Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends Phil Ochs (Phil Ochs) C D C D Look outside the window there's a woman being grabbed C Em F G They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed E Am Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain F Am Dm G But Monopoly is so much fun I'd hate to blow the game C Am Eb And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody Cm F Outside of a small circle of friends C D C D Riding down the highway yes my back is getting stiff C Em F G Thirteen cars are piled up they're hanging on a cliff E Am Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain F Am Dm G But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it's gonna rain C Am Eb And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody Cm F Outside of a small circle of friends C D C D Sweating in the ghetto with the colored and the poor C Em F G The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor E Am Now wouldn't it be a riot if they really blew their tops F Am Dm G But they got too much already and besides we got the cops C Am Eb And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody Cm F Outside of a small circle of friends C D C D Oh there's a dirty paper using sex to make a sale C Em F G The Supreme Court was so upset they sent him off to jail E Am Maybe we should help the fiend and take away his fine F Am Dm G But we're busy reading Playboy and the Sunday New York Times C Am Eb And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody Cm F Outside of a small circle of friends C D C D Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer C Em F G But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years E Am Maybe we should raise our voices ask somebody why F Am Dm G But demonstrations are a drag besides we're much too high And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody Outside of a small circle of friends C D C D Look outside the window there's a woman being grabbed C Em F G They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed E Am Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain F Am Dm G But Monopoly is so much fun I'd hate to blow the game C Am Eb And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody Cm F Outside of a small circle of friends From Phil Ochs "Pleasures of the Harbor" A & M Records 1967 Barricade Music(ASCAP) source: Rick --------- 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."10