Fridays
With Phil

9. Doesn't Lenny Live Here Anymore? (1969, Rehearsals for Retirement, A&M Records)

Often mistaken for an elegy for comedian Lenny Bruce—which it is not—the song explores themes of isolation and identity loss. Through memorable imagery of hushed rooms, unanswered questions (and razor blades), Ochs turns a "haggard ex-lover's" search for her ex, described as a "longtime loser," into something darker. Her refrain, which closes the song, is one harrowing repeated phrase: "Are you sure? Are you sure?" 

10. Outside of a Small Circle of Friends (1967, Pleasures of the Harbor, A&M Records) 

Although her name is never mentioned, this song is about Kitty Genovese, who was raped and murdered outside her apartment in New York City in 1964, while 37 onlookers failed to intervene. Psychology literature still refers to this bystander passivity as the "Genovese Effect."

The incident was still fresh when Ochs wrote lyrics that interpreted the indifferent onlookers' thoughts as, "Maybe we should call the cops/ And try to stop the pain,/ But Monopoly is so much fun/ I'd hate to blow the game." The verse receives a ragtime, burlesque musical accompaniment that cloaks outrage in irony, which is a common Ochs trick.

The outrage gets a bit lost when he extends his narrator's reluctance to get involved past the assault to include highway traffic accidents, ghetto riots, pornography, and drug arrests. Regardless, the song predicts the 21st-century phenomenon of citizens numbly distracted by their preferred entertainments, still refusing to see what is happening under their own noses.

11. Pleasures of the Harbor (1967, Pleasures of the Harbor, A&M Records)

An unusual, to say the least, mashup describing the assassination of John F. Kennedy using seafaring metaphors, this track has been justly criticized for producer Larry Marks’ over-orchestration and cheesy use of psychedelic sound effects. Ochs composed the song after watching John Ford's 1940 film "The Long Voyage Home", about merchant sailors. The song's emotional core depicts sailors briefly in port, seeking human warmth and connection before the open water reclaims them.

The song is said to have brought Robert Kennedy to tears when Ochs performed it for him during a benefit in early 1968, months before RFK's own assassination. The better versions of the song featured Ochs alone, stripped of the studio orchestration, with just his guitar and voice. Listening to recordings of those solo concert performances can still bring anyone to tears. The original album track, on the other hand, just has too much going on to make a strong emotional connection.

12. Rehearsals for Retirement (1969, from Rehearsals for Retirement, A&M Records)

This is the singer reciting his own eulogy. The album cover makes that declaration literal: a tombstone reading "Phil Ochs (American) / Born: El Paso, Texas 1940 / Died: Chicago, Illinois 1968." (He would end his life eight years past that date.)

The title track, positioned last, is backed by Lincoln Mayorga’s spare, mournful piano rather than any hint of political fire, in language that hovers between elegy and resignation. "The days grow longer for smaller prizes / I feel a stranger to all surprises." The verse that follows is harrowing: "I take my colours from the stable / They lie in tatters by the tournament."

The song closes not with anger but with something sadder: a farewell to love, to imagination, and to the self that once believed. The word "rehearsals" carries its own ambiguity: Is he practicing for artistic retirement, for death, or simply for a quieter, diminished life? The answer turned out to be all three. But the lyric that cuts deepest is a plaintive throwaway from this morbid song: “I tell my daughter/ That it doesn’t matter.”

13. Changes (1966, from Phil Ochs in Concert, Elektra Records)

This ballad, likely Ochs’ most commercially successful tune, marks the exact moment he stepped away from the topical headlines to look inward. Stripped of his trademark political fury, "Changes" is an eloquent reflection on the relentless passage of time and the fragility of human connection. It’s a beautifully constructed meditation on loss, built around the realization that impermanence is the only certainty.

Most would still argue this is Ochs’ best work. I disagree. Unlike much of his catalog, the song hasn’t aged well. The current pace of change circa 2026 has revealed this 60-year-old track as a slow-paced lament that would fit more comfortably in the Stephen Foster era than our own. Regardless, there is no denying its enduring beauty.

