Keith Hagel graduated from Staples in 1963, then 4 years later from Tufts University, where he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.
Keith Hagel, back in the day.
He was a reporter and editor at Fairpress in Westport, and an editor in Norwalk and Maine. He and his partner, Andrea Hatch, live in Maine and Colorado, play in competitive Scrabble tournaments nationwide, and haunt used bookstores.
56 years ago today, Keith attended a memorablle Staples concert. It was not, however, the Doors, Cream, Yardbirds or Animals. Keith writes:
1968 was a crazy, hazy year — a seemingly incessant drumbeat of slogans, opposition to the Vietnam War, and violence.
“Hell, no, we won’t go!”
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
“Girls say yes to boys who say no.”
“One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war.”
Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were murdered. With the safe harbor of graduate school draft deferments ending, anti-Vietnam War protests exploded on campuses and in the streets, rupturing families and friends into verbally armed camps spewing rhetorical bullets at each other.
Protesters’ chants of “the whole world is watching” — as it was — did not stop Chicago police from battering and bloodying them at the Democratic National Convention.
Anti-war protestors and police clashed, at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
1968 was an awful year. But it wasn’t all bad.
Now, 56 years later, in another bitterly divided nation, many of us who have morphed from social unrest to Social Security still vividly, and perhaps nostalgically, recall those slogans that often were uttered with a combination of defiance, anger and moral righteousness.
But very few, even among geezers and soon-to-be geezers, remember Phil Ochs.
Yet I will never forget him, nor will any of the approximately 1,000 others who on March 31, 1968, packed the Staples High School auditorium to hear him in a benefit concert for a Peace Corps project.
Phil Ochs
I was 22, had just flunked out of law school, and was hoping I could dodge the draft (though I was not candid enough then to say “dodge”).
A folk singer, acoustical guitarist, prolific songwriter and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, the slim, intense 28-year old blended sardonic comments and lyrical napalm in his songs and commentary on that early spring Sunday night in 1968, as he repeatedly lashed out at President Johnson on Vietnam. The overwhelmingly anti-war audience loved it.
Until, from the wings, a young woman called out urgently.
“Phil! PHIL!!”
I froze in my seat. I’m sure others did too.
This was not part of the show. The memory of hearing in a college class in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated flashed back, chillingly.
Ochs turned and went to talk briefly to the woman in the wings, then came back to address the stunned, suddenly hushed audience.
“I’ve been told that President Johnson has just announced he will not be a candidate for re-election,” Ochs said quietly.
One of Westport artist David Levine’s most famous works was of President Johnson, who had revealed a gall bladder operation scar to the public (photo). Levine envisioned it as a map of Vietnam.
Pandemonium. Utter, freaking pandemonium. Roars of “Gene, Gene” erupted from supporters of insurgent Democratic presidential candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.
Some people in the audience thought the news was an April Fools’ joke.
I didn’t. The urgency in the voice of the woman from the wings could not have been practiced.
Ochs motioned for quiet.
Few would have faulted him for taking a few more verbal or musical potshots at a bombastic, swaggering president now figuratively knee-capped by cascading opposition to the Vietnam War he had so aggressively escalated.
Instead, Phil Ochs softly said he thought Johnson’s announcement probably was the most noble act the president had ever made.
And so he dedicated his next song, about change, to the man he had been skewering only moments before.
Ochs made his point, and chose not to rub it in.
And that was it. The concert was over, prematurely, as people in the audience literally sprinted to the parking lot to listen to the bombshell news on their car radios. No cell phones in 1968.
The euphoria was short-lived. Only 4 days later Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis. Then in June, Senator Kennedy also died from an assassin’s bullet.
In August Chicago cops, egged on by the city’s bully boy mayor Richard Daley, broke heads, in what investigators later described as a police riot, at the Democratic convention.
In an anticlimax, the nomination went to warhorse Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a former liberal and “Happy Warrior” who had become a sad mouthpiece for Johnson.
The cover of Phil Ochs’ 1969 “Rehearsals for Retirement” album.
Richard Nixon cruised to the presidency. The war, the protests, and the deaths of the young went on
Phil Ochs tried to go on.
