Phil Ochs - In Concert

Can music and politics be successfully mixed? Nay-sayers could build a strong case on the back of the George W era; Springsteen, Neil Young, Steve Earle and Greenday all had a stab at fusing political critique and music, with the results often as clumsy and misguided as the politics themselves. Time then, to consider the case for the defence, Phil Ochs’ under-appreciated third album In Concert; a high watermark of articulate, witty, well-observed and politically aware pop music.

First-time listeners will notice first Ochs’ fine talent for melody, and the resonant tenor through which his songs are delivered. But the accessibility of his style betrays a radical and bilious tongue; from the opening bars of the proclamatory ‘I’m going to say it now’ Ochs launches a cutting attack on sixties America’s “Great Society”. Rampant militarism, social injustice and political hypocrisy all come under fire, as in the brilliant ‘Love me, I’m a liberal’ sung from the perspective of a bleeding-heart liberal with Not-in-my-back-yard syndrome.

Ochs’ tale is ultimately a tragic one; in his heyday he was always unfairly compared to Bob Dylan against whose poetic tapestries Ochs’ self-styled ‘singing journalism’ always came out second best. His career after In Concert increasingly veered towards self-parody and broken by his own perceived failure, Ochs committed suicide in 1976. Yet his trilogy of albums recorded for Elektra represents a remarkable legacy. Buy In Concert, please, and then fork out for his earlier albums as well. Between them they stake a claim for Ochs to be the most talented, and most wrongly neglected artist of the sixties.