In 1970, after gaining fame as a protest singer, Phil Ochs decided to go back to his original influences. On Greatest Hits, he paid tribute to country singers like Buck Owens, Lefty Frizzell, and Merle Haggard, along with Elvis Presley. In further homage to The King, Ochs commissioned Nudie to replicate Elvis’s famous gold lame suit.
Ochs promoted the album and his new direction in the suit. The most notorious of those shows was later released as The Gunfight at Carnegie Hall.
Ochs felt the protest singer America needed wasn’t a folkie, as he had been framed up till then, but a combination of Che Guevera and Elvis.
A bomb threat stopped the first of the two Carnegie Hall shows. During intermission Ochs punched out the ticket booth glass trying to help patrons get back in, so he played the second show with a severed thumb tendon. At one point, the power was shut off and the audience, well versed in protest lingo, chanted “we want power” until it was turned back on.
Phil praised Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard (who most of his New York folkie contemporaries considered right wing hillbillies) to lukewarm response. He said Haggard was likely the next Hank Williams. The last song of the long night was “(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such As I”, which, of course, was made famous by Hank Snow, and later covered by Elvis.
Looking around about Phil and his suit, I read about a new documentary about him, which I saw at the theatre the other day.
The film makes brief mention of “The Gunfight” and “The Suit”, and his early country influences. However, only songs from his folk repertoire ran throughout, not later ones like “Gas Station Women” from Greatest Hits which clearly connects to Haggard and “Harold’s Super Service” with steel guitar and backing vocals by Buck Owens soundalike Bobby Wayne.
Fill ‘er up with love
Please won’t you, mister?
Just the hi-test is what I used to say
But that was before I lost my baby
I’ll have a dollar’s worth of regular today
Unfortunately, Greatest Hits was Ochs’s last studio LP. It had more country songs like (Gram Parsons prequel) “Chords of Fame” as well as the folk style ballads Ochs is most famous for. In one, he is in denial over Nixon’s election, but others like “Jim Dean of Indiana” differed again from his topical and protest material, about the hazards not of war but of celebrity.
Phil’s trouble with mental illness got worse after he released Greatest Hits. His career deteriorated too, but he continued his political involvement. Many dismissed his belief that he was being followed by the FBI and CIA as paranoid ranting. The film didn’t say that after his suicide in 1976, it was revealed there were more than 500 pages of files on him.
Phil Ochs, 1966
Ochs also talked about getting either Colonel Tom Parker or Colonel Harland Sanders to manage his new career. If only he had.