For a while he did, continuing to compose, perform and protest. As a defense witness at the trial of the radical dissenters who became known as the Chicago 7, Ochs offered to sing his trademark anti-war song, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” Judge Julius Hoffman, whose major credentials were being a relative and former law partner of Mayor Daley, rebuffed him.
So Ochs sang his protest to reporters outside the courtroom. When Walter Cronkite ran the clip on his evening television news show, millions heard Ochs’ message.
But he would not be the same for long. Devastated by the deaths of King and RFK, he spiraled down into a dark hole of depression and substance abuse. He thought he was washed up.
In April 1976 — little more than 8 years after his unforgettable concert in Connecticut — Phil Ochs hung himself. He was 35.
It’s 56 years since March 31, 1968. I’m 78 now. As mobility outranks nobility for me, I have come, grudgingly, to appreciate the benefits of a walker and priority parking privileges.
I probably ain’t marching anymore, anywhere. Weed is now legal in Maine and other states. The longhairs of the ‘60s and ‘70s increasingly have become gray hairs and no hairs.
The enticingly mini-skirted young women we called “chicks” in those days now have to deal with artificial knees and/or hips, not to mention still-pervasive sexism and ageism.
Almost no one remembers Phil Ochs.
Phil Ochs
I asked 15 people, mostly 50 or older, if they knew who Ochs was. Only one did: a bearded, white-haired former newspaper reporter who, to my delight, spat out “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”
The others were clueless. That was a shame.
In March 2024, the US remains sharply and hostilely divided as ever. Another egotistical, swaggering politician, this time a former president, having tried and failed to bring about a coup, continues to lie that he won the last election, while he tries to run out the clock on multiple criminal charges before this year’s vote.
Keith Hagel today.
Rogue cops and gutless legislators oppress minorities. COVID is still around and deadly, while some fools continue to deny or minimize its existence.
A lyrical, moral comet, Phil Ochs sang truth to power. He faded from the spotlights long ago. But on a spring night in late March 1968, he shone with a class act before 1,000 Westport concertgoers And he still matters today.
Ochs didn’t get to take a bow that night or do an encore. So — very belatedly — let’s give him a cheer, adapted from youth sports:
“Two, four, ’68, who do we appreciate?
Phil! PHIL!”
(That 1968 concert was not Phil Ochs’ only Westport appearance. Click here for a story about his very different performance, here in town.)
(“06880” is “where Westport meets the world” — yesterday, today and tomorrow. Please click here to support our work. Thank you!)
I was at home watching TV with my parents when LBJ made that announcement seemingly out of the blue. We were all beyond surprised. And so, yes, I missed another amazing concert at Staples—but this one was organized not by Staples students but by my classmates at Coleytown Junior High. The wonderful fundraising idea came from our Student Council VP Cathy Shufro.
I guess I’m surprised to read that so few people know of Phil Ochs. Maybe I was lucky that I had a brother who was at MIT in the mid-to-late 1960’s and was introduced to him and many other performers in the Boston scene. I still have his vinyl 1967 album, “Pleasures of the Harbor” and a “Best of” album downloaded into my Apple Music. Listen to them now and again, and still feel the emotions expressed in those songs. Sad he is mostly forgotten.
In 1968 my step-father was in Ontario helping the Mennonites get Americans dodging the draft into Canada. He later went on to become an elementary school teacher. When he met my mom in the ’80’s in Newfoundland he would play records for us and introduce us to a ton of folk and blues and rock music, Phil Ochs included. I was just playing some Phil Ochs for my daughter the other day. He’s not completely forgotten just yet!
Knew his brother Michael in LA. We played beach volleyball every Sunday for a year
Michael is still in Venice and Sonny is in New York – still doing her radio show, I think. Sad to think that Phil’s music is not more present, especially these days when it would resonate. “There but for Fortune”, I guess.
Of course l remember Phil Ochs. He wrote some of the best anti war songs. Beautiful lyrics and melodies. Powerful and poignant. I was going to Harpur College, SUNY Binghamton when three friends friends of mine and l heard that there was to be a concert for Dan Berrigan at Cornell. It was April 1970. Dan was going into hiding to avoid jail. We drove up to Ithaca to be there. We were going to be staying overnight at a friend’s house and would sleep on their living room floor. Phil Ochs sang a number of his songs. We went back stage to say hello and talk with him. I was heart broken when l learned he committed suicide in 1976.
