Customer Reviews

Death of a Rebel/a Biography of Phil Ochs

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

as super-"och'sfan", i collect everything i can on my favorite singer. i found this book about a year & a half ago in a used bookstore in calgary. well written by an old friend of phil och's it is a sympathetic, loving, look back on a very remarkable life. i felt much the same as when i first heard my first och's song, cruxifiction, when i was 23. hearing this stunning peice about the inevitability of fate, i was stunned, overwhelmed, and ultimatley uplifted. it made me want to collect every album (i know, i know, that dates me.) & any literary info on this man. i would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants understand their world, & to those who remember when music mattered.

i'm a huge fan of phil ochs and enjoyed this boiography a lot. the author didn't try to sugar coat phil's bad side, which is good. i think he did a great job of covering his whole life and showing the reader what kind of a person phil was. another reviewer said the ochs family was outraged by eliot's portrayal of phil. this is not the case. sonny ochs reccomends it (along with the other biography 'there but for fortune') on phil's web site and eliot openly admits in the epilogue that michael ochs was angered for a few months by how he talked about phil in his last days.

great read. i'd reccomend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the life of phil ochs. the only thing i didn't like was that the author didn't include many of his personal stories involving phil, but that's okay.

I've always had a lot of mixed feelings about the career of Phil Ochs; he always seemed to fall just short enough of the mark enough times as a performer that you had to remember that there were several times when he hit the mark dead center and then some. From the information Marc Eliot gives forth in this very well-written, powerful book, Phil Ochs was a man whose fantasies were so intergrated with his realities that when reality won out, he had nowhere else to go. There's not much more to say---you can "what if" the poor man's choices 'til kingdom come and, in the end, what's left is a very talented guy whose life lacked enough that he chose to end it. How tragic.

I am about 2/3rds of the way through reading this book. It is pretty weak writing (but not bad), and the author doesn't seem to be able to really connect-the-dots or provide a clear overall view of Ochs, but the facts seem to be there. If you can read between the lines, a full and sad picture of Phil Ochs emerges. For me, it's a little disturbing to read what a jerk Ochs was a lot of the time... except maybe when he was singing. He seems to have had serious problems with women.

I bought this second-hand from my local library . This is an OK book. I've heard the other bio "There But For Fortune" is allegedly much better, but this one was written by a friend/associate of Phil's, which gave him an eye-witness account to some of the stuff, but doesn't neccessarily make him a good writer.

(I grew up listening to my older brother's Phil Ochs albums. I liked a lot of his stuff... and was broken hearted in 76 when I heard he committed suicide.)

I read the book with real interest but I found it somewhat patchy with odd innacuracies. There are chunks of Phil's early life where there is a real feel for the guy whereas when he was at his peak, the account sounds spasmodic. What it hasn't really integrated is an overall view, in particular Phil's drive for success as opposed to his very real idealism for the causes he supported. Marc's shared interest with Phil was with the movies which creates limits in his perception - the annex drawn from the FBI file starts to fill in the gaps.The guy was fated by his vulnerabilities and the downturn in American radical politics which caused his downfall. Ironically, as time has gone on Phil's songs have become more relevant than ever, with only an occasional change of name.

Phil Ochs was a great artist, Marc Eliot has a lot of nerve to call himself a friend, he did all he could to destroy Phil's lasting image by overemphasizing his tragedies in the most distasteful and vulgar fashion imaginable. Ochs was indeed an artist, rebel. His life was an inspiration, his death a great tragedy. Eliot's book is painful to read, and understandably angered the Ochs' family. This is exploitation and sensationalism at its very worst. Do yourself a favor, skip this garbage and find a copy of Michael Schumacher's more restrained and honest account, "There but for Fortune".

I didn't know a lot about Phil Ochs though I knew who he was and I knew about a few of his songs. The book was insightful and full of details surrounding Phil's troubled life. I got the impression that he could have been in the major league had it not been for his own ego getting in the way and also maybe if he had concentrated more on his singer/songwriter career instead of wasting his time on the anti-establishment scene, he would have made it to the top. The author did an excellent job of putting it all on the table in a way that gave us a look behind the scenes. I'd recommend this to anyone wanting to know more about Phil's life and the 60's folk scene.