Eclectic Company: A Tale of Two Biopics (and an Autobiography)

Two recently released bio-documentaries about musicians have just played independent film centers in New York, and I was able to catch both. Ken Bowser’s Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune about the late topical folksinger famous for compositions such as “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “Love Me, I’m A Liberal,” and “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends,” followed the songwriter’s prolific, though brief, career and personal decline into mental illness magnified by alcohol and drug abuse, which ended with his suicide much too young at 35.

Bowser’s 2010 project owes much to work done for an earlier Ochs film — Michael Korolenko’s 1984 work Chords of Fame — which featured interviews with many people who had known Ochs well, from the late Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin to the late musician Dave Van Ronk, including many other activists and musicians who were also gone before Bowser began working on There But For Fortune. Their interviews are excerpted for Bowser’s film, but surprisingly, Korolenko barely receives credit for all his recorded output that made it into the film, and his surname is misspelled in the quickly crawling thank yous that hardly note the extent of Korolenko’s contribution.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that There But For Fortune does real justice to Phil Ochs’s memory, using loads of footage of Ochs himself speaking and singing many of his sarcastic, ironic, witty and just plain brilliant protest anthems, intercut with archival news footage of the civil rights and Vietnam war eras, and newer interviews with Ochs’ younger brother Michael, who latterly managed the singer’s career, and their older sister Sonny, who’s kept Phil’s music alive by presenting young performers covering Phil’s songs in concerts all over the country. There But For Fortune is jam-packed with loving but clear-eyed reminiscences, including commentary from Ochs’s daughter Meegan, his ex-wife Alice (who passed away last November), peace activist Cora Weiss, and patriarch of the protest folk song movement, Pete Seeger. In considering the changed world in which Ochs found himself — at the legal end of segregation, and then at the end of the Vietnam war, having seen the fruits of his protests — Bowser’s interviewees rightly wonder if Ochs had run out of reasons to keep writing and singing. Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune is in limited commercial release, so you might have to wait for the DVD to see it, but you won’t be sorry if you make a special effort to do so.

The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, the story of the GRAMMY-winning klezmer music stars by director Erik Greenberg Anjou, is a fly on the wall documentary about the struggles of a hardworking and talented band to make a financial success worthy of their international celebrity, while coping with the group’s internal troubles brought on by the conflicting personal needs of the band’s members. There are wonderful musical performances and lovely moments as band members rehearse, travel, and perform, including recurring references to their 20th anniversary Town Hall concert featuring special guests and a cast of dozens. But the film left me vaguely disappointed. Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many similar stories fictionalized and factualized in the HBO series Entourage, in feature films like Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do, and in reality shows like MTV’s Making The Band, to be truly surprised by The Klezmatics’ difficulties in keeping it together. For viewers new to the esoteric genre of klezmer music — a style which The Klezmatics have expanded from its Yiddish language and Jewish spiritual roots to incorporate contemporary themes such as human rights and anti-fundamentalism and eclectic musical influences such as Arabic, African, Latin and Balkan rhythms, as well as jazz and punk — the band’s 20-year career arc and brief breakout general audience success may be more surprising than what appears to be the story of a band kind of fizzling out. Listen to their music and learn more at www.klezmatics.com.

At last week’s after-screening “talk back” (screening and aftermath were both part of the New York Jewish Film Festival, co-sponsored by Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum), five of the band’s members joined Anjou and a Lincoln Center film program curator to explore the process of making On Holy Ground. Anjou admitted that during the first few years of filming, he’d gathered wonderful B-roll material as The Klezmatics rehearsed, toured, and performed in weird and wonderful concert settings, but that the band members’ reserve had given him a story without a central conflict; persuading the band to open up and reveal the tremors and temblors caused in part by trumpet player and arranger Frank London’s increasing absences as he accepted more work outside The Klezmatics required enormous trust on all sides. Getting down to tachlis (Yiddish for brass tacks), violinist Lisa Gutkin is seen voicing the ensemble’s frustration with London’s failure to communicate about planned absences and changes of schedule at a tense band meeting over bagels and lox at the home of vocalist and Yiddish music archivist Lorin Sklamberg. The others nod along, and London admits in an after-meeting interview that he should be more upfront and clear about his need to find better paying and more frequent work to support his family. Apparently he hasn’t gotten there yet — rumor was that London would be one of the band members speaking after the screening, but although the date was cleared with him well in advance, and he’d accepted the gig, on the night in question, London was MIA.

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Christine Lavin’s memoir Cold Pizza For Breakfast: A Mem-wha??, is the excuse for a tour of libraries and book signings, and earlier this week Lavin alit at my sisters’ local, the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, where she read, and sang a few songs, and told some of the book’s anecdotes in paraphrases.

My mom is a big Christine Lavin fan, as are political song duo Emma’s Revolution, so we four trooped in from the precipitation to surprise Christine. Which we did, and she surprised us in turn, by calling Pat and Sandy up to perform “Swimming to the Other Side,” Pat’s song that was the subject of an All Thing’s Considered piece, and reminding me that I booked Christine in her first actual concert performance about a million light years ago. Lavin has made some big fans in Lake Charles having performed her baton-twirling lagniappe at the end of her Banners’ concert. Well you all can satisfy some of your craving for more Christine eating up Cold Pizza For Breakfast. It’s genuinely tasty. www.christinelavin.com.