The murder that inspired Phil Ochs song ‘Outside of a Small Circle of Friends’
The music scene of America in the 1960s was awash with protest singers. With the folk revival coinciding with a rising countercultural and anti-war movement, countless artists dusted off their acoustic guitars and set about writing songs to challenge social attitudes of the time. Among this new generation of singer-songwriters was Phil Ochs, who often found inspiration in the darkest of places.
Noted for his political activism, sharp wit and often humorous lyrics, Ochs was heavily involved in both the anti-war movement and the fight for African American Civil Rights. Largely as a result of his fierce political activism and lyrics often covering topics that were deemed too extreme for mainstream conservative audiences in America, Ochs never had a chart hit – although fellow singer-songwriter Joan Baez did score a hit single in the UK with a recording of the Ochs song ‘There But For Fortune’.
Despite never reaching the dizzying heights of the singles charts, Ochs is perhaps best remembered for his 1967 track ‘Outside of a Small Circle of Friends’, taken from the album Pleasures of the Harbor. The track is a stunning indictment of social apathy, attacking the complacency with which many people live their lives. Themed around the refusal to help those in need and an apparent indifference to horrific crimes, you would be forgiven for thinking that the song is a thinly veiled condemnation of conservative attitudes towards the war crimes perpetrated in Vietnam by the US Army.
While the horrors of Vietnam must have been present in the mind of Ochs during the writing of this track, the actual inspiration comes from a murder on US soil. In 1964, a 28-year-old bartender named Kitty Genovese was raped and murdered in an alleyway outside of her apartment in Queens, New York. In the investigation following the murder, which was committed by Winston Moseley, The New York Times claimed that up to 38 witnesses had either seen or heard the attack within the densely populated area of Queens, yet nobody tried to intervene or call the police.
In the years following, the article was widely accepted to have exaggerated the number of witnesses, however, this theme of societal indifference remained in the mind of Phil Ochs. Using the murder of Genovese as a starting point, the protest singer began writing ‘Outside of a Small Circle of Friends’. The track lists various horrific events, followed by the apathy of the narrator, “Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain, But Monopoly is so much fun, I’d hate to blow the game”.
Contrasting the dark subject matter of murder, poverty, pornography and imprisonment, the song itself has a strangely upbeat rhythm; characterised by the influence of a banjo and piano, the tune of the track provides a sense of irony to the subject matter, something that Ochs regularly did throughout his musical career.
‘Outside of a Small Circle of Friends’ was never a hit despite receiving an admirable amount of radio play upon its release. Its trajectory to the charts was halted when the song was pulled from radio stations for its lyrical content, including the line “smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer”. Nevertheless, the song remains a stunning example of Ochs innate ability to create music which is both fun and deeply philosophical.
