The Mayor of MacDougal Street (33 page)

Pete himself was kind of embarrassed by the whole business. He had always felt that the music was the important thing—the man is nothing; the work is everything—and he thought that a lot of performers who deserved a national hearing were depriving themselves of an opportunity. His basic attitude was “For God’s sake boys, leave me behind; just leave me one bullet.” Of course, we paid absolutely no attention to him. Our position was, “Sorry, Pete, old man, but you’re a symbol.” And although that organization did not stay together, and in any case
Hootenanny
was so laughably awful that it barely lasted a season, that flap really did help put an end to the blacklist.
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My politics had never been a secret, and I continued to show up and play for benefits whenever asked and to work with various radical organizations. As in the past, I rarely sang political songs, but there were exceptions even to that rule. The night of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was working down at the Gaslight, and I opened my set with “This Land Is Your Land” and closed it with “The International,” including the verse that goes, “We want no condescending saviors.” I cannot remember any incident in history that made me feel more lefty than that business. I thought Khrushchev was being an opportunist and an asshole, but he had every right to make a deal with another country to put missiles on their turf—the United States had made a deal with Turkey to do exactly the same thing and nobody made any big issue of it. So at that point, to all intents and purposes, I was a better Stalinist than most of the Stalinists. They were all running around trying to find some kind of a deal, while we Trotskyists went down to the UN to demonstrate in support of Cuba and their damn missiles. Truth to tell, I did not want the missiles there; they made me nervous. Nonetheless, fair is fair.

I was encouraged by a lot of the changes that were happening in the 1960s, but as an orthodox leftist I was also a very strong critic of the student movement and the New Left. Of course, I agreed with a lot of their
stances—I was strongly pro-civil rights and strongly antiwar—but most of those people were not really radicals, just a bunch of very pissed-off liberals. They had no grounding, and indeed no interest, in theory, and their disdain for studying history and learning economics infuriated me. The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood—and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another. They wanted the world to change, but essentially it was a petty bourgeois movement that had no connection with what was really going on. The working class at least has some power—if the working class folds its arms, the machinery stops—and as for the ruling class, its power is obvious. But what power does the middle class have? They have the power to talk: yak, yak, yak. To interpret, reinterpret, and re-re-reinterpret. And that is the history of the New Left in a nutshell.

When it came to political music, I looked on most of what was being written around me with a similarly jaundiced eye. My feeling was that nobody has ever been convinced that they were wrong about anything by listening to a song, so when you are writing a political song, you are preaching to the choir. Of course, the choir needs songs, and when a group sings together, that builds solidarity. When the cops were coming down on them with the dogs, the clubs, and the cattle prods, the civil rights workers would be standing there singing “We are not afraid”—and you better believe they were afraid, but the singing helped. It had a real function, and in that situation it was very important. But when it came to singing these things in a coffeehouse or at a concert, I always felt that politics is politics and music is music. Brecht was a Stalinist, but his best songs are not Stalinist songs. Brecht’s work expressed a
weltanschauung
, a worldview, and that view was often consonant with radical politics, but as a poet and a songwriter, Brecht was more of a philosopher than a politician. And when it came to Paxton, or Ochs, or Dylan, I liked their songs when they were well written, regardless of what they were about, and when they were not well written, I had no interest.

My attitude is essentially that of a craftsman, and I thought a lot of times the politics got in the way of the craft. Also, there is a built-in flaw to topical songs, which is that if you live by the newspaper, you die by the newspaper. You may expend your greatest efforts and do some of your best writing about an incident that will be forgotten in six weeks. I mean, Phil
Ochs was one of my best friends and I love a good many of his songs, but it always struck me as a tragedy that so much of Phil’s material became dated so quickly. I remember when I heard him sing his song about William Worthy, I thought, “That’s not one of Phil’s best, but it doesn’t matter, because two years down the line he won’t be able to sing it anymore.” And sure enough, he couldn’t, because nobody remembered who William Worthy was. But unfortunately that was also true of some of his other material that I liked a lot more. Paxton dealt with that kind of planned obsolescence by disciplining himself to the point that if you give him a topic, he can give you a song, just like that. Len Chandler did the same thing; for a while he had a radio show in LA where he would improvise songs over the air from the daily newspaper. And if you have that kind of skill, I suppose you can keep going indefinitely as a topical songwriter. But nothing less than that will do, and very few people can do that or would want to, year in and year out. I think that was one of the things that destroyed Phil, in the end: he had painted himself into a corner, and he tried to work his way out of it by doing things like “Pleasures of the Harbor,” but they never had the immediacy of his topical material, and he knew it.

