During the early and mid-’60s, there was a relatively brief period when public protests against injustice helped raise consciousness and change minds. My dad was there, an ardent participant in sit-ins, marches, and moratoriums with other like-minded folks determined to speak out against the madness of racism and war. And when they marched, they marched to spirituals and protest songs. Though Americans have been writing and singing protest songs for almost two centuries, the ’60s were a particularly fertile era for the genre, and protest songs frequently appeared in the regular rotation of AM stations and the Billboard/Cashbox Top 10 lists. Folk music dominated the protest scene in the first half of the decade, but the rockers started catching up once they realized there was more to life than boy-girl relationships. There was some blowback—Nina Simone’s career certainly suffered after she released “Mississippi Goddam,” and some radio stations banned Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”—but these backhanded attempts to silence non-establishment perspectives only served to heighten public interest and encourage more artists to join the movement. Protest songs remained quite popular in the USA through the end of the decade and into the early ’70s.
But where are all the protest songs now? Where are the anthems like “If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ in the Wind?” While American musicians have raised their voices in protest in the intervening years, there is no sense of a unified movement against The Establishment as there was in the ’60s. And when you listen to some of the most popular protest songs from the last thirty years—“Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine, Green Day’s “American Idiot,” “We The People” by A Tribe Called Quest—they all fall short in one important respect: they express the rage but fail to bring the inspiration. “The world is fucked, so fuck you” seems to be a common theme. The great protest songs of the ’60s not only exposed the outrageous practices of the powerful but inspired people to get off their asses and do something about injustice instead of fast-forwarding to the next song on the playlist. Man, we could really use Phil Ochs right now.
Phil Ochs entered the scene right around the time that Bob Dylan was starting to distance himself from political themes. He established himself as an important new voice in the genre on his first official album, All the News That’s Fit to Sing, where he applied his penetrating wit and genuine empathy for the disadvantaged to interpretations of current events. Ochs also revealed himself as a remarkably talented fortune teller, releasing the first protest song about Vietnam (“Vietnam Talking Blues”) a full four months before LBJ perpetrated the fraud known as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The album title reflects his background in journalism, and though his work certainly displayed an editorial slant, you get the sense that even at this early stage in his development as a songwriter, his primary mission was to uncover the truth about the world we inhabit. Once upon a time, that’s what journalists were expected to do.
I Ain’t Marching Anymore was released in February 1965, featuring songs he had written in the transitional years of 1963-1964 and a few adaptations of the works of other poets and folksingers. On this second album, Ochs dispensed with the superfluous second guitar used on his debut, increasing the prominence of his lyrics and distinctive voice. While the folksinger-with-a-guitar model was pretty much standard operating procedure in those days, the contrast between his performance on All the News That’s Fit to Sing and I Ain’t Marching Anymore is striking. Phil’s voice is less tentative, his sense of urgency more obvious, and his authenticity undeniable.
Phil proves he didn’t need a second guitar with his spirited picking in the intro to “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” The narrator is the archetypal soldier who fought in every goddamned American war from 1812 onward. Our hero has finally figured out that there are no wars to end all wars, but only old men with delusions of grandeur who peddle the outrageous notion that war is the ultimate test of one’s masculinity. Through the generation of patriotic fervor, the powers that be manipulate young men into enlisting so they can show the world what they’re made of:
It’s always the old to lead us to the war It’s always the young to fall Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun Tell me is it worth it all?
When I lived in the States I heard a lot of bitching about the many “undeclared wars” of the post-WWII era, but undeclared wars have formed the modus operandi for the United States since its founding. War is defined as “a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state,” whether declared or not. Most Americans prefer to hide behind the declared/undeclared distinction, but not Phil Ochs, who refused to exclude one of America’s most brutal and lengthy wars:
For I’ve killed my share of Indians In a thousand different fights I was there at the Little Big Horn I heard many men lying I saw many more dying But I ain’t marchin’ anymore
The subsequent verses record the increasingly gloomy history of American combat: Polk’s single-minded determination to achieve manifest destiny by inventing the original Gulf of Tonkin on the Rio Grande and suckering Congress to declare war on Mexico; brothers killing brothers in the Civil War; the unimaginable slaughter known as World War I; “the mighty mushroom roar” that signaled the end of WWII and demonstrated the sick ingenuity of the human race when it comes to killing. The closing verse describes the unintended consequences of what Eisenhower described as “the military-industrial complex” and the ugly truth that short-sightedness and the profit motive both play significant roles in the decision to send young men to their deaths:
Now the labor leader’s screamin’ when they close the missile plants, United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore, Call it “Peace” or call it “Treason” Call it “Love” or call it “Reason” But I ain’t marchin’ anymore.
I wish every person in uniform would wake up one day and say, “Fuck it. Fight your own goddamned battles, you sick bastards.” We haven’t evolved to that point, but there is no doubt that draft-age men in the Vietnam era took the song’s message to heart. When Phil performed “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” for the protesters camped outside the Democratic Convention in ’68, hundreds burned their draft cards, a moment that Phil called the highlight of his career.
From: https://altrockchick.com/2020/02/22/phil-ochs-i-aint-marching-anymore-classic-music-review/