14. The Power and the Glory (1964, from All the News That's Fit to Sing, Elektra Records)

Here, Ochs updates Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” for a generation waking up to the American Dream’s limits. It’s an impossibly earnest geography lesson, bursting with the patriotic romanticism Ochs harboured even at his most cynical. Yet, true to form, he lands a devastating caveat: “She’s only as rich as the poorest of the poor.”

Unlike the absurdist satire or exhausted grief of his later albums, this is the young folk singer holding out hope, demanding the country live up to its high principles and majestic scenery. It’s a complicated love song to an America that would soon break his heart. Ironically, the track was used, obliviously, by Ronald Reagan during his re-election rallies.

15. Here's to the State of Mississippi (1965, from I Ain't Marching Anymore, Elektra Records)

Ochs unloads a verse-by-verse demolition of a southern state, structured as a methodical indictment of its politicians, judges, police, churches, and schools, delivered with a controlled calm that can’t mask the fury underneath. Ochs had participated in Freedom Summer 1964, and the song's darkest line was far from a metaphor: "If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find."

The reference: While searching for the murdered civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, FBI agents found the bodies of Charles Eddie Moore, Henry Hezekiah Dee, Herbert Oarsby, and five other unidentified Black men whose kidnappings had attracted no outside attention.

Some objected that it was unfair to condemn an entire state, that northern states were equally racist. Ochs answered in his liner notes with characteristic precision. Mississippi wasn't as bad as his song implied, "unless you are a Negro who has forgotten his place, or unless your last name was Chaney, Goodman, or Schwerner."

"Here's to the State of Richard Nixon," an updated version released in 1974 during the Watergate hearings, transplants the song structure intact, the new verses indicting Oval Office misdeeds: "Criminals are posing as advisors to the crown." Ochs created a protest song so enduring that each generation finds it fits their current moment. 

16. Half a Century High (1968, from Tape from California, A&M Records) 

This is one of Ochs' most prophetic songs, a meditation on television addiction and the assimilation of identity into the screen, decades before social media fixation became a thing. Every verse opens with the same refrain: "In the tube where I was..." — born, raised, grown, killed. The "tube" is the cathode ray television set, and Ochs constructs an entire psychic life inside it.

"Through the dots I ran / Looking for a man who looked like me" places the narrator searching the screen's literal pixel clusters for identity rather than the world outside. "There was so much to see / There was so little to be / But I was free" defines the passive viewer, overloaded with images and hollow of experience.

The lyric crystallizes the central paradox: "I’m a quarter of a century old / but half a century high." At 25, the narrator has consumed enough accelerated imagery to feel twice his age. And the song's most devastating line may be its simplest: "In the tube where I was killed / I was fulfilled." The screen terminates selfhood while providing just enough stimulation to keep the viewer from noticing. This thought connects directly to "watching my television talk on the telephone" in "One Way Ticket Home" (#18 on this list.) It’s Ochs returning, obsessively, to the American screen as a sustained act of civic and personal lobotomy. 

17. The Doll House (1969, from Rehearsals for Retirement, A&M Records) 

Here the folksinger-turned-temporary-pop-star tries his hand at an honest-to-god Vienna waltz, marked by Lincoln Mayorga's elegant piano. The music and arrangement are a slight reworking of "I've Had Her" (#24 on this list), while the lyrics drift through name-checks of Cinderella, Tom Sawyer, and Pirate Jenny from Brecht's Threepenny Opera. The song cites several references: There's Ibsen's A Doll's House, whose Nora awakens from a life subjugated to her husband to claim selfhood. There's also the shadow of Mattel’s Barbie and Ken, fully saturated in 1960s culture, fitting the album's contempt for plastic, consumer-culture Americana. And true to its time, there's a Hugh Hefner reading: "My costume dropped to the floor.../ And the service was rendered," suggesting a Playboy Club transaction: intimacy reduced to bunny-costumes and cheesy commerce.

