Hard Times, Come Again No More?

Plus: A Tony Fauci dating show, the Fred Hampton film and a new book by Phil Ochs.

Stephen Foster wrote the greatest American song of the 19th century, in my opinion, “Hard Times (Come Again No More).” Can’t hope for that sentiment to be realized entirely in the new Biden/pandemic era but at least it’s something we can all agree on and hope for. So here’s the incredible version of “Hard Times” quite a few years back with Emmylou Harris, the McGarrigles, Mary Black and a young Rufus Wainwright. Then the usual political shorts, the trailer for the upcoming Fred Hampton movie, and finally a new book with the writings of Phil Ochs and, of course, a couple of his tunes.

This is really good news, so to speak: “Women will overwhelmingly guide coverage of the White House and politics during the Biden administration, Axios judges, propelled by a slew of newly appointed leaders at major TV and radio networks, newspapers and digital outlets.” In a major surprise, Washington Post editor Marty Baron just announced he will step down at the end of February. I first met him almost 20 years ago when we picked him as Editor of the Year when he was still at the Miami Herald.

This is potentially about as bad as it gets: Kellyannne Conway allegedly posted a topless photo of her daughter Claudia on Twitter. Just last week, Claudia posted a series of TikTok videos accusing her mother of physical and verbal abuse….and Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, has just been permanently banned from Twitter for his nutty conspiracy rantings.

I’ve ranted for years about our laughably unrepresentative U.S. Senate, no matter which party controlled it, but here are some fresh facts from my former Editor & Publisher colleague Ari Berman: “15 states with 38 million people elect 30 GOP senators—California with 40 million people elects 2 Dems. By 2040, 30% of America will elect 70 senators.” He adds, “How to reverse GOP minority rule: abolish Electoral College, statehood for DC & Puerto Rico, kill filibuster, expand voting access & pass constitutional right to vote, restore Voting Rights Act, end gerrymandering, expand the court.”

With Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) announcing he won’t run for re-election in 2022, the best outcome, of course, is for Rep. Jim “Rat” Jordan to run and lose to a Democrat, which would be a two-fer, with Jim giving up his (heavily-gerrymandered) House seat. Erstwhile candidate for president Rep. Tim Ryan is already signaling a run for the Democrats, with Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton also likely.

Funny little opening for Colbert last night as Anthony Fauci finally gets to do all the shows Trump blocked him from doing—sports, weather, dating, food….

White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that the new administration will renew efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 dollar bill. Would be another two-fer, with Indian-slayer Andrew Jackson gone. There’s no touching Alexander Hamilton now, of course. They are not taking away his spot. No, they are not taking away his spot.

Will be interesting to see how Twitter’s new Wikipedia-lite effort to combat misinformation, “Birdwatch,” works out. It will at first “only be available to a small set of users, largely on a first-come, first-served basis. Priority will not be provided to high-profile people or traditional fact-checkers, but users will have to use an account tied to a real phone number and email address.” I do like the name “Birdwatchers” though. Requirement: must be eagle-eyed.

Threat of the Day from Chuck Schumer, on MSNBC last night: "I think it might be a good idea for President Biden to call a climate emergency. Then he can do many, many things under the emergency powers of the president that wouldn't have to go through — that he could do without legislation."

Former Sen. John Danforth said last night supporting Senator Josh Hawley “was the worst mistake of my life.” And this is the man who gave us Clarence Thomas.

Los Angeles just adjusted its air quality regs due to the increase in cremations in its horrendous Covid surge—yet now is lifting its ban on outdoor dining and some other restrictions. I guess one or two beds finally opened up in the city’s ICU wards. And yes, let’s eat outside and breathe that ashy air…

Books

Back in the early to mid-1970s, Phil Ochs was a casual friend. A terrific songwriter of topical songs, such as “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” and “There But for Fortune,” he competed with and then labored under the enormous shadow of Bob Dylan, who eventually dismissed him (to his face) as merely a “journalist.” Yet Phil wrote a lot of other fine songs with more personal themes, such as “Pleasures of the Harbor.” Neil Young performed his “Changes” at Farm Aid not long ago after calling Phil a true “poet.”

