1. I'm Going to Say It Now (3:11)
2. Bracero (4:07)
3. Ringing of Revolution (7:19)
4. Is There Anybody Here? (3:27)
5. Canons of Christianity (6:01)
6. There But for Fortune (2:52)
7. Cops of the World (5:05)
8. Santo Domingo (5:59)
9. Changes (4:41)
10. Love Me, I'm a Liberal (4:37)
11. When I'm Gone (4:20)
Notes
This album was recorded at concerts given by Phil Ochs in Boston and New York in the winter of 1965-66. The concerts were presented by Arthur Gorson.
All songs written by Phil Ochs. (C) Copyright Barricade Music ASCAP unless otherwise noted.
Produced by Mark Abramson and Jac Holzman
Engineering - David B. Jones
Remastering: Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch/Digiprep
Cover photo - Dan Kramer
Liner photo - Joel Brodsky
Cover design - William S. Harvey
Reissue art direction - Rachel Gutek
Design - Nadia Block
Supplemental photos - Michael Ochs Archives
Reissue supervision - Ted Myers
Project assistance - Lloyd Hardy
This album was originally released as Elektra #7310, March 1966
Changsha (Memories of youth)
The immense river is a transparent green
and a hundred boats are racing by.
The eagles strike against the sky,
The fish swim in the shallows;
In the freezing air all creatures strive for freedom.
Alone in the desolate vastness,
I ask of the ageless earth:
"Who is the ruler of the universe?"
I remember a hundred friends coming here
during the crowded, eventual years;
All of them young and upright,
Gleaming with brilliance,
true to the scholar's spirit.
I remember how vivid they were
As they gazed upon rivers and mountains:
The Chinese earth gave strength to their words,
And they regarded as dung the ancient feudal lords.
Do you remember
How in midstream we struck out at the water,
And the waves dashed against the speeding ships?
Tapoteh (A district)
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet
Who in the sky is dancing, waving this ribbon of color?
After the rain the setting sun returns
Line after line, the hills and the pass are blue!
Once there raged a desperate battle here,
And the village walls were pierced with bullet holes.
They are a decoration, and today
The hills shine more splendidly.
The Loushan Pass
(which the Red Army crossed in the Long March in Jan., 1935)
Cold is the west wind!
The wild geese cry in the frosty morning moonlight.
O the frosty morning moonlight!
The ringing of the horses hooves,
And the sobbing of trumpets!
Do not say the pass is guarded with iron
Today we shall leap over the summit.
O we shall go leaping!
The dark green mountains are like the sea,
And the dying sun like blood.
The Snow
(written in an airplane in Aug. 1945 at a time when there was a possibility of truce in the civil war)
In this north country in the flaming wind
A thousand acres are enclosed in ice,
and ten thousand acres in whirling snow
Behold both sides of the Great Wall --
There is only a vast desolation left.
On the upper and lower reaches of the Yellow river
Only a great tumbling of waves.
The silver serpents are dancing on the mountains,
The winter elephants career on the plains:
We desire to compare our height with the skies.
O wait for the pure sky!
See how charming is the earth
Like a red-faced girl clothed in white!
Such is the charm of these mountains and rivers
Calling innumerable heroes to vie with each other in pursuing her.
The Emperors Shih Huang and Wu Ti were hardly lettered,
The Emperors T'ai Tsung and T'sai Tsu were barely chivalrous,
For a whole generation Genghis Khan was a favorite of heaven,
But he knew only how to bend his bow at the eagles.
All have passed away--only today are there mean of great feeling.
The Pavilion of the Yellow Crane
Nine immense rivers flow through China,
A single deepcut railroad threads north and south.
Blue smoke and rain shroud the heavens.
Stones, snakes and tortoises grip the great river.
Where have the yellow cranes flown?
Only the haunts of the wayfarers remain.
I lift my winecup and drink to the roaring river
My heart is as full as the rising waters.
Kunlung Mountain (The abode of the blessed)
Rising straight into the air above the earth,
Lofty Kunlung, mistress of the world's joys
The three million jade dragons are soaring
All the heavens are transpierced with frost.
Snow melting in summer,
And the rivers brimming over.
Men may become fishes and tortoises.
Who will judge us over a thousand autumns?
Who will confer punishments and favors?
I say to the high mountains:
"Why so high? Why so much snow?"
Could I but lean on heaven and draw my precious sword.
And cut you in three pieces,
I would send one to Europe,
The second I would give to America,
The third I would keep for China.
So there would be a great peace on earth,
For all the world would share in your
Warmth and cold.
The Immortals
(commemorates the death of Mao's wife at the hands of the Hunanese warlord Ho Chien and the husband of Madame Li Shu-Yi who died in the early years of fighting with the Kuo-mingtang.)
I lost my proud poplar
You lost your willow
Poplar and willow soar high into the heavens.
Wu Kang, asked what he has to offer,
Presents them with the wine of cassia.
The lonely goddess of the moon
spreads her sleeves,
and dances for these happy souls in an endless sky.
Of a sudden comes word of the tiger's defeat
And they break into a flood of tears.
A poem for Liu Ya Tzu
(Written for an old friend who hesitated to come to Peking after the revolution.)
Long was the night, slow the coming of the red dawn.
For a hundred years the devil-monsters whirled in a dance,
And there was no coming together of the myriad people.
Now the cock crows, dawn breaks over the world,
And from a thousand places arises a swelling music.
Never were poets so inspired!
Poems by MAO TSE-TUNG
Is This the enemy?
Phil Ochs
To Phil Ochs, I was just one of the faceless fans who bought his albums and cheered him at peace rallies. How could he have known what he meant to us?
"He suffered from low self-esteem--he didn't know how good he was," recalls journalist Jack Newfield, who watched tears fall onto Bobby Kennedy's cheeks when Ochs played him a song written for his slain brother. By all accounts, Ochs was hard on himself, like many great artists, not realizing how he affected those who experienced his art.
"Phil Ochs changed my life," remembers poet Jim Carroll, who dedicated his classic memoir of growing up in the '60s, The Basketball Diaries, to Ochs. Carroll listened to pop like The 4 Seasons until "a guy at school turned me on to Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs. Ochs had by far the most impact on me. From there, both my politics and my aesthetics became different." Bonnie Raitt had a similar revelation: "The fact that he and Dylan were writing political songs changed my idea of what an artist was."
Phil Ochs changed my life too. As this album, In Concert, was being recorded at concerts in Boston and New York in the winter of 1965-66, I was obsessively wearing out copies of his first two albums, All The News That's Fit To Sing and I Ain't Marching Anymore. Those early albums formed ideas about politics and music that continue to motivate me 30 years later.
As the civil rights movement was peaking and the protests against the war in Vietnam were beginning, Phil Ochs was to me and my high-school friends what Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, U2, and R.E.M. were to later generations. "If you are a young person, trying to understand the idealism, the conviction, and the fervor of the early '60s, Phil Ochs' songs are one of the best documents of that time," believes Jon Landau, Springsteen's longtime manager and former senior editor of Rolling Stone.
"Ochs had enormous credibility with his audience because he did not appear to be beholden to any one faction," notes Carroll. "I didn't feel he was dogmatic or didactic." Indeed, Ochs was attracted by the purity of the radical left (the original liner notes of this album were poems by Mao Tse-tung--Ochs' one comment was the line, "Is this the enemy?"). On the other hand, he wrote two songs lamenting the death of President Kennedy. According to Jack Newfield, Ochs was torn, prior to Robert Kennedy's assassination, between supporting RFK and supporting a Yippie alternative to both parties.
His clarity of thought shines through the song "Love Me, I'm A Liberal"--the song that was, for me, the best reason to buy In Concert (which, unlike today's "live" albums, contained almost all previously unrecorded material). I first heard the song in the summer of 1965 at a Quaker workshop in nonviolence, where it was sung by a long-since-forgotten kid with a guitar. The kid told me the song had been written by Phil Ochs, and from that day until I purchased this album, I searched for an Ochs recording of the song. "Love Me, I'm A Liberal" was an epiphany to me--it created a space between old-fashioned Marxists and increasingly middle-of-the-road Cold War liberals, who would soon become the enemy of those who protested Lyndon Johnson's war.
