Reel Music Films
The Reel Music Festival is underway, and I’ll try to inform you of ones I have seen that I like. Two films worth your time, one at 7PM tonight (Sunday, Jan. 9) at the Whitsell Auditorium, and one on Thursday at 7 at the Mission Theater.
There is a biography documentary tonight entitled Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune. The film is well done, and anyone who lived through the 60s and was aware of what was happening will be moved. It struck me particularly because Ochs was so important to me at the time.
Phil was a topical/protest singer with a unique mixture of intellectual and emotional appeal. I spent a lot of my early 20s listening to him and he helped to form my political consciousness. In my hierarchy of male folksingers at the time, he was always near the top, along with Dylan, Dave Van Ronk and Tom Paxton. Dylan, in fact, must have feared him because he always felt the need to put Phil down when they met.
You had to be smart and informed to love Phil Ochs, because his songs were full of references that came from the news and from history. The emotional component, he was passionate about social justice and the triumph of the left, drove the message home.
He sold albums but never became a star. Not on the Dylan level, not on the Peter, Paul and Mary level. He also had bipolar disorder, and this eventually helped to bring him down.
Because he failed to succeed on his terms, he drank. Because Nixon won in 1968, he became depressed. Then, there were the King and Kennedy assassinations, Kent State, and the drinking and depression made him suicidal. He took his own life in 1975.
The film has all the right talking heads, including Tom Hayden, Ed Sanders, Paul Krassner, Joan Baez, Judy Henske, your basic survey of the political and cultural left. This film really got to me, and reminded me how much Ochs meant in my life. If you were too young to be there, this is not a bad intro to the times.
The Thursday film is Search and Destroy: Iggy Pop & The Stooges’ Raw Power. As the title implies, it is the story of a record, and a musical style, that became extremely influential in later years, although only critics and musicians loved it when it came out. (Oh, how I still miss Lester Bangs.)
Only the Velvet Underground and David Bowie had as much influence. Iggy is still lean and mean on stage, and the whole band is articulate and smart about what they were doing. Raw Power holds up today better than a lot of “seminal” records of the same time. When was the last time you heard something that sounded like Sgt. Pepper?
Good stuff, especially for roots-music afficionados like yours truly.