Michael Ochs: Who Knew That Collecting Rock ’n’ Roll Stuff Could Be a Ticket to Ride?
What a walk through Willy Wonka’s factory was to a chocaholic, a walk through the Michael Ochs Archives was to anyone who loves American popular music.
Ochs, who died July 23 at the age of 82 after a long battle with Parkinson’s, assembled the world’s largest library of popular music photos — more than three million by the time he sold them to Getty in 2007.
Corporate headquarters for the Michael Ochs Archives, founded in the early 1970s, was Ochs’s home, a pleasant, airy and somewhat modest house in Venice, California. “Funky,” he called it.
I got the informal tour on a warm day in February 1990, after an affectionate greeting from a huge furry dog named Dooley. Ochs seemed to enjoy showing off the place, which was separate from the file room where four employees did the actual archival business, and wasn’t a museum as much as a random collection of cool fun stuff. His already rapid conversation became more rapid when he got to anything that was particularly cool.
“That book there,” he said. “Irwin C. Miller’s Brown Skin Models. 50 Sepia Stars.
“There are the Mar-Keys. There hadn’t been a shot of them until I bought the [James] Kriegsmann collection. He was the first to photograph blacks properly and not Anglicize them.
“Check out this Aretha publicity shot. This is the original negative. You can see where it was masked so the printed photo makes her about 40 pounds lighter.”
“That flier there, it’s from 1954. Elvis ‘That’s All Right’ Presley at the Galena Park Fire Department. Tickets $1.25.
“Robert Johnson, of course. We have that shot of him because of me. Look at those fingers!”
Michael Ochs grew up a rock ’n’ roll guy. He was a catholic archivist.
“[My rock ’n’ roll] friends say why do I file the Partridge Family,” he said. “I don’t draw lines. Just look at Dinah Shore records and see all the people who played on them.”
When he left the record company PR world in 1975 and went all-in on the Archive, he recalled, “It was four years of starvation. Now it’s exquisite. People like Francis Ford Coppola call me. He wanted a crash course on big bands. I don’t have to blow my own horn. We’ve never advertised. It’s all word of mouth.”
Like most people, Michael Ochs had several sides. He was the rock ’n’ roll fan who before he started the Archive had collected more than 100,000 records. He was also a businessman who maintained strict control over the use of his several million images, and whose fiscal model did not include compensating the artists whose pictures he was licensing. He had no legal obligation to do so, but there were multiple efforts in those years encouraging voluntary restitution to early artists who had often been paid little or nothing for their work.
Ochs said his primary motivation with the Archive, which he called “a labor of love,” was to save what would otherwise very likely be lost.
“We’re still not preserving our art,” he said. “Jazz, blues, folk, all of it. So much from the ’50s is already gone.”
What wasn’t helping, he said, were two parts of the music world that should have been in the lead: collectors and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“Some collectors have helped,” he said. “But in general, collectors are despicable. They want things to remain rare, so they can say, ‘It’s mine.’ I love disseminating things. I love helping people remember Thurston Harris.”
As for the Rock Hall, it was don’t get him started. “None of what’s here will ever go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” he said. “It’s in my will.”
Ochs compiled several books, the most notable of which was 1984’s Rock Archives, featuring some 1,100 pictures focusing on the ’50s and ’60s. It was a rock ’n’ roll counterpart to Frank Driggs’s and Harris Lewine’s iconic jazz photo collection Black Beauty, White Heat.
“I think my book ended up about 60%-70% black artists,” Ochs said. “I never looked at the balance. I wanted candids, like Smokey Robinson backstage at the Apollo singing ‘My Girl’ to the Temptations.
“I love the fashion aspect, too, and I looked at the book like a concept album. It has a rhythm and flow to it. I’d love to have a companion video. Seeing the Crystals live would be even better than seeing their picture.
“There were some challenges. How do you organize 100 one-shot artists? But I was generally happy with how it came out — although you always look back and see something. How could I have left out Bobby Fuller?”
Ochs would also lament the fact no one had ever found footage of the Alan Freed TV show, “which they took off the air when Frankie Lymon danced with a white girl.” He exulted over finding a dozen pictures of the Chocolate Watchband and a previously unknown shot of Cannibal and the Headhunters. He called it “criminal” that there wasn’t a Five Royales album in print and said he personally traced rock ’n’ roll to “60 Minute Man” by the Dominoes. He talked about how Phil Spector “split time into seconds . . . or fractions of seconds.”
Okay, and he said he also tried to keep the music in perspective.
“I try to preserve without overanalyzing,” he said. “Rock ’n’ roll is street stuff. As Johnny Otis, ‘We did it to get attention.’ “
He then joked that “Bob Dylan hurt rock ’n’ roll by bringing intelligence to it” — and invoking Dylan in any context inexorably leads to one other element of Michael Ochs’s life. He was the brother of Phil Ochs, the gifted 1960s singer-songwriter-activist who committed suicide in 1976.
Michael Ochs was Phil’s manager for a time, and became the shepherd of his legacy. The faux tombstone that Phil used as the cover image on his dark 1969 Rehearsals for Retirement album was embedded in the backyard of Michael’s Venice house.
He had conflicting thoughts on Phil.
He wanted to ensure Phil’s legacy would endure and toward that end produced numerous archival recordings, up to the 2020 compilation The Best of the Rest.
At the same time, he didn’t want to be just The Brother Of. He felt like he’d done enough not to live in Phil’s shadow.
Mostly, though, he said, he never lost his frustration over what happened to Phil.
“He had mental health issues,” Michael said. “He was diagnosed as bipolar and manic-depressive. Our father had the same conditions, and so do I. The difference is that by the time I was diagnosed, there was medications. That wasn’t the case for our father, or for Phil. If those medications had been available, I’d like to think his life could have taken a different path.”
Phil Ochs lived to 35. Michael Ochs lived to 82. What he helped to preserve will, with luck, live for millennia.
