Credit: Far Out / Discogs / Alamy

Phil Ochs’ bitter feud with Bob Dylan: “It was like there was a noose in the middle of the room”

Sat 14 June 2025 18:30, UK

It might be a dramatic stretch to call Phil Ochs the Salieri to Bob Dylan’s Mozart, but in the close quarters of the Greenwich Village folk scene, the drama was in ample supply. Ochs, who was a year older than Dylan and certainly influenced by the same key figures, Woody Guthrie, first and foremost, was nonetheless viewed as one of the early pretenders to Bob’s throne—arguably the first in a very long line of songwriters dubbed “the new Dylan” by lazy reporters.

From the time he arrived in New York from Ohio State University in 1962, Ochs’ politically-minded songwriting was met with general approval, both from young listeners already turned on by Dylan’s early work, as well as his fellow musicians in the Village, who recognised Ochs’ talent and welcomed him into their inner circles.

Even Dylan himself was fairly friendly and sociable in the early going, giving Ochs the impression of a mutual respect. In turn, when Dylan went electric and was suddenly under siege by parts of the folk establishment, Ochs wrote a letter in the Village Voice newspaper in his friend’s defence: “I understand that even most of the festival directors were quite upset at his performance… I think the best way to judge for yourself who was making the most valid musical point is to listen to a couple of Newport records of previous years and then listen to Dylan’s new single ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.”

However, Ochs may have had ulterior motives for celebrating the electrified rock ‘n’ roll version of Dylan, as it opened up a very big absence for the spot Bob had previously held as the acoustic troubadour/voice of his generation. Ochs’ second album, 1965’s I Ain’t Marching Anymore, was a clear claim to that title and was quite successful, which perhaps explains why Dylan’s attitude towards him started to turn.

So, what caused the feud between Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs?

Near the end of 1965, when Dylan was testing out new songs at the Kettle of Fish club with Ochs, Tom Paxton, and other established folk scene heavyweights in attendance, Bob seemed to have a new streak of nastiness about him, often filling his stage banter with barbed insults at his contemporaries, with Ochs supposedly taking the brunt of the vitriol. Phil, meanwhile, was already understandably jealous of Dylan’s seemingly unreachable talent and success. This mounting tension all boiled over one night in November.

“I had a fight with Dylan,” the singer recalled of the evening, as later quoted in Clinton Heylin’s Dylan biography, Behind the Shades. “He used to try to categorise all the other writers in terms of how good he was.”

Apparently, Dylan would go off naming names and decreeing them as non-writers, crowning himself as the ultimate master of words. Quite a bold claim that really points to how vain the youthful Dylan could be, but understandable in light of the fact that the man went on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature. Clearly, Ochs, like a fair sport, even in his incensed moments, seemed to concur, saying, “…he went through this whole fantastic riff on how we shouldn’t try to write, and that he was really the writer, which, on straight aesthetics, I would admit that was true. Y’know he was the best writer.”

Seemingly a man who liked to keep it honest, calling a spade a spade, one day, when Dylan asked for some feedback on one of his new singles at the time, ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window’, Ochs was pretty cut and dry about it, which was the last thing the petulant artist wanted to hear.

Ochs explained, “He asked me what I thought, and I said I didn’t like it.” When the temperamental Dylan demanded to know why he was dissatisfied so, Ochs offered candidly, “Well, it’s not as good as your old stuff, and speaking commercially, I don’t think it’ll sell.” That really sent him over the edge. They were in a limousine with David Blue when the enraged Dylan threw a fit and kicked Ochs out of the car, with some choice words thrown at him about how he was not a musician but a journalist.

That was the final straw for the mild-mannered Ochs, who wasn’t about to sit around and stoke Dylan’s ego. Following the incident, they didn’t see each other again for nearly a decade, and when they finally did reconnect, the former had unfortunately entered the early stages of the mental illness that would ultimately take his life in 1976.

Patti Smith later recalled being at events with both men, noting, “Bob wouldn’t talk to Phil Ochs… It was like there was a noose in the middle of the room and they were circling around, trying to get each other to hang themselves.”

Two years after Ochs’ death, Dylan seemed to have softened, telling reporter Mark Rowlands that, while most of Ochs’ “topical songs” weren’t going to convince anybody to change their political views, the song ‘I Ain’t Marching Anymore’ might have at least come close. “You know, someone could be sitting on a fence and hear a song like that and might just get a little courage to go out and get off that fence one way or another,” Dylan said. Hard to tell if he harboured any regrets over his actions from back in the day, but the two rivals surely could hold a grudge; Ochs was maybe slightly more entitled to it.