(In
the October-December 1976 issue of the now-defunct Broadside: the topical song
magazine,” a founder and longtime editor of that non-profit folk music
publication who died in 1996, Gordon Friesen, provided U.S. music fans with the
following interesting alternative take on the 1960s topical and anti-war
protest folk singer-songwriter Phil Ochs’s strange death to that presented in
the 2011 documentary film about Phil Ochs, There But For Fortune, which was
later broadcast in January 2012 on the PBS series, American Masters)
"It
is indicative of the depth of the brainwashing to which the American people
have been systematically subjected that too many of them accept Phil Ochs’
death as a not too uncommon breakdown of a personality. But the accumulated
facts raise more than a suspicion that a plot existed leading to his deliberate
destruction. Let us look at some of these facts which would impel the
reactionary, fascist-type U.S. imperialists to reach the decision that Phil
Ochs must die.
"The
brainwashing of the people by the U.S. ruling class has created a tendency by
artists, especially dissident songwriters, to underestimate the ferocious
measures the ruling class will employ to destroy them. We know that the Wobbly
balladeer Joe Hill was framed and executed by a firing squad (Phil knew this
and even wrote a song expressing his admiration of Joe Hill). The woman radical
songwriters, Fannie Sellins and Ella May Wiggins, were shot to death by police.
Aunt Molly Jackson and her fellow songwriting relatives, Jim Garland and Sara
Ogden, were forced to flee for their lives from the Harlan County, Kentucky,
coal fields.
"A
fascist vigilante mob, aided by N.Y. State and local police, tried to murder
Paul Robeson at Peekskill. He was finally silenced and driven into exile by the
U.S. government. Even Woody Guthrie stated in print he was under surveillance
by what he called the F-B-Eyes. Many Pete Seeger concerts were picketed by John
Birchers handing out inflammatory leaflets urging at least by implication,
violence against him. In 1940 the Oklahoma Red Dust Players were raided and
scattered to the winds.
"One
can conclude that Phil Ochs was an even greater threat than these to the U.S.
imperialists. In his early songs he defended Castro Cuba and the Vietnamese
liberation fighters against the imperialistic designs of Washington. His songs
became more and more pointed. “White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land”, “Santo
Domingo”, “United Fruit” (where he approves of “young men going to the
mountains to learn the way of the rifle” instead of slaving at pitiful wages
for the American exploiters). But it was “Cops Of The World” with such lines as
“here’s a kick in the ass, boys”, and “clean your johns with your flag” because
“we’re the cops of the world”, and “Ringing Of Revolution” where he looks
forward to the destruction of the last vestiges of the desperate decaying
ruling class by the exploited masses, which really stuck like a bone in the
throat of the U.S. imperialists.
"A
special threat was the wide circulation of Phil’s songs abroad. Books
containing materials about him and his work were published in Spain, France,
and other countries. The Spanish book reprinted “Cops Of The World” for its
example of an Ochs song and the author likened Phil’s guitar to a machine gun.
The first edition sold out so quickly, mainly to students, that the Franco
regime did not have time to suppress it, as it did any further reprintings.
Individuals and groups sang his songs in Japan, Scandinavia, Holland, W.
Germany and many other countries.
"It
was naïve on Phil’s part to think when he undertook several jaunts in the early
seventies to foreign nations that he would be treated like an ordinary tourist.
He was met at two South American airports by police who arrested him, jailed
him overnight and deported him the next day. From recent revelations it becomes
obvious that the local authorities were acting under orders from the C.I.A. He
was welcomed only in Chile where he sang together with Victor Jara, the popular
Chilean peoples’ singer (Jara was destroyed in a bestial fashion when the
C.I.A.-Ford-Kissinger sponsored Chilean fascists overthrew Allende in 1973. The
police smashed Victor’s hands with their rifle butts, gave him his guitar and
taunted “Now play and sing.” Then they murdered him).
"When
Phil tried to visit his ancestral Scotland the London police intercepted him
and put him on a plane back to the United States. He got off at Dublin. Here
communications between the C.I.A. and the Irish authorities seemed to have
lagged, for Phil was allowed to stay all of two days in Dublin before being
deported to New York.
"On
an African trip he was set upon by three thugs who paid special attention to
crushing his voice box. Again the participation of the C.I.A. seemed
unmistakably obvious. He came home barely able to croak and could never again
sing like in the old days.
"Meantime
the activities and programs of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. were slowly coming to
light through hearings in Washington and books by former agents who could no
longer endure the inhumanity of these secret organizations—their assassination
plots, poison dart-guns, drugs to induce incoherency, burglaries, arming
foreign fascists to overthrow their democratic governments, the use of
informants and disrupters, spreading of lies, clawing through personal mail,
bugging telephones, planting listening devices in citizens’ cars. And so far
this seems only the tip of the iceberg.
"The
F.B.I. even had an elaborate program designed to induce dissidents to commit
suicide. They confessed they had tried it on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In
this instance they failed. But who knows in which cases they have succeeded. In
1965 another Broadside songwriter “committed suicide.” He was Peter La Farge,
adopted son of Oliver La Farge, first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for
Literature—the book was “Laughing Boy,” a sympathetic treatment of the Navajo
Indians. The F.B.I. took an interest in Peter and began hounding him when he
organized FAIR (Federation for American Indian Rights). Several months before
he died, the F.B.I. raided his New York apartment at midnight. They scattered
and tore up his papers; they put handcuffs on him and dragged him to Bellevue
in his pajamas. They put pressure on Bellevue to declare him insane, but
Bellevue could find nothing wrong and turned him loose.
"When
Phil came back to New York last summer [in 1975] he was still full of plans. He
was arranging to go to a place in New Jersey for a six-weeks “drying out”
period under supervision by medical experts. Then he planned to set up what he
called Barricade House, where he would issue a newspaper, record protest
singers and make films. He already had the building picked out in SoHo.
"People
ask us what motivation would the F.B.I.-C.I.A. have in wanting to see Phil dead
when he could no longer sing or write. We answer that this was their
motivation: Phil still had tremendous organizing ability, as witness his
organizing the Chilean benefit. Barricade House would have been a great threat
to the ruling class. We can visualize the F.B.I. doing one of their infamous
psychological profiles on Phil Ochs. They asked the computer, what is his
greatest weakness? The computer spat back: ALCOHOL! The next step of the F.B.I.
is to assign agents to exploit this weakness in their intended victim; I would
be very suspicious of the “friends” who attached themselves to Phil and kept
plying him with alcoholic drinks.
"I
am afraid we didn’t take to seriously Phil’s daily insistence that the C.I.A.
and F.B.I., and later with the collaboration of Mafia hit men, were out to
murder him. He sought a place to hide and tried to hire a bodyguard; he carried
an iron bar, a big scissors and other means with which to defend his life.
"Where
did these threats come from? What really happened? Perhaps some commission five
or ten years from now will bring out the true details of how Phil Ochs met his
strange death. We should finally learn how the great song-poem “Crucifixion”
became a personal prophesy of the fate of its author.
--Gordon
Friesen (Broadside, 10-12/76/issue 133)
 |
| Broadside magazine co-editors Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen |
