THE BRAT IS BACK: It’s not always...

THE BRAT IS BACK: It’s not always easy to get Sean Penn to pose for a picture or talk to the press (unless he’s promoting a movie he likes), but it was easy to get movieland’s leading Angry Young Man to tout his favorite songwriter, the late Phil Ochs. In fact, Rhino Records’ new collection of 14 unreleased Ochs demo recordings, “A Toast to Those Who Are Gone,” has a lengthy set of back-cover liner notes by Penn himself. The essay doesn’t reveal that many fresh insights into the legendary folk singer (after all, as Penn puts it: “He’d hung himself three years before I’d ever heard his voice”), but it does offer an intriguing glimpse of Ochs’ influence on a distant generation.

Penn explains that he first heard Ochs’ music as a teen-ager, when he heard his little brother playing an Ochs album as he searched for music to accompany a “Super-8 Vietnam epic” he had filmed. Penn also relates how he “drank too much” the first night he listened to Ochs’ songs; how he met Ochs’ daughter, Meegan (he called her up at 1:30 a.m. and introduced himself, saying “My name is Penn and I’m interested in makin’ a movie about your dad. Wanna talk about it?”) and how Penn prepared for a scene in the film “Taps” by playing excerpts from Ochs’ “That Was the President” before each take (“By the time the song had played through once, the entire cast and crew were in tears”).

Penn, who bears a striking resemblance to pictures of the young Ochs, terms the singer “my favorite all-time fighter.” He added that after first listening to his songs, “I began to feel a disturbing familiarity with his sense of hope in its contrast to the ever-present pain. I was in the midst of some ‘to the brink’ troubles of my own at that time, and it seemed, as it always does, that no one else could suffer to the degree we all claim as exclusive.”