Original subtitles

2016, 2017 was a very emotional time for me.

And I had one particular dream, a very vivid dream, where I was, I woke up, and

in my room, I was sitting, I was lying in my bed, and the lights were on, and

my uncle was sitting to the side of my bed, just sitting there across from me.

My mother was in front of me, and I had a dresser over here, and my uncle said

to me, he said, this is your time to say goodbye.

And I looked over, and sitting there, just sitting straight out with my

father.

And I just, I knew that this was the time when I was going to say goodbye.

And this was my time to say goodbye. But as soon as I said something, actually

said something, that he would be gone.

And it was like this understood thing. It wasn't something that was said.

So I looked over and I just held him and I hugged him and I just said, I don't

blame you and I love you and I just want you to know that I'll always love you

and how important he was to me. And then he was gone.

Just like that.

I think the best songs that he wrote, Crucifixion, Changes, The War Is Over,

were as great as anything that Dylan or anyone else wrote in the 60s.

But I think the tragedy was that Phil didn't know how great he was. I think

he felt he needed the 60s, the movements of the 60s, to continue writing great

songs into the 70s.

What makes you angry about it is that whole belief in Phil that his life was a

movie and that he had to die by hanging.

Now here's this nonviolent person, this person who sang about nonviolence, whose

life was a statement for nonviolence, who dies by hanging himself.

It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense.

Oaks here.

Testing. One, two.

I was always a dreamer, even when I was a kid back in the Midwest.

I was totally captivated by the movies, the whole Marlon Brando, James Dean

trip.

When I was 16, I went out and got myself a six-gun, and I started practicing my

quick draw.

So I shot myself in the foot one day.

Then I quit.

The movie heroes never quit.

They just kept right on fighting for whatever absurdly unrealistic vision

they had at the moment.

I went to Staunton Military Academy because I wanted to be able to play my

clarinet in the marching band.

I was there for three years.

I didn't learn much about world politics at Staunton.

I didn't learn about superpowers or military greed.

It was John Wayne and Johnny Cash right down the line.

Green Leaves of Sun

To brown and to yellow they fade.

And then they have to die.

Trapped within the circle time.

The rage of changes.

Phil was totally apolitical before Ohio State.

And I don't think he knew what politics really were. I don't think he even

cared.

He was like raw material.

He became political in college. I think he did a lot of reading. I know he read

Marx and Engels in college.

He was reading everything he could get his hands on. He was constantly going to

the library.

And I think the Times, too, radicalized him quite a bit because that was in the

early 60s. Things started to happen politically. I think it's pretty hard

for anybody not to be a lawyer.

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military

-industrial complex.

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days, nor will it be finished

in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this great, nor even perhaps in our

lifetimes on this planet.

But let us begin.

A thousand went to take the island.

Chances strong as broken twigs.

A thousand stayed there at the island.

Met their fate at the Bay of Pigs.

They were told when they arrived.

They'd be held by Castro's men.

But they found out, those who survived, that the

CIA was wrong.

We used to have these late-night political conversations. We'd stay up

all night talking about politics.

Phil thought Castro would be out in six months after he came in. I said, no way,

Castro's going to be in there for a long time.

But he wrote a great song about that whole event.

It was called The Bay of Pigs or The Cuban Invasion. It was the first song

Fell wrote. And I knew when he wrote this song that he was a songwriter.

The headlines were lying.

Why wasn't I told?

When a thousand went to take the island.

Chances strong as broken twigs.

And a thousand stayed there.

The big, big...

Oaks

here. What did you do to get your little friend?

Me and Dave caught a double feature up at the Lyric. Why did you go to the fire

escape? To avoid all the fans.

What fans, Bill?

That was good practice.

Did you like Dylan, sir, Tom?

No, he needs a lesson in diction or something.

He loved it, I think, that one.

Yeah, well, I'll see you down at Raphael's later on, right?

The early village days were great.

They would convert alleys into clubs. They would take alleys between two

buildings and put a thatched roof over it, and that would be the newest club.

