"Dig This With The Splendid Bohemians" - MEMORIAL DAY SPECIAL: FROM THE ARCHIVES- OUR TRIBUTE TO PHIL OCHS - THE TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY OF ONE OF FOLK'S GREATEST POETS.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/26/phil-ochs-the-doomed-folk-singer-who-woke-up-from-the-american-dream#:~:text=He%20died%20by%20suicide.,of%20his%20conviction%20came%20from.As a kid in the 1950s, Phil Ochs cut class and spent afternoons at the local movie house. The Searchers and Rebel Without a Cause were two of his favourites. Always a dreamer, Ochs fantasised that one day he could be a stoic cowboy like John Wayne, a teenage rebel like James Dean, or a rockabilly sex symbol like Elvis Presley. He took his early love of Hollywood with him to New York, where he became one of the most celebrated folk singers in the world, culminating in an album that has just turned 50: Greatest Hits, titled with a savage, knowing irony.Ochs came up in the Greenwich Village folk scene, rattling off songs at a pace that caused Bob Dylan – with whom he had a friendly rivalry – to complain “I just can’t keep up with Phil”. But Ochs couldn’t cross over like Dylan did. His sole hit song There But for Fortune, which reached No 50 in the US and the Top 10 in the UK, was performed by Joan Baez.The peak of his career took a different form. In 1968, aged 27, Ochs agreed to help organise and perform at the Festival of Life demonstration against the Vietnam war in Chicago’s Grant Park, at the Democratic National Convention. During his performance of I Ain’t Marching Anymore, one of his most acerbic and damning anti-war songs, bursts of fire sparkled throughout the crowd as young men from across America took the song’s message to heart and burned their draft cards. It was a defining moment in Ochs’s life and one of his greatest personal achievements. “This is the highlight of my career,” he told journalist Paul Krassner as he walked off stage. He felt like a Hollywood hero...