(In retrospect, it's regrettable that "the movement" allowed the Vietnam warriors to claim the word "liberal." It left the grand progressive legacy of the word undefended when Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh and their ilk succeeded in making "liberal" a dirty word. But at the time the song provided a crucial distinction within the political world.)
Even the people closest to artists--and in some cases the artists themselves--cannot understand the pure impact of the art on the fans. Andy Wickham, who shared an apartment with Ochs during the early 1970s, used to tease him about the line in "Love Me, I'm A Liberal" when Ochs sings of NAACP leader Medgar Evers' murder, "The tears ran down my spine." "I used to ask him, 'Were you looking over your shoulder when you were crying?'" Wickham says. It may have been lazy songwriting, but that's not the point. As a fan, I was so awed by the insight and wit of the song, its ringing sarcasm, the way the song encapsulated my own inarticulate feelings, I was convinced that somewhere there must be incredibly hip people who talked about tears running down their spine.
Some of the songs on this album--"Love Me, I'm A Liberal" and the somewhat more prosaic "Cops Of The World" and "I'm Going To Say It Now"--are historical snapshots of the era, addressing anti-intervention sentiment and the campus free-speech movement, respectively. Other songs seem astonishingly fresh 30 years after they were written. "Canons Of Christianity," with only small modifications, could be taken as a critique of the Christian Coalition. "Bracero," about the humanity of illegal aliens, could have been written in response to California's Proposition 187. Listening to these still-trenchant statements, one can only imagine how Ochs could have popularized or illuminated progressive positions on today's issues--human rights in China or Bosnia, welfare cuts, antiabortion pressure, the beating of Rodney King, the mass media's obsession with tabloid crimes, the return of the death penalty, the unraveling of some gains made during the civil rights era. Clearly, no one has taken his place.
But Ochs was more than a political fighter. He was a poet and an artist. In the best of his songs, observes Carroll, "He offset a political image with a poetic image." Listening to "Ringing Of Revolution," perhaps the apotheosis of the romantic fable of "revolution" that rattled around the heads of '60s activists before they had to confront what it really meant. Or consider the way, in "Santo Domingo," Ochs offsets the literal title with the song's evocative first words, "The crabs are crawling, they shuttle back and forth--the sands are burning."
Ochs makes two references to Bob Dylan in his sardonic intros on this album, referring to Dylan as "God" and fantasizing about a movie in which Ochs himself portrays Dylan. Although activists were grateful that Ochs continued to write political songs long after Dylan shifted to personal, impressionistic lyrics, Ochs was clearly impressed and intimidated by Dylan's larger success and cultural impact. "He was freaked out by being in Dylan's orbit," recalls Newfield. "It hurt him," adds Wickham, "when the people around Dylan referred to [Ochs] not as a poet but as a journalist." (Ochs did appear to have a decent personal relationship with Dylan. When he organized a benefit show for Chilean refugees after the Allende assassination, Dylan performed at it.)
He may have been in Dylan's "orbit," but Ochs was never in his shadow artistically, and never an imitator. "Phil hung out at bars like the Kettle of Fish with Dylan and the other folk singers of his time, but as an artist he was listening to a different muse," says Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman, who signed and recorded Ochs. One key distinction between Ochs and Dylan, notes Carroll, lay in Ochs' willingness to expose his emotions: "He didn't mind writing a sentimental line. In the '60s I had the impression that Dylan's worst fear was that he wouldn't seem hip, that he would be taken to be sentimental. Phil Ochs wasn't afraid to take that chance."
In Concert, as it happens, has two of the most sentimental and most eloquent songs Ochs would ever write. When I was in high school, it seemed like every kid who got an acoustic guitar played the song "Changes" as soon as they learned the chords. It was the ultimate way for kids to say "I'm sensitive" in their angst-ridden years, in the angst-ridden decade. "There But For Fortune" speaks to people in any decade and was certainly Phil Ochs' most comercially successful song; it later became a bona fide hit single for Joan Baez. Even Baez, however, could not convey the emotional honesty of a Phil Ochs vocal.
Making the point that one must seize the moment, Phil Ochs sings wistfully on this album's last song, "There's no place in the world where I'll belong when I'm gone." How wrong he was about that. How wrong.
--Danny Goldberg