And most of the clubs, including some of the big ones, there was no admission

charge. It was all pass-the-hat type places where the performers, after they

sang, would pass a hat around, and that's how they got paid. It was from

the generosity of the crowd.

There were so many clubs. I've been trying to remember how many places there

were to work around here.

It must have been 25 or 30.

They were hiring folk singers and acoustical musicians.

And Phil would come in and do guest sets every day in one of them. The first gig

I saw Phil at in the village was a place called The Third Side.

And it was Phil, Tiny Tim, Jim and Gene, and Richie Havens.

And they were all playing for nothing, just passing the hat after their thing.

And then from there, the key thing was to get a real gig.

And the showcase back then was Gertie Spoke City.

That's where they showcased Dylan. If you played Gerties, that meant you would

arrive. Come on and take a walk with me through this green and growing land.

Walk through the meadows and the mountains and the sand.

Walk through the valleys and the rivers and the plains.

Walk through the sun and walk through the rain.

Here is a land full of power and glory.

Beauty that words cannot recall.

We started this in 1959.

We came up with this idea to call Hoodnani. It was like an invention for

the new up-and-coming talent.

They didn't have a place where to go and be discovered.

And a lot of those fellows that come in are like Dillon, Alts, John Armand, P.

Paul and Mary.

Feliciano, Simon and Garfunkel, Ed Milouaris, Melissa Manchester.

I used to give them a break to work a couple of weeks.

Oh, her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom. Her glory shall rest on

us all.

On us all.

In the early 50s, the feeling in Greenwich Village was that people were

not there to make money or to become famous, but to make music and to share

certain ideas that really were already challenging the conventional wisdom.

What we experienced was an enormous energy because the feeling that was

shared was so contrary to the kinds of feelings that people felt in the 50s. It

was a counterculture feeling from the beginning, even though it was mostly

traditional music.

is becoming increasingly overt in its commentaries on American politics.

The Greenwich Village Clubs have instituted a new phenomenon known as

the... It is a forum for seemingly communist-leaning young discontents who

are trying to pass off their personal ineptitudes as poetry and music.

Unfortunately for them, it only blares their obvious shortcomings as

responsible citizens.

The topical song movement that evolved out of opposition to segregation, Jim

Crow, the civil rights movement in general, subsequently the Vietnam War.

Without those howling injustices and outrages,

there would have been no protest song movement.

Probably there would have been no folk song movement.

It's the sound of freedom calling, ringing up to the sky.

It's the sound of the always a falling.

You can hear it if you try.

You can hear it if you try.

considered protest songs.

It's that area of insistence upon living.

They were not called protest songs.

So actually, in the 60s, a new term came to something that has been being done

for many years.

Mr. Oaks, who studied journalism at Ohio State, prefers to have himself called a

topical singer rather than a folk singer.

He has carried his journalistic interests to music, writing melodic

editorials on the news of the day.

His satire is trenchant, and his opinions are controversial in such songs

as Billy Saul, Freedom Riders, Talking Cuban Crisis, Ballad of Medgar Evers,

and Talking Vietnam.

These are just a few examples of the 60 songs he has written to meet his self

-imposed topical deadlines.

William Worthy isn't worthy to enter our door.

He went down to Cuba. He's not American anymore.

Somehow it's strange to hear the State Department say you are living in the

free world, in the free world you must stay.

In an abstract and theoretical way, I, of course, had known, not known all my

life, that songs, particularly protest songs, have played a role in the

struggle for justice down through the ages.

But it wasn't until I was personally involved in a song, mainly this ballad

of William Worthy, that I realized, traveling all over the country,

lecturing on campuses, how important a song is. Because I met even 12 and 16

-year-old kids who would never read the New York Times and read a detailed story

on a legal case such as mine, but who knew about my case through Phillips'

song. It really played a role in creating the atmosphere that eventually

won an acquittal in my case.

constitutional victory many of us in the 60s felt that if we could just

say it the right way the whole world would change

all

the bullets of the false revenge have struck us once again

As the angry seas have struck upon the sand.

