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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.)

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