs, I suspect that my writing would be very different.

lyrics

Groping through the wavebands for a time-check
On a local music station I caught the tail end of the news
Of a singer in New York who’d committed suicide
Too late to catch the name, still I knew that it was you

The way that bad news comes as no surprise
Though till you hear it, you can’t think what could be wrong
In fact I thought of you just the week before
For the first time in years when someone asked me for a song I’d learned from you

I don’t know how to define what you mean to me now /
I never met you, of course, and I don’t sing your songs
Though I did long ago and even now, in a way
There are things I learned from you in songs of my own

I first heard your songs second-hand – the sweeter ones, of course
and bought an album on spec that raised blisters on my soul
In an era where ‘protest’ meant ‘hey man, it’s all wrong’
You were raising real issues and aiming at real goals

And I heard that you’d dried up, or did you just let it pass?
Did you find songs weren’t the weapon we were told that they could be?
No doubt someone has some answers but I’ll never really know
If you just decided snapshots don’t alter history

I’ve been thinking for hours there should be better songs to write
But thinking just makes circles in my head
There’s just a vague ache where my conscience ought to be
And a sour conviction that something true is dead

Only time will tell if I’m repeating your mistakes
Perhaps you’d have survived turning redneck like your peers
The romantics seem to be the real cynics after all:
Could it be the escapists really have the right idea?
And did you just decide living was a bind?
Slops for the body and musak for the mind?

credits

from Cold Iron, released July 22, 2021
Words & music by David A. Harley
Guitars and vocal by David A. Harley

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about

David A. Harley England, UK

David Harley is a former professional musician, administrator, IT security editor, author and researcher, and former much else that is even less impressive. He now lives in Cornwall. More info at whealalice.com