From: rickl1@ix.netcom.com
 
 
Ochs might have lamented that "Changes" was never the hit it should've
been, but here he encountered something far more frustrating:
 a hit that almost was. "Small Circle Of Friends" was an immediate
staple of "underground" FM radio and looked set to cross the
 message over to the less discriminating masses who still understood
only what Top 40 radio tattooed on their consciousness.
 The single was all over the AM airwaves in Los Angeles and actually
cracked the Top 10 in Seattle. Then the FCC weighed in 
with the opinion that the record was objectionable because of the line
"smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer." Never 
mind that in context the line was part of an explicitly antidrug
message; that was a subtlety the FCC could not fathom. By the
 time A&M Records could get an "acceptable" edit on the market, the
momentum of the early airplay had been lost. And in the
 Top 40 game, momentum is everything. Phil Ochs would never have that
hit single. And the tragedy was that had it become the
 hit it seems certain it would have been, the Pleasures Of The Harbor
album would have reached the new audience for which it 
was intended. In losing the momentum of the single, they lost the
whole album. 
This song, still a hit around my house, was inspired by the Kitty
Genovese murder in New York, which was witnessed by several
 people who rather than become involved allowed the woman to die. But
Phil saw the Genovese incident as only the screaming headline 
of a story that included -- and indicted -- everyone. At precisely the
moment when the "counterculture" was exploding, Phil saw instead
 the underlying disease that was eating away at the foundation of all
American life. He liked to say that he "died" during the
demonstrations 
at the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago. But in this song,
recorded a year earlier, he had already diagnosed the cancer --
 the avoidance of involvement -- that would take the life of the
artist/activist. 
"It's always been a question of: Will it stand the test of time?" Phil
later said of topical music and in particular of "Small Circle Of
Friends." 
"That was one of the things in the very early days, before Dylan left
politics, when he and I were writing political songs. There were two 
attacks: You can't write folk music, and you can't use folk music for
propaganda. Besides it's topical and it'll be meaningless two years
from 
then. And so to sing 'Small Circle Of Friends' seven years later and
still get the same response gives the lie to that attack. Whether the
 audience is hearing it for the first or the fifteenth time, it holds
up. It could be nostalgia for some people, but on the other hand,
there's some 
essential truth locked up in that song. A thirteen-year-old kid that
hears it today responds to it because the truth is there. In a way
it's more
 there than ever, than even when I wrote it."