I had no idea of the Westport connection but recall doing a term project in a college political science class (Politics and the Counterculture) comparing and contrasting Ochs and Dylan, with a classmate. We spent all week in the library listening to his songs. Our end product was a cassette tape somehow (super cutting edge-it was the 70s) and I liberal sing in the shower, his super ironic, ultra-unflattering portrait , “ Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Great poet, journalist, musician, singer songwriter, who told it like it was, even when that was unpopular- unlike today. He was an original ! RIP PO !
I was at that concert. Went not knowing who he was, left totally changed by his music. Had no idea of his tragic end….
Thank you, Phil.
My friend Jack Golden introduced me to Ochs in junior high school. Thanks Jack! And I was at that concert. On my first date. Driven there by my mom. How embarrassing. It was an astonishing movement when the announcement was made. But I never forgot Ochs. Among the many things he wrote about and was shown to to be correct, it turned out that smoking marijuana WAS more fun than drinking beer. Of course, at the time, that only known within a small circle of friends. But not including me. That’s another story.
What a coincidence with this post and the one in today’s Roundup re “The High School That Rocked!” since Cathy Shufro was one of our interviewees in THSTR telling the story of how the Phil Ochs concert came about. I think CJHS was the only Westport junior high in that era to stage a concert at Staples (although it’s possible I’m wrong about that).
What a beautiful tribute. Excellent journalism. And yes, I remember Phil Ochs with great fondness. Along with Country Joe and the Fish, Phil Ochs was the soundtrack of my life in the 60s and early 70s.
I was a senior at Staples when that concert occurred, but was not allowed to attend. However, I loved Phil Ochs. When my uncle died, a man who most definitely walked the walk, I recited Phil Ochs’ “When I’m gone” at his funeral. The refrain reads:
“There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone
And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone
And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here…”
I was at that concert. I used to play guitar and sing folk songs some of his included. I haven’t forgotten him!
I don’t know how I learned about Phil Ochs, but he was part of my sophomore US History musical montage project. In what would now be known as a mixtape, I assembled multiple protest songs that I had learned at Camp Mahackeno and Beach School from my counselors (likely Staples students) along with other tunes, and chief among them was the Draft Dodger Rag, which I can still sing from memory. “…and if you ever get a war without blood and gore, well, I’ll be the first to go.”
I was and still am a fan of Phil Ochs.I was lucky enough to be at the concert and yes, the audience went nuts when he came back out and made the announcement.
I’m sitting in a hotel inTokyo waiting to go to the airport heading to Taiwan reflecting on the Ukrainian family I met yesterday displaced by the war in Ukraine and hosted by the Japanese government. When I listen to Ochs it feels like a sermon that requires attention and reverence. He was a great lyricist, guitar player, and had a voice you can never forget. I too wish he was still telling us what we need to hear. He stood out like few have ever before shaping my youth and humanitarian approach to living on this blue marble. Long live Phil, long live his thinking about life! Thanks Dan for the link to Phil’s ‘I ain’t marching anymore’ it was perfect timing-You are connecting Westport to the world brilliantly.
I still have my vinyl album Pleasures of the Harbor by Phil Ochs. I remember listening to him and to Tom Rush in that era. What a shame that he died, essentially, due to depression.
Phil Ochs so talented, sad he had mental issues. I don’t remember when I first became aware of him, it could have been back in the late sixties when I was living in Westport and New York, and were heavy into music, jazz, folk and rock and roll. I’m pleased that my daughter and son in law (they are in their early forties) are familiar with Phil Ochs. A close friend of mine passed away in 2020, he left behind a huge collection of old LP’s, which his sister let me have. I don’t have an old fashion record player anymore (get much music from Utube and dvd’s), but my son in law does, I gave him several of my friends LP’s one was Phil Ochs, he was over the moon. He also likes The Band, another of my favorite, if not, my favorite groups from back then.
My sister Susie Campbell and I worked as Phil’s managers for several years during the 60’s. The hours we all, including other singers we worked with – Eric Anderson, Tom Rush etc – sat around with Phil while he worked on songs were never boring. They used to try to outdo each other constantly. He was a great guy with an unfortunate dark streak.