Lady Gaga even sang Phil’s “The War Is Over” at the 2016 Democratic National Convention and elsewhere. Sean Penn wanted to make a movie about him. The Clash borrowed his lyrics for a song on its Sandanista album. Dylan did sing two songs at his Chile memorial. And so on.

Phil’s sad decline into madness and alcoholism has been well-documented. In fact, the last time I saw him he was swinging a golf club over his head at a party in 1975 at William Kunstler’s home in Greenwich Village, and then was unceremoniously ushered out to the street. (Kunstler had questioned Phil on the stand at the Chicago 7 trial, which was not included in the Sorkin movie.) A few months later Phil took his life. But he should be remembered for his strong songs and political commitment, right up to organizing the 1974 memorial, which I attended, in New York for Salvador Allende and others who died in the Pinochet coup in Chile. Christopher Hitchens talks about Phil here, and check out the trailer for the recent doc, There But for Fortune.

Yet there was something to Dylan’s “journalist” claim. Phil loved reading the morning papers and then trying to pen a song drawn from them—maybe the latest civil rights outrage or LBJ sending troops to Santa Domingo. This came naturally to him, as he had been a journalism major at Ohio State in the early 1960s, where he wrote for the campus newspaper. When the came to New York to make his career as a folksinger he kept writing articles and reviews, often about the folk scene, politics and historical figures. Much later he wrote a widely-published piece about the passing of film/karate star Bruce Lee.

This is all carried forward in a new collection of Phil’s published and unpublished stories and poems, compiled by David Cohen for Backbeat Books. Its title, I’m Gonna Say It Now, is derived from his song quoted by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his vital 2018 letter to NFL owners defending the players’ right to protest. Wesley Stace, a fairly well-known singer/songwriter himself who records under the name of John Wesley Harding, wrote a lengthy review of the collection for the Wall Street Journal. It is stashed behind a pay wall so I will excerpt from it here.

It is one of the chief joys of Mr. Cohen’s I’m Gonna Say It Now that we can concentrate on Ochs’s live-wire mind, his crackling satire and his off-the-cuff flights of fancy.

Ochs’s early student pieces evidence an awakening political conscience; on his arrival in New York, the articles argue the nature of the topical song, debate the point of protest, and praise or poke fun at Greenwich Village troubadours and troublemakers. A blossoming aesthetic awareness led him to defend Dylan vociferously against charges of solipsism and selfishness and also contributed to Ochs’s own baroque musical explorations….

Then, a Eureka moment: the thrilling revelation that a protest singer preaching to the converted simply wasn’t enough. Ochs had always used edgy humor to make his point, but he took on more daring tactics...This predilection for theatrical agitprop put him in the company of the Yippies at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Ochs sang in Lincoln Park right before the violence erupted—and [a biographer] tells us that when he’d sung “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” the previous night, “the Coliseum twinkled from draft cards burning like votive candles.” Ochs called it the highlight of his career.

It would be easy to say that we need a Phil Ochs now, but there are plenty of people flying the protest flag, many of whom haven’t found themselves troubled by Ochs’s own misgivings. Yet, watching events unfold in the late autumn of 2020, it was impossible not to be struck by how firmly Ochs grasped events he did not live to see: When we were continually told that an election hadn’t yet been decided, when we knew that it had, and that reality was not in fact reality—what other reaction could we possibly have than to fight absurdity with absurdity?

When, on the launch of this newsletter two weeks ago, I posted Phil’s “Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon” as a farewell to Trump (“find yourself another country to be part of”), the writer Lucian Truscott IV commented, “I had him over for Thanksgiving dinner a couple of times when he was well. A great guy. One time I invited Phil and he came, and then Maurice, the old gray-haired street guy who sold [Village] Voices on the street, walked in with Odetta on his arm. What a night.”

Truscott added that the rendition of “Pleasures of the Harbor” by the great Tim Hardin (who had demons of his own) at the 1976 memorial concert for Phil was “the single most moving performance by a singer I've ever heard in my life. He gave that wonderful song an entire new life and new meaning. I had tears running down my cheeks.” So here it is. Hardin struggles with the lyrics at times but the feeling is all there…Tim would be dead, too, in four years.

Tomorrow: Highlights from Phil’s wild day on the stand at the Chicago 7 trial. No need for it to be Sorkinized.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he won more than a dozen awards as editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and now has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.