Song of the Day 12/6: Phil Ochs, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”

Some people who vote for Democrats, and some who get elected as Democrats, have been calling themselves liberals for generations now. Phil Ochs isn’t heard much these days, but he had their number in 1966, when he noted that liberals are “10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.”

Chris Coons, former bearded Marxist, should have the last verse tattooed on his back:

Sure, once I was young and impulsive; I wore every conceivable pin,
Even went to Socialist meetings, learned all the old Union hymns.
Ah, but I’ve grown older and wiser, and that’s why I’m turning you in.
So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.

Ochs was a Greenwich Village folkie, a contemporary of Bob Dylan and a key contributor to the Great Folk Music Scare. A polarizing figure in life, his reputation has markedly improved in the years since his 1976 suicide, but the topicality of his material, and his sad decline due to bipolar disorder, makes a full-fledged revival unlikely.

Les Crane, for those who’ve forgotten, which is just about everybody, was a talk-radio personality of the late ’50s and early ’60s; he eventually got a television show that evolved into ABC’s “Nightline,” and was known at the time of Ochs’ song for interviews with guests like Dylan, George Wallace and Malcolm X. His most lasting claim to fame came a few years later when he narrated the unlikely spoken-word hit “Desiderata.”