These threads seem to point to a central truth. Dolls are replications, while the human heart longs for something real. As if that isn't enough to ponder, Ochs reserves one chorus for a comedy-club impression of Bob Dylan, at which point the song becomes a genuine schmozzle, albeit one you can never entirely get out of your head. 

18. One Way Ticket Home (1970, Phil Ochs Greatest Hits, A&M Records)

Having decided he needed to be "part Elvis Presley and part Che Guevara," Ochs commissioned a gold lamé suit from Elvis's own tailor, Nudie Cohn, and posed for the cover in direct homage to Elvis's 1959 album 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong. The back cover of Greatest Hits cheekily declares "50 Phil Ochs Fans Can't Be Wrong." The album, which ironically contained no previously released material, was the lowest-selling of his career.

You can hear the exhaustion in the first bar. The song's arrangement is wildly over the top, with rolling drums, swelling horns, and a female chorus (the track featured Merry Clayton as a backup singer, fresh from the Stones' "Gimme Shelter") conspiring to give the song a cinematic scale.

Then there are the lyrics. The image of his parents having "dropped me at a matinee and left without a trace" is a gut punch. The line about "watching my television talk on the telephone" is stranger and more prophetic. It reads almost like a premonition of the coming Fox News/Rush Limbaugh era, of televised demagogy and right-wing call-in culture. The events of 1968 — the Chicago riots, the subsequent trial — had convinced Ochs that the average American was no longer listening, and this song is a cry of hollow, bewildered grief. He wants to go home, but is certain that home doesn’t exist anymore. 

19. The War Is Over (1968, originally a single, later on Tape from California, A&M Records)

This is one of Ochs' odder antiwar statements. Rather than calling for the Vietnam War to end, he simply declares it already over, by fiat of imagination. The title became a literal rallying cry; Ochs led a "War Is Over" public rally in Los Angeles in 1967, using the slogan as a piece of guerrilla theater, with the idea being that if enough people declared it over, the war's legitimacy would collapse. Perhaps he was thinking that whimsy might trump conflict, where anger and moral certainty had not.

Ochs' song and John Lennon's 1971 "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" share more than a title. Both declared an end to the Vietnam War as an act of will, rather than waiting for governments to negotiate one. Ochs' version came first.

Compared to other anthems of the period — Country Joe's mocking "Fixin'-to-Die Rag," Edwin Starr's blunt "War," or Buffy Sainte-Marie's mournful "Universal Soldier" — both Ochs and Lennon stand out for their optimism-as-protest approach. Rather than condemning or grieving, they imagine the war's end into being, trusting that imagination and mass sentiment could bend reality. Ochs' version is weirder and more surreal; Lennon's is gentler, more like a lullaby, and has somehow become a holiday standard. . 

20. The Bells (1964, from All the News That's Fit to Sing, Electra Records) 

Early in his career, Ochs found the perfect songwriting partner in Edgar Allan Poe, the 19th Century poet and author. Poe's poem moves in four parts from the joyful jingling of sleigh bells to the groaning of funeral bells, and Ochs uses this arc to craft a socially critical message about those who sit uncomprehending while the bells toll warnings around them. The melody is rhythmic and repetitive, entirely like the tolling of bells. It's a striking choice for a topical folk singer to have made in the early 1960s, raiding gothic poetry and finding it perfectly suited to his own moment. Bob Dylan never attempted something like this, and, being Dylan, probably resented Ochs’ effort. 

21. Draft Dodger Rag (1964, from All the News That's Fit to Sing, Elektra Records) 

This dates from the long-ago era of military conscription. It’s a gleefully comic song in which the narrator rattles off an ever-escalating list of reasons why he simply cannot serve in the military: flat feet, bad eyes, a trick knee, allergies, a dear old mother to support, and “I always carry a purse.” He did not think to include bone spurs as an ailment.

Unlike Ochs' more solemn protest material, this one goes for pure absurdist humour, the narrator essentially bragging about his draft evasion. The joke cuts both ways: it mocks the shamelessness of those who dodge service while also implicitly questioning why anyone would want to serve in the first place. It's Ochs at his most vaudevillian, with sharp politics wrapped in a staged wink and too much delight at his own cleverness. Funny song, regardless. 