When I first met Phil, he was working at a place on 3rd Street called the Third Side. It was the same story as with Dylan: Somebody was making the rounds of the clubs, happened to hear him, and came barging into the Kettle of Fish and said, “There’s a guy over at the Third Side who’s really fantastic. You’ve gotta check him out.” I don’t think he had been in town for more than a week or so, and as I remember, the owner of the club was letting him crash there as well, sleeping on the pool table.

Phil was very much his own man, right from the beginning. For one thing, although he was never going to be nominated to any best-dressed lists, he was one of the last of the jacket-and-tie holdouts. He used to wear this thing that had once been a blue suit, but he had worn it so long that, if you had got him to stand still, you could have shaved in your reflection in the back of the jacket. He had a way with neckties, though. I remember one that looked like it was made out of crepe paper, which he carried around in his back pocket to use for formal occasions.
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Musically, what struck me first about Phil’s work was that he was a very interesting extension of Bob Gibson. He had Bob’s approach to chords and melodic lines, and also a lot of Bob’s guitar style, but he had harnessed all of this for political commentary, which Bob was not all that interested in doing. Later on, when he and Bob were collaborating on some songs, it was perfect, because it was like Bob collaborating with his political self and Phil collaborating with his nonpolitical self.

Phil’s chord sense was quite advanced, and he was the only person around aside from Gibson who used the relative minor and secondary keys. He was also one of the few songwriters on that scene who knew how to write a bridge. He was no Jerome Kern, but considering the limitations almost everybody else was struggling with, his work stood out. That may in part explain why he was not a very influential songwriter. There were a few Ochs clones, but not many, and that was probably because most of the people who wanted to sound like him couldn’t do it. He was also a surprisingly effective guitarist—not a virtuoso by any means, but he filled in all the spaces and never lost the impetus. And man, he pounded the shit out of his instruments. He borrowed a guitar from me once at a festival, and you can still see where his flat-pick gouged into the top.

As a lyricist, there was nobody like Phil before and there has not been anybody since. That is not to say that I liked everything he wrote, but he had a touch that was so distinctive that it just could not be anybody else. He had been a journalism student before he became a singer, and he would never sacrifice what he felt to be the truth for a good line. In a way that was a shame, because he would have come up with more good lines if he had been willing to compromise now and then. But at its best, there was a deftness to his writing that went beyond straight journalism. He wrote a song about the conservatism of big labor in that period called “Links on the Chain,” and its last line was, “It’s only fair to ask you boys, now which side are you on?” That is goddamn good. There is a dialectic to that line; it has a history, and all of that is right there. A lot of people I knew on the working-class left were upset by that song—they felt he was using “Which Side Are You On?” to attack the people it was written for—but as far as I was concerned, he was laying it on the line to those guys, and that was just what the situation called for. And he not only called ’em the way he saw ’em but made the call a work of art. Phil was very prolific for a while, and he committed
as much hackwork as almost any other songwriter of the period, but when that boy cooked, he really cooked.

Phil and I fought like cats and dogs, about politics and everything else. I was a socialist; he was a left liberal. I was a materialist and he was a mystic. So we could argue about everything from the meaning of life to yesterday’s headlines. I thought a lot of his stances were too simplistic, which was typical of that whole crowd. His positions would make sense in a limited way, but he had not really thought them through. Like when he wrote “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” I understood that he had just been down there and had been horrified by what he was seeing, but I thought that singling out Mississippi as a racist hellhole was unfair to the other forty-nine states. As Malcolm X used to say, “There’s down south, and there’s up south.” Without all the activists who were from there, none of that movement would have happened, and having some northerner come down and shit all over Mississippi was unfair to the people who were living there and trying to fix up their state. And it was also too damn easy.

