It has been six years since any reissues of the music of Phil Ochs have been released. Although he died in 1976, there has been a steady flow of retrospectives since his suicide. That’s helped the legend of Ochs continue to grow, as we gain a deeper understanding of just how multi-talented he was.
Like John Lennon, Ochs would have turned 80 this year. Given the sad state of American politics, his trenchant and at times evocative and even amusing insights into political corruption and hypocrisy are even more relevant now than they were in the 1960s.
The 20-track The Best of the Rest: Rare and Unreleased Recordings mostly features demos Phil Ochs made for the music publisher Warner/Chappell and is released by the Liberation Hall label, which is part of the Woody Guthrie Center. A comparison can be made to a similar release, not unsurprisingly from Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos, 1962–1964, issued almost exactly 10 years ago. In both cases, we get to listen to historic songs in a bare-bones setting and in some cases with initial lyrics that would change for the commercially available completed studio recording.
Most of the songs on Best of the Rest are from the period when Ochs was concluding his tenure with Elektra Records in 1965-66. He recorded his first three albums for the label. After his studio debut, Phil Ochs recorded another studio album and then a live album, the latter two of which comprise the primary period covered here. There are five demos of songs that would end up on I Ain’t Marching Any More and four that would appear on Phil Ochs in Concert. There is also one song that would show up on his second A&M album, the criminally underrated Tapes from California. There is nothing, however, from Och’s A&M debut Pleasures of the Harbor.
It’s interesting that Phil Ochs is usually described in potted biographies as a finger-pointing, protest singer and songwriter, or a troubled artist with demons that brought about his premature death at the age of 36. In fact, it is the first two studio albums for A&M that best represent his incredible talent. And it is these demos that start pointing the way to songs that, while still politically astute and cutting, foreshadow the early A&M period. Those songs highlight his beautiful and expressive voice and reveal compositions that stretch out and defy categorization, and are rooted in visionary poetic beauty.
There’s still plenty of what would have been called protest music on The Best of the Rest: Rare and Unreleased Recordings – particularly “The War is Over,” not from one of the demos, but from a live WBAI broadcast from 1967. Other songs, such as “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” “Canons of Christianity” and “Colored Town” sound like they were written last week. A song that the followers of Bernie Sanders probably won’t like, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” shows Ochs to be a serious songwriter but no partisan, tackling controversial subjects but maintaining his sense of humor.
Some of these songs showed up on posthumous releases such as A Toast to Those Who Are Gone and Farewells and Fantasies. There was also a cover of “I’m Tired” by Shawn Phillips released in 1965 and a cover of “Sailors and Soldiers” appeared on Sid Griffin’s 1997 solo album, with help from Billy Bragg.
Given the almost totalitarian conditions, monstrous constitutional desecration, rampant racism and environmental destruction perpetuated by Donald Trump’s administration and its political allies, one wonders why no musical artists have picked up the mantle of the protest song over the past four years. Perhaps we live in a time where musical artists have become too fearful of potentially alienating half their audience.
Where are the Phil Ochs figures of today? I guess they ain’t marching anymore.
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