And it seems as though a friendless world has lost itself a

friend.

That was the president and that was the man.

Oh, the glory that was Lincoln.

It's been carried over time and time again.

And to that list of honor, you can add another name.

That was the president and that...

You're going to go sing Cuban Missile Crisis now? Yeah. Tonight?

He's only two weeks dead, Phil. People are still crying over his grave. Nothing

has changed.

I write about Cuba and Mississippi because what goes on there affects me.

Don't try pulling censorship on me on the grounds of sentimentality.

These songs are all the more important now that Kennedy's dead. Well, you hear

last week, Phil, when Van Ronk got up and sang Good Riddance to JFK, the place

went wild. They screamed for their money back for Van Ronk's assassination. They

threatened to bomb the place. It was a near riot.

The only riots that I'm interested in stopping are in Hazard and Mississippi.

We got a new bozo in the White House, another great American president who

thinks he's in some epic war movie, proud to march his mighty country right

into hell.

What should I think tonight, Sam, deep in the heart of Texas?

How about a little simple respect, Phil?

JFK gets the same respect, Ed, as he did alive.

No more and no less.

Though you say that all the good times are gone.

Though you say that rain will keep raining on.

When the pavements were burning, the

soul of the city was ravaged at night.

After the city's sun was sinking,

now no one knows how it started.

Why the windows were shattered.

Deep in the dark, someone set fire.

And then it no longer mattered.

When the fury was over.

And shame was replacing the anger.

I had seen Phil the first time at a Newport Festival when I was in college,

and I had never met him before.

And when I finally met him at Gertie's one night, he had heard all about me,

and he came running up to me and introduced himself and said, How you

doing? Come on.

Have you been to the kettle of fish? Have you been? Come up to my house.

Alice will cook you dinner.

Did you meet Mike Porco? Did you meet this one? Did you meet that one? I mean,

he knew all about what I'd been doing.

So he was very friendly. So I started tagging along with him and his friends.

And he was very involved with his career.

And we spent a great deal of time listening to Phil.

talk about his career and what he was going to do next. It was all very

exciting, you know, Carnegie Hall, places I'd only heard of, and I'd be

hearing about whether he wanted to play Carnegie Hall or he was going to do Town

Hall. So he was very much in the strategy of his career. And then

secondary, politics came.

He was involved with all kinds of the movement and stuff. We did a lot of

protests, festivals, and a lot of concerts, you know, raising money for

things against the war and civil rights.

I just tagged along with him. I went down to Hazard, Kentucky with him to

visit miners.

He was raving all the time.

He was marvelous. He was a lot of fun.

I remember one time he came charging into my apartment.

He always charged into one's apartment.

I said, tell me everything you know about poetry. Take your time. I have 20

minutes before I have to catch a plane.

Well, I'll never forget Fred Holliman coming in excitedly to the publisher's

office. I heard Phil's latest, and I said, what was it? And he tore it off.

I'm just a typical American boy from a typical American town.

I believe in God and sin as a daughter. Keep an old Castro down.

When I came my time to serve, I knew better dead than red.

So when I came to my old draft board, buddy, this is what I said.

When I was only 18, I got a ruptured spleen. I'll always carry a purse.

I got eyes like a bat, and my feet are flat, and my eyes was getting worse.

Think of my career, my sweetheart's here. The poor old invalid ass. That

ain't no fool. I'm going to school. Working in a defense plant.

I never really at the beginning thought much of Phil's music.

But as his songs became more and more popular, I realized something that was

actually made clear one night at Newport when I was running that evening's

program. Every night one of us would run the program.

And that night Phil was on it.

And after a succession of fairly well-known performers, Phil went out and

he started to sing one of his songs. I think it was Power and Glory.

And George Weems standing next to me as he heard the roar that...

that accepted the song, said, see, he knows what they want.

I guess for a long time, Phil met the needs of his audience.

He was just exactly what they were looking for.

Oh, I marched to the Battle of New Orleans At the end of the early British

War The young land started growing The young blood started flowing

was an extremely important part of this Newport Folk Festival because he, more

than Bobby, of course, was very, very political.

