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Weathermen
Tim Hardin, Jackson C. Frank, and Phil Ochs
BY DOUGLAS WOLK

In the early ’60s, the folk scene was simmering with possibility, and around 1965 that possibility started to become reality. After Bob Dylan’s career took off, record companies rushed to sign other bright young men with acoustic guitars, elegant lyrics, and a reputation among their peers — and, perhaps, songs that pop stars could turn into hits. Of Dylan’s ’60s contemporaries, Tim Hardin did the best for himself as a songwriter: his "Reason To Believe" and "If I Were a Carpenter" are more or less standards now (they were hits for Rod Stewart and Bobby Darin, respectively).

None of Hardin’s albums is still in print in its original form; The Best of Tim Hardin: The Millennium Collection (Polydor) edits his first three, recorded between 1966 and 1968, down to their high points. Hardin’s voice was warm and light, and his words were full of wounded optimism, but he was a melodist above all; set to his tunes, words that would seem maudlin on the page are rife with subtlety. He was also open to musical possibilities beyond folk; his third album was recorded live with a jazz group, and that gave him a chance to stretch out with his voice ("You Upset the Grace of Living When You Lie" appears here). It’s not widely known, but Hardin even sang on stage with the German experimental rock group Can a few times in the early ’70s. That didn’t work out, however. A few years ago, Can bassist Holger Czukay told me that after one show, Hardin said, "Guys, one thing: you don’t give me the impression that you have ever played for your lives."

If Hardin was a rocker’s folkie, Jackson C. Frank was a folkie’s folkie. His sole, homonymous album (newly reissued on the British label Sanctuary) was produced by Paul Simon and features Al Stewart on one song; its magnificently assured opener, "Blues Run the Game," has been covered by everyone from Nick Drake to Bert Jansch and Simon & Garfunkel. Frank had the gift, shared by the early Dylan and very few others, of writing songs that sounded archetypal — as if something bigger and older than himself were singing through him. In fact, his singing and guitar playing are archetypal in much the same way, and that may have worked against him: he seems less a distinctive performer than the abstracted and distilled voice of deep melancholy.

Phil Ochs’s voice was a doctrinaire folksinger’s, with the precise enunciation and prissy vibrato of a Pete Seeger acolyte — but in the 1967-’70 period covered by his own entry in the Millennium Collection series, his arrangements went past adventurous and all the way to bizarre. While Dylan was going electric, Ochs was scurrying everywhere else. "The Crucifixion" (1967), a very long metaphorical ballad about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, is held in place only by Ochs’s singing. Its accompaniment is an orchestral fantasia inspired as much by Stockhausen as by the weirder things the Beatles were getting up to that year; it starts out atonal and eventually becomes almost free-form.

Ochs’s experiments were sometimes excessive, but he actually did find his own way out of the folk ghetto; the four astonishing songs here from his final two studio albums are sober, elegiac, and self-lacerating, even though their arrangements are (a little) more conservative. He’d seen the best minds of his generation destroyed and was trying to hold on to his own.

He didn’t make it — none of them did. After 1970’s 8-1/2-ish "No More Songs," Ochs ended the period documented on The Millennium Collection with a brief, abortive attempt to go rock, complete with gold lamé suit, then choked up altogether. When he hanged himself, in 1976, he hadn’t made an album for five years. After Frank’s glorious debut, he hit a writer’s block that he never really got past (five decent but sparkless demos from the ’70s are appended to the new reissue). By the ’80s, he was intermittently homeless and institutionalized; he died in 1999, having been blinded in one eye by a random shooting a few years before. Hardin burned out only a little more slowly — he kept recording until 1974, but by then he’d stopped writing songs too, and in late 1980 he died of a heroin overdose. The exquisite sensitivity that made their art backfired on all of them. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, but the weathervane gets the worst of it.

Issue Date: February 28 - March 7, 2002
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