22. Joe Hill (1968, from Tape from California, A&M Records) 

This is emphatically not "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," the Depression-era ballad composed in 1936, recorded by Paul Robeson and later revived by Joan Baez at Woodstock. That song is hagiography, which is something Ochs was never about.

Where the Robeson/Baez version depicts the labour leader as a saint, Ochs sketches a man: a Swedish immigrant who came through Ellis Island looking for work, got tangled in the brutal copper mines of Utah, was framed for murder, and was executed by the state in 1915, despite his likely innocence. Ochs narrates all of this with flat precision ("The government crawled to the mine-owners' call,/ and the judge was appointed by the state.") That makes the point that Joe Hill doesn't need a legend; the historical record is damning enough on its own.

Speaking of legends, Ramblin' Jack Elliott plays guitar on the track. Producer Larry Marks later recalled that Ramblin’ Jack was falling-down drunk throughout the gig, which made the recording session difficult to complete. That might have been the inspiration for an imaginary album titled “Ramblin’ Jack’s Drinking With Joe Hill,“ which, sadly, would never be recorded. 

23. Tape from California (1968, from Tape from California, A&M Records) 

In 1968, a coast-to-coast phone call cost roughly a dollar a minute—a genuine luxury—and the ancient art of letter-writing had largely collapsed. The solution some adopted was to dictate onto a three-inch reel-to-reel tape and mail it, creating a spoken letter, warm and immediate in ways the written word wasn't.

Ochs embraced the conceit perfectly. This is a spoken-word message home from the Golden State, where the Beach Boys and the Watts ghetto existed ten miles apart.

The album was released just weeks before the Democratic Convention in Chicago would detonate what remained of the decade's optimism. At this point, the Yippie movement led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin was still ascendant, and Ochs orbited it with ambivalence. He was present at the demonstrations, but never fully accepted as a Yippie true believer.

Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson's own creative foil, plays keyboards on the track. The presence of Parks helps Ochs eulogize the California dream, making the tape an era's recorded farewell testament. It’s worthy of inclusion in the National Archives, and it never will be.  

24. I've Had Her (1967, from Pleasures of the Harbor, A&M Records)

The song lands very differently today than when it was released in 1967. The mid-century sexual revolution had repackaged taboos as liberation, and Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire had commercialized a damaging philosophy: the sophisticated male churns through relationships, and moves on. The narrator is exactly that man, a player, who dismissively sums up: I've had her. She's nothing. 

Ochs doesn't let this toxic fella off easily. The player is not triumphant; he is tragic. He is the voice of dismissive cynicism. Biographers note that Ochs never seemed able to sustain a loving relationship. The man who marched for human dignity seems not to have extended it behind closed doors, and "I've Had Her" could be his most unsettling narrative.

Which makes it a shame that the lush, Sgt. Pepper-chasing orchestration—all swooning strings and nonsense psychedelic filigree—wraps the song in a  lushness that contradicts its point. The music seduces while the lyrics indict. Ochs wanted this album to sound like the Summer of Love, and it did. But this was one tune that really would have been better communicated with one voice and a solo guitar. 

25. Santo Domingo (1966, from Phil Ochs in Concert, Elektra Records).

The song opens with a crab scuttling along the Caribbean beach, sensing something atmospheric is about to change. Then come the US warships.

This track is considerably more cinematic than Ochs’ usual protest songs, the imagery evoking his fondness for Hollywood war movies and westerns. The incident he describes, President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 occupation of the Dominican Republic, is lost in current American memory, but provides a context for the “little excursions” of 60 years later. Consider the line: “The traitors will pretend that it’s getting near the end when it’s beginning.” 

26. Jim Dean of Indiana (1970, from Phil Ochs Greatest Hits, A&M Records)

This is a tender elegy for James Dean, the charismatic actor who died in 1955 at the age of 24. Backed by Lincoln Mayorga’s sorrowful piano, it traces the story of a lonely kid from a fly-over state adjacent to Ochs’ boyhood Ohio, who sought fame to escape his trauma.

