Like Dylan yesterday, this was a different beast from what I had been led to expect. Phil Ochs seems to be talked about more than listened to. I'd formed this impression that he was the one who kept the protest-song flame burning when Dylan deserted it for impressionistic narratives and love songs. Which I think may be largely true, but it meant that I was expecting a fairly straightforward Guthrie-nouveau sound.
The sound of Phil Ochs is vastly more varied than that, more complex, and takes influences from all over the place. Some of the stuff on the first disc sounds like it draws on the European influences of Brecht and Brel more than Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. The American comparisons might be with Tim Buckley, for the way Ochs stretches his voice and the form of the song, and Bobby Darin, who also recorded Brecht and Weill's Mack the Knife. (Though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, in the later part of his career, Darin started to sound more like Ochs.)
It doesn't stop there. Disc two starts off with musical settings of poems by Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred Noyes. In the middle Gas Station Women sounds like Hank Williams, and there are covers of Mona Lisa (not a highlight, to be honest) and Chuck Berry's School Days. Then it rounds off with a couple of African songs, Bwatue and Niko Mchumba Ngobe. Extraordinary.
It's a bit annoying that there are no writing credits for the songs, but apart from that the compilation and the lengthy notes seems excellent, as you'd expect from Sid Griffin. I used to quite fancy his ex-wife, but that's a story for another day.
Bizarrely, at the time of writing, Amazon is saying the only available copy of this album is over £90. I got my copy for £7 from Fopp in February 2001.
MusicBrainz entry for this disc 1 |
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