Word: phil
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...cycle of sacrifice unwinds." "Crucifixion"--Phil Ochs...
THEY ADVERTISED this book: "The Sixties died on April 19, 19 6." Phil Ochs dangling from his belt jammed in the bathroom doorway; it marked the end, we are told, of an era that blew away with his ashes...
...know. The sixties died long before Phil Ochs wandered into his sister's bathroom in Far Rockaway, New York. And Marc Eliot makes a good case that Ochs did too. Phil Ochs went down slowly, painfully, and the actual moment of his death only confirmed what Ochs had guessed from the evidence of Chicago, or Kent State, or Chile. And by the time Ochs actually made his final break, the parts of his life that might have made his death the tombstone of his time had long since withered away...
Eliot's biography captures the tragedy of Ochs' life as well as anything written about him yet. It does what biographies are supposed to do; it provides a detailed account of Ochs' life from beginning to end. Through Phil Ochs' life Eliot tries to capture the essence of the '60s. However, it becomes the story not of the death of an era, but of its still-birth...
...Phil Ochs in a gold lame suit never made it, and after a few too many deaths -- the Kennedys, King, Malcolm and Medgar Evers, Allende and Jara--Ochs lost the ability even to try. He pulled himself out of John Train with enough time left to see a few friends. Then, years after he died, he hung himself. In the end, Eliot leaves him with Citizen Kane's epitaph: "it's become a very clear picture. He was the most honest man who ever lived, with a streak of crookedness a yard wide. He was a liberal and reactionary...