There was a time

I just got done listening to a 3 cd set of my old friend Phil Ochs, his life work. Phil was a singer songwriter in the 60's and 70's who was labeled a "protest song singer". His first album was called All the news that's fit to sing, a satirical take off on the N.Y. Times front page motto. The students were very active speaking out about civil rights, the Vietnam war and He was the troubadour that along provided much of the background to the conscience revolution of the times. Buy one of his CD's and you will find that the songs are VERY relevant today, and in fact are becoming popular. Phil feeling his work was done after the peace in Vietnam, suffering from writers block and severe depression and bi-polar, took his own life at the age of 36 in 1976...how sad, but how wrong he was. WHERE is that type of voice today? Are we too busy talking on our cell phones? There is way too much going on from a war started with lies, the oil company employees running the country, rising food prices, unemployment. Of course my favorite Gov love pain is the out of control Child Services System and the Gestapo like tactics that take children from a mother and place them in foster on a phone tip from an admitted mental patient, but fail time after time to help the children that are sleeping on the floor of a crack house! Bucks County Pennsylvania Child services, is called social services. Yes that's because any friend of a worker their who haa mental patient son can call in and have YOUR children taken from you and placed in foster care with little recourse! I wrote a lengthy artle on that so I won't get too into a rant. No my friends there is so much Phil could have written today. What are some of your favorite issues of the day...Environmentally safe off shore drilling??? All they do is put the forest of rigs past the horizon line from the beach so you can't see the tangled mess! Yes it is time for our college age people to pick up the fight again as soon this will be all theirs! Maybe some of us that were there, when students were vocal with megaphones and not cell phones, can give our current favorite gov love that is outrageous...that's a small start. Love to hear what's on your minds...enlighten me!

Comments: 9

Karen E. Jun 19, 2008, 11:47am EDT

Paul, I sure agree. There was a time... I sat in at Stanford and Berkley and marched in San Francisco and felt a passion to join hands and voices,energy and vision to say that we have to live more thoughtfully and responsibly on this earth and in our world community. That war did end, my brother came home but he never recovered his heart from the war, just as many thousands of men and women took the horrors of Viet Nam with them through their lives. We did make some progress on environmental issues that progress was distroyed with the last 8 years' administration. After JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy we had such a passion to regard and respect cultures and races and religious beliefs. That has been replaced by such a fearing of other nations and cultures that we have alienated ourselves in our world community.
There was a time... I miss that enlightenment and passion. I still speak for justice and social benevolence and respect of others and peace-not war. We need to speak, we need to be heard.

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Sarah (I want points) Jun 19, 2008, 1:37pm EDT

I just think we've all become complacent as Americans...

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J R B. Jun 19, 2008, 4:03pm EDT

There was a time I marched in San Francisco. Then they made me get in the car, in the parade. People knew who I was then.

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Jim Swan Jun 20, 2008, 2:37am EDT

The theme song for our generation should be Harry Chapin's "Remember When the Music . . . "

"Remember when the music came from wood boxes strung with silver wire?
And when we sang the words, it set our minds on fire
Cuz we believed in things, and so we'd sing."

"Remember when the music was a glow on the horizon of every newborn day?
And as we sang the words, it chased the dark away . . . "

There's a lot more, but I can't remember it all right now (irony intended). But I do have the CD just downstairs. I think I'll go listen to it!

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Jim Swan Jun 20, 2008, 2:40am EDT

If you actually knew Phil Ochs personally, the sixties must have been quite an experience for you. I was on the west coast in the sixties, at Santa Barbara, but -- to my everlasting shame -- I didn't have the guts to join in the protests.

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Paul Kurrey Jun 20, 2008, 8:53am EDT

Yes Jim I did have the HONOR of knowing Phil personally. He touched my music and writing at an early age as I was 14 when I met him. First at coffee house he was playing at in Philly, I met him upstairs which was backstage, and again the following day at a guitar store I use to hang out in. My best friend (Eric Bazilian...The Hooters, Cyndi Lauper) and I thought it was cool to hang in "beatnik, folk singer haunts", which exposed us both to older musicians at a young age. Then I ran away from home to NYC and actually bumped into Phil who remembered me and introduced my to other "Folkies" like Dave van Ronk and others whose names have faded........Phil showed me off like a kid mascot, but we did cross paths many times and I crashed on his couch in his apartment on Bleeker st. That was very cool as it was a crossroads for lots of Villiage musicians. John Sebastion of The Lovin Spoonful and Zal Yanofsky were there and then I started seeing them play at a Electric club called The Night Owl cafe...That was the early days of folk rock and very memorable.......I wrote an earlier article on here called Remembering Phil... Sad that he died thinking there was no reason to write when it's obvious that there is still even more so today a reason to fight.

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Jim Swan Jun 20, 2008, 9:18am EDT

More from the Harry Chapin song:

"Remember when the music was the best of what we dreamed of for our children's time?"

What a classic line!!! It makes you want to cry. Now that I think about it, there's a similar line in a song I wrote for my daughter's birth. I didn't realize I was stealing from the master:

"Perhaps your world will be one like now we're only dreaming
Perhaps your world will still be run by throwbacks to the past
But don't despair, love's everywhere, even just a flicker gleaming
And its time will come, this world of hate and war must fade at last!"

Too bad it's no closer today than it was back then. Our daughter is 31 years old now . . .

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