The song sketches Dean's difficult early life: his mother's death, his father's near-total absence, and his upbringing by his uncle Marcus Winslow on an Indiana farm. For Ochs, the actor held mythical significance since adolescence, when he first encountered him in the classic films “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” and “Giant.” The song presents a deeply personal side of Ochs, culminating in his placing a flower on the actor’s grave, perhaps revealing more about the lyricist's veneration than about the song’s subject.

27. The Scorpion Departs But Never Returns (1969, from Rehearsals for Retirement, A&M Records)

Recorded in the aftermath of Ochs' traumatic presence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Rehearsals for Retirement is the darkest chapter of his bleak catalogue. This song, its centrepiece, was inspired by the mysterious loss of a nuclear submarine, the USS Scorpion, which vanished in the Atlantic in 1968 with 99 sailors aboard.

This is not a standard seafaring elegy comparable with Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Ochs is making an analogy about America itself: the good men who did nothing wrong, the captain who offers no answers, the radio promising forgiveness if they'd only come back to shore. The repeated, desperate self-denials—“tell me I'm not dying”—are among the most haunting lines he ever wrote. You could hear this as a protest song, or as high art. It’s both.

28. Too Many Martyrs (1964, from All the News That's Fit to Sing, Elektra Records)

Co-written with Ochs’ role model, Chicago folk singer Bob Gibson, this is Phil in his earliest mode: a working journalist who traded his typewriter for a guitar.

Medgar Evers, an NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was shot in the back outside his home on June 12, 1963, by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. Ochs traces the arc from Emmett Till's lynching to Evers’ murder with the economy of a wire-service dispatch and the fury of an elegy.

The title originated from an overheard remark from someone who, upon hearing of Evers' death, said, “Oh God, no. We've already got too many martyrs.” Ochs first performed the song at the Newport Folk Festival that same summer, mere weeks after the assassination. The chorus declares a summary: too many lies, far too many empty words. Ever thus. 

29. The Harder They Fall (1968, from Tape from California, A&M Records) 

By 1968, Ochs had grown impatient with pretty stories, and this song is his assault on them. Working through a gallery of corrupted nursery rhymes (London Bridge, Jack and Jill, Mary's little lamb), he strips each one of its innocence, forcing the familiar verse to confess what it was always hiding, namely humanity’s worst instincts. The premise may have inspired the early work of comedian Andrew Dice Clay.

The song’s refrain provides the analysis: "Poems are pretty, tales are tall / Only the witches recall." The witches—the disbelieved, the marginalized, the burned—are the sole custodians of truth that comfortable mythology suppresses. The title phrase, borrowed from the pro boxing world and a 1956 Humphrey Bogart film, lands here as a cultural prophecy. The grander the fairy tale a society tells itself, the more catastrophic its eventual reckoning.

30. Cops of the World (1966, from Phil Ochs in Concert, Elektra Records) 

For a 60-year-old protest song, this sounds like this morning’s news feed. The repeated refrain ("'Cause we're the cops of the world, boys, we're the cops of the world") exudes irony, as the narrator boasts about installing puppet governments, exploiting resources, and crushing dissent, all while wrapping the brutality in the language of freedom and order. While it is one of the most effective anti-interventionist songs in American folk music, improbably, it sounds as if it may have somehow inspired current foreign relations policy. 

31. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart & Me (1968, from Tape From California, A&M Records)

Despite the title, this is not about classical music. It's a subtly radical act of ordinariness, and a postcard from one of rock history's most mythologized neighbourhoods. The lyrics describe a typical day shared by two couples in a Los Angeles house: Phil and his then-partner Karen, and his friend Andy  Wickham and his girlfriend Frances. We hear about an uneventful and slightly dreary round of picking up the Sunday paper, playing volleyball, firing up the barbecue. The "Judy" who stops by is possibly Judy Collins, although it might have been Judy Henske; both were prominent west coast folksingers. The baroque harpsichord and string quartet bring some mockery to the Laurel Canyon scene.

