Phil Ochs
Greatest Hits

Scene 1/exterior day/between Bleecker and McDougal.

A Cadillac stops. Someone inside opens the door. A young man dressed in worn clothes is thrown out of the car. Invisible, from inside the car, Mr. Zimmerman's nasal voice addresses him, singing the lyrics of a Kinks song: "Hey mister reporter, how about talking about yourself?" The car suddenly drives off.

Cut. Flashforward. A gravestone. Framed by a golden ring, the black and white photo of the deceased. The young man we saw rolling out of the car a few shots earlier. The flash of a camera and the click of the shutter are the sound bridge for a cut on the axis to widen the frame. Bent over the gravestone and taking a picture of it, it's still him, the supposedly deceased...

Cut to the detail of a man's hands rifling through vinyl records on the shelves of a store. He pulls out a vinyl. On the cover is the photo of the gravestone. The album's title is Rehearsal for Retirement . The slow pan from the cover to the face of the buyer reveals Jeff Tweedy, the leader of Wilco, caught between a bitter grimace and a pleased smile as he looks at his imminent purchase.

Cut. Jeff Tweedy plays the guitar, legs crossed on the home couch, next to him the cover of Rehearsal for Retirement... He sings: "How to fight loneliness/smile all the time/ shine your teeth ‘till meaningless/sharpen them with lies"... a microphone feedback screeching at too high a volume breaks in. Cut.

We are backstage at a theater stage, red velvet everywhere. In a wall mirror, the reflected image of Elvis, dressed in golden lamé. But the counter shot on the man in the mirror reveals a faded and caricatured copy of Elvis. The golden lamé now adorns the young man encountered on the sidewalk of Bleecker and Mac Dougal, intent on portraying his gravestone. That young man is called...

Phil Ochs steps onto the stage; the curtain rises, and he takes up the guitar. He begins to play, resembling an incongruous marriage between Elvis and Woody Guthrie. As his voice sounds, the first chord of Jailhouse Rock overlaps, distorted and dragging while Scott Walker's schizophrenic and paranoid voice sings: Jesse are you listening? Jesse are you listening?
Stop frame capturing Phil Ochs in the cover image of Greatest Hits... opening credits start... or are they the closing ones already?

Heard in passing, "Greatest Hits" is an ironic album. Heard in passing, it is a confused, blurred album, without head or tail. You look at the cover. This poor man's Elvis on the front is somewhat pathetic. On the back, the phrase 50 fans can't be wrong about Phil Ochs at most elicits a cynical smile.

But be cautious, should you grant this album a second listen. Should you just sit down and abandon the paths between the kitchen pans and the computer at the desk, a subtle, pervasive unease grips the stomach.

Phil Ochs may have been a reporter, as Mr. Dylan's scathing epithet goes, but a reporter in the noble lineage of James Agee; and his investigation into rural America "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," if reprinted today, alongside the photographic series by Walker Evans, would deserve a link to a downloadable mp3 of "Boy in Ohio", a bittersweet portrait of Ochs' childhood, with prominent fiddle and banjo embellishments.

The confusion of the album gradually becomes the clear image of an America irreducible to simple and emblematic photographs.

Phil's favored perspective is the eccentric gaze of the provincial left behind by the frenetic rhythms of the rising Babylon. And when he sings of the advancing new, it's with the sentiment of a dethroned ruler: "a car, a car, my kingdom for a car!"... which with its rock'n'roll rhythms would be ready to blast from radios and speakers of American Graffiti, but for the voice lost in the mix and the bitter words it utters that would choke popcorn in the throats of more than one in the theaters of an America flaunting fragile optimism always ready to turn into despair...

Phil Ochs spies on cinema with the local bitterness of a small-town Indiana persona, embodied in that introverted and sinister young man Jim Dean. The piano follows his sorrowful trajectory toward a success that's just an arc toward the abyss. A single crystal clear instrument to follow a trajectory of solitude that the Star system can mask but not redeem.

Phil Ochs might be a reporter, but when he recounts the political establishment, he does so with almost Brechtian alienation techniques. Besides, "Greatest Hits" is a collection of all unpublished songs whose inevitable failure hoists it as a banner. And so the song about Nixon and his rise is the staging of a fake concert. Complete with spoken introduction and audience laughter, but in the middle, a sound cut whose falseness is so audible as to be demystifying and hyperrealistic. Hyperrealistic like the White House which, according to our chronicle, now resides in Disneyland, and within which unfold comedies worthy of Laurel & Hardy.

Phil Ochs might be a reporter, unable to boast Dylan's ability to kill tradition, transfigure it, and smuggle it into the future with his own fledgling Baudelaire signature; but in return, he is a chronicle of a possible present. Not a pragmatic one anchored to the status quo. It is a present you can feel nostalgic for; a present where tradition is alive and reconciled, and diversity and dissent are welcomed. And if you pass through that utopian present, you can come in for tea (you won't find Randy Newman maybe, although sometimes, putting cynicism aside, he passed by), along with Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Phil... the butler who provides the arrangement for those afternoon teas, let it be noted, is producer Van Dyke Parks (who gladly gives up deserved holidays in Trinidad to work at the Ochs household, dusting the tracks with all the retro sonic curiosities at his disposal).

Tweedy is right: when laughter is too ostentatious, the line on the darkest bitterness, on the blackest loneliness, becomes very thin. And when the drums and English horns of No more songs begin, it feels like the dawn of an apocalypse worthy of Scott Walker. They say Phil Ochs was mad, in the grip of a personality split (is this how they explain his counterproductive and radio-unfriendly experiments?), yet when he finds the time to bid us farewell before leaving the song world forever, to tell us: "Hello, Hello Hello, is there anybody home? I've only called to say I'm sorry/ The drums are in the dawn / and all the voice's gone/and it seems that there are no more songs" ...Well, the impression is that sometimes madness is more lucid than any mental sanity.

That confusion can be more in focus than any calligraphic postcard.