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Written by Huw Spink

OCH/Dk,Dx/Interjection
(Scot. And Anglo-Irish)
Expr. Regret, irritation etc
From The Shorter English Dictionary

In an interview with Izzy Young in 1968 at the Folklore Centre in New York City after his return from the chaos and trauma of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, (in the interview during which Phil stated “I’ve always tried to hang onto the idea of saving the country, but at this point I could be persuaded to destroy it”) Phil was asked;

“…But how can you be an enemy of America in America? What can you do? Sabotage?”

To which Phil answered;

“No, not that. I might leave the country…I might go back to Scotland.”
If, by 1968 at least, the United States had become the stuff of grim reality, to Phil Scotland was the stuff of dreams. Scotland was the place of his mother’s youth, spent in comfort and something akin to luxury. The country that welcomed his father when the country of his birth shunned him (I’ll write more on that later). The country in which his parents met, fell in love and married. The country of his sister Sonny’s birth. The setting for his favourite movie Tunes of Glory (according to Marc Eliot at least). The country from where sprung the song that was at one time at least his favourite – My Bonnie Laddies Lang A-Growing. The country where Phil’s ashes were scattered, specifically from turret of Edinburgh castle, while The Flowers of the Forest floated alongside them, carried by a Caledonian breeze;

 ““I’ve seen the smiling of fortune beguiling,I’ve tasted her favours and felt her decay,
Sweet was her blessing, kind her caressing,
But now they are fled, fled far away.”

Phil spent the best part of six months in Edinburgh from February 1947, staying in his grandfather’s house and schooling in Liberton, to the south of the city. One can only imagine the kind of influence that the journey by ship across the Atlantic must have had on the young Phil’s already fertile imagination and daydreamy nature. However uncomfortable a reality it may have been up against the sea-bound adventuring Phil had become accustomed via the silver-screen this must have felt a very real adventure, a time spent lost amongst the sea, the sea that would crop up so powerfully in so many of Phil’s songs.
Phil, along with his mother Gertrude, brother Michael and sister Sonny, stayed at his grandparents’ house at 97 Mayfield Road, described by Michael Schumacher as a “ten-room stone mansion”, a house whose grandeur remains undiminished.

Set within a leafy suburb to the south of Edinburgh Mayfield Road remains, despite its relative proximity to the centre of the city, a world away the city life that the young Ochs family had become accustomed in Texas and latterly Far Rockaway, New York. Gertrude’s father, George Phin ran a couple of tobacconists in the city, one in Leith Street and the other a short bus ride from Mayfield Road at 92 South Clerk Street, at the very heart of the city’s university district. As with Phil’s paternal great-grandparents, George Phin’s father Philip (after whom Phil was named) also left Poland, arriving in Scotland having sometime before 1858 when George was born.
By the late 1800’s Edinburgh had a burgeoning Jewish community, certainly the largest in Scotland. The census of 1891 found the Phins living in Caledonian Crescent, which was also the site of Dalry Synagogue, where George Phin held his Bar mitzvah. There was also a synagogue on South Clerk Street, a short distance from George’s tobacconists. The picture emerges of a family at the heart of a community that welcomed them, a genuine home, that enabled George to offer his family the kind of a life that Jack’s family strove for in the United States but was unable to provide. No wonder Edinburgh became the place that Phil Ochs would later dream of returning.  

Phil’s songs are littered with references to a search for home, for a sense of belonging and a sense of place. Dissatisfaction and threat are everywhere, basic tenets of his early songs, where even the beauty of The Hills of West Virginia are rendered alien by the suspicious looks of the locals. Nowhere can we find signs of happiness, of celebration. In Cross My Heart even dreams appear cursed, built upon weak foundations that are bound to fall apart. In Tape From California he yearns for escape from New York City, (“I guess I’ll have to fly, it’s worth a try”), When in Rome has it’s “time for escape”, in My Life he is “like the drifter”, The World Began In Eden… has its call for “another chance, another place to start” with Phil becoming just another to head west wondering how it would all turn out.

A clue as to how it all turned out comes from the opening track of Greatest Hits with his appeal for a One Way Ticket Home, allied to an uncertainty as to where that ticket should take him; “I must have come from somewhere but I can’t recall the place”. Phil’s proclamation that “I would be in exile now but everywhere’s the same” is virtual proof that his escape has failed. As in I’m Tired (“Every face in the street is as cold as the air/ As hard as the pavement that I feel beneath my feet”) he walks the streets unrecognised, a nobody in a strange town, something that crops up again in Gas Station Women; “the more folks that I run across the less I seem to know”. . No wonder then he empathised with James Dean of Indiana and his portrayal of a “boy without a home/ torn with no tomorrow”. It is this “tomorrow” that he seeks in My Kingdom For A Car, but yet again his escape to “find a new land” is halted, this time by a traffic jam, a jokey almost throwaway line that none the less reveals much.

There is a bizarre atmosphere to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Me, a song disquieting perhaps because it refers directly to home, the home that elsewhere seems to have alluded him. Yet this is a home in name only, and rather than being a celebration it is instead a study of mundanity with Phil present but inert as the lives of others revolve around him. His only response is to “dream of the past”, of being a Boy In Ohio, of a time of simplicity and innocence – “I don’t believe I’ve had any more fun/then when I was a boy in Ohio” – a million miles away from the cynicism and boredom of adult life.
And the outcome of that that alienation? No More Songs.

Phil spent his career writing about the United States because he wanted to change it, to improve it because he loved it. Having lost his belief in himself as an American, the sense of America being his home he lost his reason to write;

“The troubadour comes from the country, falls by the factory,
Sliding on simple strings.
Armed with his anger, he sings of the danger,
He senses a stranger is in the wings.
But the fledgling has learned to fly, all of the innocence leaves his eye.
Echoes explode, rolled from the road,
The melody dies”
Floods Of Florence (1968)

There is little sign of the Phins in Edinburgh now. Dalry Synagogue closed in 1914, the synagogue on South Clerk street closed in 1920. 97 Mayfield Road still stands proudly, but perhaps, even with the Autumn sun shining upon it, somewhat gray and cold and domineering rather than homely.

The tobacconists on South Clerk Street is long gone. It is now a charity shop “Supporting Bereaved Parents”.

Phil never did return to Scotland. Instead he travelled the world, had his heart broken in Chile and his voice broken in Tanzania. He returned not to a place nor to a dream but to family and his sister Sonny’s house in Far Rockaway.

His ashes made it to Scotland however. Me and my girlfriend walked up to the castle on a sunny, cold day in October. We marvelled at the views from the castles walkway and photographed each other with glorious Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth behind us. We got to the Castles entrance but soon turned back, put off by the exorbitant entrance fee. We decided to pay our respects some other way.