Bobby really only had that moment for a while. But Phil sustained that, and that

was his point of view.

So in terms of active political participation, nobody was like Phil.

I must have killed a billion men and now they want me back again. Well, I ain't

marching anymore.

I'll have to get sitting in the fifth row.

hollering my head off. I'll never forget that. He just pushed it on out and 20

,000 people roared back the chorus at him. It was great.

There was power there.

And there really was power.

That's why I say, who knows, the guitar may be mightier than the bomb.

I was organizing a teach-in in Berkeley in 1965 and we were trying to bring the

most important spokespeople in the country to Berkeley at that time. And we

had Norman Mailer, Ben Spock.

uh senators and i needed a folk singer and we tried joan baez and she couldn't

do it and i remember calling up paul krasner and saying paul we really need a

folk singer and he said uh give her a look and i just vaguely heard of him and

he said phil has a commercial date that night may 21st 1965 and really and and i

don't know if he'll be able to make it well to show you what kind of person

phil was he cancelled his commercial date and flew out to california uh to

appear at this teach-in And he was fabulous. I met him at the airport.

I'd never known him before. I didn't know who he was. And we became friends

very, very quickly.

I think one thing we both noticed about each other is we were both from Ohio.

And that gave us kind of a gee whiz attitude toward life. We didn't have

that New York sophistication that made one cynical.

And Phil was always asking questions, and so was I.

I remember running into him in the street in New York. It was the first

time I saw him since the teaching.

And I came back to my apartment, and I showed him some writing that I was

doing.

Now, it's pretty serious when you've worked on something for seven, eight

months, and you show it to a friend.

And after about two hours, I said, what do you think of it, Phil?

He said, well, it doesn't have the punch and the sparkle of your articles that

have been appearing in the past year in the underground press.

I really don't like it. I don't think it's going to work.

I got so angry that we didn't have dinner that night. We got in a big,

furious fight.

And a few days later, I thought about it, and I realized he was right, and I

rewrote the book completely.

And so I really owe to Phil that kind of searing honesty, which there's something

about Phil always told you right to your face what he thought about you.

And he did it from a point of view of support of you and love. It wasn't to

hurt.

A lot of people say my songs sound alike.

What I'm trying to do is write one endless song called Truth, painting the

world exactly as I see it, without compromise, always questioning.

Christian cannons have fired at my day

With a warning beneath the holy

blade

of Christianity.

Worship now and wash your sins away.

Drop the call.

Smile the canon of Christianity.

Cry the canon of Christianity.

Oak typifies what I dislike most about American folk music.

15th-rate topical songs by a 10th-rate journalist.

Mr. Pfeiffer will respond predictably to every cliche that helps to widen the

generation gap. He obviously has something to say, but there must be a

better way of saying it. His melodies are about as inventive as the average

Tibetan chant. We found Mr. Oaks much too vulgar for our tastes.

Surely one can be entertaining without being vulgar.

Newport Daily News.

You'd be a little like it when you come and preach to them, you know.

As soon as you start trying to lay down some new way of thinking, they try to

find a category for you.

What's happening to the folk scene in the village?

Well, cover on Lenny Bruce's album hasn't taken a picnic in a graveyard.

Think that about sums it up. I think after a certain point, the music stopped

having a certain vitality for people in the sense that the personalities

became too important.

They became heroes and heroines, and people began to

buy. That point of view.

Slacks for the campus radical.

It became something that could be bought and sold.

And when that happened, Greenwich Village was a place to which tourists

came. And they were not looking for the same sense of creative companionship and

release. They were pursuing the coattails of fame to be a part

of it.

To witness it, to share in it, get a piece of the action.

It was not the commercialization that killed it. The commercialization was a

symptom as much as it was a cause.

There were a lot of things going on. It was sort of a coalescence of the folk

music scene and the rock and roll scene.

Suddenly the opportunity to make tons and tons and tons of money was dangled

before us.

And look, we're good Americanos, i.e. greedy.