Fanfare, Ache, Despair Unfold in Ochs Retrospective : PHIL OCHS “Farewells & Fantasies” Elektra Traditions/Rhino, * * * 1/2

Sometimes true revolutionaries are not those who rush ahead into change but those who stand steadfast while the world turns around them. That may well be the legacy of Phil Ochs--the folk singer, activist and tragic hero whose body of work is perhaps the most accurate artifact of the idealism that carried young America from the death of John F. Kennedy through Watergate.

As collected in this comprehensive three-CD set, compiled by Ochs’ brother Michael and daughter Meegan along with Rhino executive Gary Stewart, the music also tells the story of a fragile individual crushed by disappointment.

Tortured by personal demons and alcoholism, his progressive politics increasingly anachronistic, Ochs took his own life in 1976 at age 35. But as Mark Kemp observes in his illuminating liner notes, the singer was a broken man long before that.

Like Bob Dylan, whose shadow he could never escape, Ochs styled himself as Woody Guthrie via James Dean. The best of his early material carries a swagger to match the ideals, coalescing in ringing anthems (“Too Many Martyrs,” “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”) and biting satire (“Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” “Draft Dodger Rag”) that were rallying cries in the antiwar and civil rights movements.

But Ochs could be as maddening as he was moving. He often spouted rhetoric, and was prone to inelegant, sweeping generalizations--in “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” he dismisses the entire state as racist and ignorant. Yet in “There but for Fortune” and “The War Is Over,” he wrote two of the era’s most gracious and individual statements.

As the ‘60s moved on, though, he became a man out of time. Dylan distanced himself from the protest movement, flower-power dominated pop culture and Yippie theatrics replaced considered dialectics in youth activism. Ochs was a voice in a vacuum--no album of his ever charted higher than No. 149.

By 1967 he was grasping for new ways to communicate, working with other musicians and arrangers and producing such gems as “Pleasures of the Harbor,” an aching cry for emotional stability. But it wasn’t to be.

In 1968 his spirit was crushed by the violence surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago. His last two studio albums were filled with dejection, cynicism and despair, and though he lived six more years, he retreated from public life.

Kemp draws a line from Ochs to the Clash, Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine as pop activist successors. Perhaps so. But no collection from any of those acts could make quite the personal testament--flaws, failures and all--as this set.

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