Laurel Canyon in this era was an enclave where musicians lived together, took drugs together, formed bands, broke up those bands, and formed other bands. The “Laurel Canyon: A Place in Time” documentary (2020, directed by Alison Ellwood) pulled back the curtain on that mythical world, immortalizing figures such as Mama Cass and Joni Mitchell as near-divine presences on a sun-drenched Mount Olympus. Ochs' song captures the same world from the inside: lived-in, slightly drowsy, and the exact opposite of a swingin’ scene. For a midwesterner who had raged at America from New York for a decade, finding beauty in the bourgeois, in a shared supper and the evening news, is both submission and its own kind of protest.

32. William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park and Escapes Unscathed (1969, from Rehearsals For Retirement, A&M Records)

Chicago, August 1968: police beat protesters in Lincoln Park while the Democratic Convention imploded. Ochs was there, and it destroyed something in him; hence, Rehearsals for Retirement's tombstone cover marking his spiritual death in Chicago.

The song imagines the Irish poet Yeats wandering through the carnage, his apocalyptic prophecies from "The Second Coming" grotesquely confirmed. The bitter joke is in the title: the poet escapes unscathed with his sonnets while real people bleed. Art predicts catastrophe but floats above it untouched.

For Ochs, who had naively believed protest songs could stop wars, that immunity of art to the disasters it foresees was a deeply personal, and ultimately fatal wound.

33. Is There Anybody Here? (1966, from Phil Ochs in Concert, Elektra Records)

The opening verse is deceptively gentle, evoking glory, loyalty, and duty in a way that seems to channel the singer’s own experiences as a cadet at the Staunton Military Academy in Virginia in the 1950s, when he graduated at the rank of sergeant.

The lyrics lull the unsuspecting listener into a sense of rote patriotism. Then the trap springs.

By the second verse, the image of wrapping a flag around "an early grave"  makes the song's true intent unmistakable, and by the end Ochs questions whether following orders takes away the blame for "murder by another name." And that's the phrase that lands hardest, deploying sarcasm as a time-released weapon.

34. Cross My Heart (1967, opening track of Pleasures of the Harbor, A&M Records)

This song marks a striking turning point in Ochs' career. It's the first track on Pleasures of the Harbor, and his first venture into orchestral instrumentation: a lush, "baroque-folk" sound far removed from his earlier acoustic protest songs. The lyrics describe a world where dreams and plans are far less solid than they appear. Nevertheless, it begins an optimistic next phase of a career that still seemed bound for much greater things.

Beginning with a diffident, tentative “I don’t know, but…”, he pledges to "cross my heart, and I hope to live," a proclamation that subverts the naive "hope to die" oath of childhood.

35. Bracero - From Phil Ochs in Concert (1966, Elektra Records)

A bracero was a migrant farm labourer brought to the U.S. from Mexico or Latin America under a 1942–1964 guest-worker program. Ochs' song rings with bitter sarcasm. A "friendly farmer" welcomes workers to California's golden fields, while the reality is backbreaking toil, sun, dust, substandard living conditions deducted from their wages, and the constant threat of replacement. The chorus's cheerful "welcome" mocks exploitation dressed up as opportunity. Recorded live, Ochs performs a Woody Guthrie-style portrait of labour abuse that remains uncomfortably relevant to the current immigration debate.

36. Lou Marsh - From All The News That's Fit to Sing (1964, Electra Records)

This track tells the true story of a New York City social worker who was murdered when he attempted to intervene in a confrontation involving four members of a street gang in Spanish Harlem. Marsh was a deeply principled man: a Baptist who had grown up in a Philadelphia ghetto and dedicated his life to community work after concluding that the institutional church was insufficient to combat the poverty and violence of inner-city life. Ochs’ lyrics depict the nervousness of the mid-century Manhattanite, pre-gentrification. That paranoia will later become a recurring theme in his music.