Like a lot of people on that scene, Phil was essentially a Jeffersonian democrat who had been pushed to the left by what was happening around him. Two consecutive Democratic presidents had turned out to be such disappointments that it forced a lot of liberals into a sort of artificial left-wing stance, and Phil was of that stripe. That may seem a surprising thing to say about the man who wrote “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” but I think it is accurate. He had believed in the liberal tradition, and it had betrayed him, and naturally he had a special contempt for the people who espoused lukewarm liberal views but were supporting the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, the crackdown on the student movement. Someone like John Wayne—an out-and-out conservative, prowar patriot—could earn Phil’s admiration in a way. As a matter of fact, Wayne was one of his heroes, and he always believed that if he had somehow gotten a chance to talk with him, he could have won Wayne over to the revolution.

I must add that, along with our honest disagreements, Phil and I also had a lot of very good
dis
honest disagreements. We both loved to argue, and quite often he would take a position just to be ornery and annoy me. (Me, I was utterly sincere all the time, of course . . . ) In an argument, Phil’s weapon of choice was the rapier. He would lead you down a primrose path to the place where he had an ambush set, and then he would skewer you
with a one-liner. If Bob Hope had been a lefty, he would have been very much like Phil.

Dylan was never as devoted to politics as Phil was, but I think that if you could have managed to pin him down, his views were roughly similar. He was a populist and was very tuned in to what was going on—and, much more than most of the Village crowd, he was tuned in not just to what was going on around the campuses but also to what was going on around the roadhouses. But it was a case of sharing the same mood, not of having an organized political point of view. Bobby was very sensitive to mood, and he probably expressed that better than anyone else. Certainly, that was Phil’s opinion. Phil felt that Bobby was the true zeitgeist, the voice of their generation.

One of the great myths of that period is that Bobby was only using the political songs as a stepping stone, a way to attract attention before moving on to other things. I have often heard that charge leveled against him, and at times he has foolishly encouraged it. The fact is, no one—and certainly not Bobby—would have been stupid enough to try to use political music as a stepping stone, because it was a stepping stone to oblivion. Bobby’s model was Woody Guthrie, and Woody had written a lot of political songs but also songs about all sorts of other subjects, and Bobby was doing the same thing.

Woody was an inspiration not only to Bobby but to almost all the songwriters on that scene, and in some ways he had a very baleful influence on their work. Woody was a genius, but he was often sloppy. He had created this wonderful, Will Rogers-style persona, and as part of that he fostered the myth that his songs just appeared out of the air—that he did not have to sweat over them, and rewrite, and polish. Bobby bought the myth lock, stock, and barrel, and that was always a problem with his work. He would write an incredible line, then follow it with a line that was utterly meaningless, and he never felt the need to go back and work that through. He always seemed to think that it was easier to write a new song than to fix an old one. That was probably true for him, at least at that time, but you can see the result in his work. Phil was a much more careful craftsman, and that is one of the reasons I liked him so much: he really took care of his craft.

One thing that was striking about both Bobby and Phil in those days was their sheer output. Bobby had a much stronger background in traditional material, and when he first came to town he had a large repertoire of older
songs, but once he started writing his own stuff he took off at a great clip. As for Phil, he was a phenomenon. He wrote so fast that all you could do was stand back and say, “Wow!” Of course, both of them wrote a lot of turkeys, but the proportion of good stuff was very high. And I think that was really a product of the milieu—they were the tip of a large and growing iceberg. Everybody was showing off for their friends. You wrote for yourself, of course, and for the public, but you were also writing for the community, and that was a very well-informed and critical audience. The approval of your peers meant more than a three-column write-up in the
Times
, because after all, that’s what Shelton did for a living—he had to write somebody up, and it was your turn—but the approval of Joni Mitchell really counted for something.