Phil Ochs

I never realized, until I finally made my way, as an adult, to New York and Los Angeles, how much of the non-Baptist culture of the Big Wide World that I was barely aware of.

It's not that my parents ever cut us off from things. It's that we were raised with a certain set of principles, and much of what the outside world offered, went against those principles. So, we had, and have, a culture. One that exists outside the view of the rest of the world. And this, by the way, is true of every human being. We live inside our own worldview and culture. So, I'm not slamming Baptists. Just stating a fact.

When I was five, our folks moved us from Arkansas, where I was born, to Anaheim, California where my dad eventually became pastor of Trinity Baptist Church. Missionary Baptist. (In the past, when Northerners asked me what a Missionary Baptist was, I would tell them, "They dropped out of an association that dropped out of an association that used to be Southern Baptist. So, they're two degrees more conservative than Southern Baptist." The look of horror on their faces was priceless.)

But, when I was in 9th grade, I believe, we moved to West Monroe, Louisiana. This would be -- god, I hate trying to remember dates -- 1968? Then, a year later, we were in southeast Texas in the golden triangle.What I remember is that my family watched the moon landing from a flickering TV in a big, old wooden house in Buna, just north of the blinking yellow light.

So, probably I was a sophomore. I loved Top 40, having discovered it in the summer of '67 when I got my first transistor radio. The first record I bought was "A Little Bit Me" by the Monkees. I was so in love with them. I had all the souvenir books and picture books. I didn't know those publications were meant for girls.

But, really, Top 40 was my peek into the outside world. It was radical enough! Protest music and folk music were way off my radar, unless they crawled in through groups like the Byrd. I never even heard a Bob Dylan vocal until I was an adult. By that I mean sit and listen to it and know it's Bob Dylan. But the same was true, for me, about Broadway music.

I do remember one song, though. I didn't know where I heard it or who it was, but I loved it. Something about the utter clarity of the lyric, and the fierce anger we all felt as we were being sent into the meatgrinder of Vietnam. There was a draft back then, so you had no choice, if your number came up.

The simplicity of "I Ain't Marchin' Anymore" still makes my blood pressure rise, as I'm immediately transported back to that era.



The present generation of soldier is volunteer. I think this is why the public is not more outraged at the madness of Bush and Obama's foreign escapades. Also, the war is mostly kept off the front pages, and, Wikileaks aside, we don't really know what's going on.

But that singer's name was Phil Ochs. There is a new documentary out about him that I intend to see. Here is the trailer:

Create Peace Through Inception?

"Inception" is a movie based on the premise that if you plant an idea deep enough in someone, it will change or alter their behavior.

Yesterday, I posted about this study showing how facts don't alter anyone's opinion about anything.

Recently, I asserted that music is an ultimate way to create peace. What is my evidence? How did this whole line of thought begin?

It began on a ship in the dead of night.

A Ray Bradbury dead of night. (In "Something Wicked This Way Comes," the description of 1am. Not so bad. 2am. Getting later. 3am. The dead of the night. 4am! I don't remember the details, but there was always something so delicious about the progression of the dead of night.)

So, I, having retired early, was now up and wide-eyed at 3am, dressed in black casual slacks and shirt, creeping down the corridor, saying hello to the night crew with their mops and vacuums.

Peeking into the night club, I looked around to see if the partiers had gone to bed. They had. The bar was now dark and empty. Too dark to work in. I pushed the secret button to "late night," and a glow settled over the gleaming black Yamaha grand, freshly tuned but showing its constantly pounding wear.

I probably played through a few of the pieces I was composing, at the time. And then, at some point, I went into my zone. When I'm in the zone, I pace. I talk to myself. I go up and down the aisles, bumping into cocktail tables. (The night crew all think I'm funny. They pretty much leave me alone, at first, until they get used to me and we end up making a choir together.)

Finally, I sat down and looked at the piano, thinking about the current foreverwar, and why war happens. And how sad it all is.

The image that came was simple. It's one we actually witness and experience every day of our lives.

I saw a huge room. It was filled with people of every type of cultural, political and religious division.

And they were all listening to a beautiful piece of music.

And it was perfectly still. Perfect stillness. And peace.

I thought about how religious and political figures, currently in the media, are all saying they want peace -- and how ironic that all of them think the only path to peace is by creating war and violence. As if "peace" were some physical shoreline just over the horizon, and "war" is a living creature, or a big storm, a physical obstacle getting in the way.

This same moment hit me when I was playing John Lennon's IMAGINE piano in Gabi and Alec Clayton's front yard. How the music from this instrument created this space of perfect peace.

Can you go into foreign territory and create peace?

It's exactly what the gay men's choruses do, for instance, when they go to a small town, like the San Francisco group did this past year, on the Freedom Tour.  

But how do you do it on a macro scale? If all the soldiers in the Middle East, for instance, start singing the same song, will they stop fighting? Remember the stories of the Civil War and WWI soldiers who, at night, were so close, they could hear each other? And sing Christmas songs together? Even cross the lines and share a drink with each other? How warm and fuzzy are those stories, those moments of shared humanity.

And yet, the stories end the same way. The next day, they continued slaughtering each other.

No. I'm not naive.

But what I do know is that when people who normally don't sit in the same room together are all joined together in song, it changes things. It makes you realize that peace is not a foreign destination. It's an achievable reality. For a little while, at least.

But maybe there are ways to extend those moments.

In "Inception," they plant the idea through dreams, and insist that it won't "take" unless it's deeply implanted. In real life, we can't jump into dreams, but we can create them, and by creating music along with those dreams, we can not only implant the idea of peace, but create peace while doing it.

Easter Blossoms & Gandhi.

I found a statue of Gandhi in Union Square, coming out of a grove of trees which were rich with pink, aromatic flowers, as if sprung to life by his steps and his words and deeds. Non-violent resistance to oppression. Justice. Dignity. It was the same set of principles I was taught growing up as a Christian. The same principles I heard at the University of Judaism when I sang and spoke with the students there.

"My optimism rests on my believe in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop non-violence...a gentle way to shake the world." Gandhi.

Infinite possibilities. Like this?

I Enter This Battle Gravely - John Fitzgerald & Steve

Another piece from our January 2010 performance of New World Waking at St. Clement's. Here is John Fitzgerald and myself singing.

"First they came for the socialists..."

Jim, Piper and I went to the Holocaust Museum two days ago, and it's really impossible to put into words what it felt like. The devastation that occurs in your soul as you witness how easy it is to convince the world that this group or that group is responsible for all the problems they're experiencing is devastating.

But you learn that this wasn't merely about the Nazis. The hate thrown at Jews began long ago after the destruction of the temple, shortly after the death of Jesus. They were flung across the world, herded into ghettos, decried as "Christ-killers," banned from "polite society," forced into conversions, driven from one country to another, blamed for disease, poverty, etc. etc. etc. until it culminated into Hitler's decision to exact a "final solution."

I'm reposting a video I shot a couple of years ago while on a cruise. Boris was a passenger who told me his own incredible story of how he managed, beyond all hope, to be saved from Buchenwald, a concentration camp.



Even today, people are surprised to hear about our own witch hunts during the 50s, the millions of murders in Stalinist Russia, the millions killed by Pol Pot, terrorist actions of the KKK, a group that still exists to this day in this country, the genocides in Sudan and Rwanda, the religious hatred of Al Qaeda -- and it goes on and on.

As injustice, war and hate continue to fill the world, what all of us must do, as Jim demonstrates through the voice of Zero Mostel is to never forget. And to create peace and justice around us in any way we can.