By
Richie Unterberger
The
1966 LP In Concert was a
breakthrough album for Phil Ochs on a few levels. It was the first Ochs
recording to make the charts, and if its peak of #149 in Billboard seems modest, that was no
mean feat for an album of uncompromisingly left-wing topical songs on a
small independent label. It also documented Ochs's artistic growth as a
sharp-eyed sociopolitical commentator, a composer of strong melodies,
and a singer skilled at projecting both warmth and commitment, for the
first time occasionally branching out beyond politics into purely
personal concerns. Ochs continued to expand his artistic horizons on
subsequent albums both lyrically and musically, especially when he
added electric instrumentation and orchestration to his acoustic folk
base. In Concert nonetheless
remains arguably his strongest and most popular collection of songs.
Unusually for a concert album of
that or any time, the record consisted entirely of songs that had not
yet been issued in studio versions. "Phil was an artist that didn't
like to repeat himself," explains his manager of the time, Arthur
Gorson. "He never was one to recycle. He always thought he was as
current as the newspaper of the day. He always wanted to have new
things out. So the idea of making a new album live would be to attempt
as much as possible to include topical songs that were of the moment.
He had a passion to do that. Plus, he had a lot of great material. He
was writing songs, maybe three a week that were worth keeping. He was
just bursting."
The planning of a concert album coincided with Ochs
and Gorson's preparations for a January 7, 1966 show at New York's
Carnegie Hall, one of the most prestigious of possible venues for
showcasing an emerging young artist. "We had been planning it for a
while," Arthur confirms. "It was when we decided that we would go into
business together and I would manage him. There's a legendary story of
us sneaking into the stage of Carnegie Hall and saying someday this
would be ours. But that's a true story. Part of our effort was to
expose Phil to a bigger audience. Promoters like Harold Leventhal were
very kind to Phil, but they would never think of him as being bigger
than [New York's] Town Hall, which was a much smaller venue."
Yet, as Arthur adds, "We figured we knew enough
people to sell out Carnegie Hall among Phil's fans. That was one of our
first goals. The costs of putting on the concert were not that high. We
took our first money and put down a deposit and bought some ads, ticket
sales started coming in, and enough sales came in to buy more ads. We
promoted everything we could out of it, and kept selling ads even after
it sold out. Carnegie Hall, I think at the time, had 2700 seats; we
might have sold 3000."
Yet though the Carnegie Hall show was recorded by
Elektra Records, In Concert is not exactly a document of the
performance. In fact, it's not exactly a live album, as much as it
sounds like one. As Gorson remembers of the tapes made at Carnegie
Hall, "most of it was unusable, because Phil had terrible voice
problems. They weren't the best or the clearest performances in terms
of a recorded memory of the concert. So I think that very, very little
was used."
Nor did the event excite positive local press
coverage, Robert Shelton opening his lukewarm New York Times review
with the statement, "The next time Phil Ochs performs at Carnegie Hall,
he will probably do better." Similarly, the Village Voice's J.R.
Goddard felt "it seemed only a rehearsal for a Carnegie evening yet to
come," finding that "his performance in the formalized setting of
Carnegie left me near paralyzed with boredom." Goddard confirmed,
incidentally, that Ochs performed at least a couple songs not found in
any form on In Concert. One, "Draft Dodger Rag," was one of the most
popular compositions on his second album, I Ain't Marching Anymore; the
other, "Joe Hill," would not appear on disc until Phil's 1968 LP Tape
From California.
Ochs tried to cut live material again shortly
afterward at Boston's Jordan Hall, continues Gorson, as "we had a much
more controlled situation in terms of recording, and I think we were
able to use snippets of Jordan Hall. Again Phil had voice problems and
some occasional emotional problems; we didn't have enough to do an
album, but we had more of the basis of an album. We ended up using a
lot of the audience interchange with Phil from both concerts in terms
of his haranguing the audience and all that stuff. It was the
performances that were clearly shaky, because of his nervousness and
vocal problems."
Ultimately, much of the album was recorded without
an audience at Judson Hall, right across the street from Carnegie Hall.
"We were in a real bind, because Elektra had a considerable investment
at the time in the live recording at Carnegie Hall and then up in
Boston," says Arthur. "We had persuaded Elektra and [label president]
Jac Holzman, who very willingly came along once they saw that Carnegie
Hall had momentum and was gonna sell out, and we were making something
bigger of Phil's career. So they weren't gonna can the album. We
huddled, like in a crisis meeting, to figure out what we would do with
these tapes. It had urgency, 'cause Phil was due to have an album out.
Judson Hall was a small hall, and for recording live, it had a lovely
acoustic sound. It was mainly for small classical chamber orchestras,
or cello concerts, and things like that. So it could approximate as
closely as possible the Boston recordings."
As Gorson points out, nowhere on the LP did it say
the recording had been done at Carnegie Hall. A note on the back stated
that "this album was recorded at concerts given by Phil Ochs in Boston
and New York in the winter of 1965-66," though Joel Brodsky's photo on
the back cover, according to Arthur, "is the same picture that was on
the Carnegie Hall poster and ad campaign." As he also acknowledges, "It
also doesn't say 'recorded at Carnegie Hall' because Carnegie Hall
would have charged a lot more money in royalty to use their name."
While many of the songs attacked American
imperialism, religious hypocrisy, and spineless liberals, the two that
got the most attention were the ones that found Ochs moving into more
personal and romantic territory. The haunting "There But For Fortune"
had already been covered by Joan Baez on a 1965 single that made it to
#50 in the US and all the way to #8 in the UK. Gorson, however, sees
"Changes" in particular "as a major turn for Phil, 'cause Phil was so
totally immersed in being the singing newspaper guy. When 'Changes'
came to him, it was an epiphany. It was like a religious experience for
him, because he wrote something that was beautiful and heartfelt, not
driven by the newspapers, and driven by candid love and emotion. It was
a precursor of other songs he would want to write and do. I think
'Changes' is probably the most important song on the album in terms of
a new direction, and a showing of his insides. It's a gorgeous song."
It also generated a number of cover versions (including 1966 renditions
by Gordon Lightfoot and Phil's friends Jim & Jean) as, in Gorson's
estimation, "it was not a hard song to record. It was not dangerous or
anything. But Phil's version of it is always my favorite, 'cause it's
so heartfelt and beautiful."
More potentially damaging to the album's sales than
any of its lyrics, however, were eight poems by Mao Tse-Tung, printed
on the back cover at Ochs's instigation. In Gorson's view, "The purpose
wasn't to be a Maoist or to show that he was some kind of red
flag-waving Communist, but to show that there was beauty everywhere,
even in the words of someone who would be described as an enemy of our
country. The essential point was to blur the image of a villain, and
soften it with art. To Elektra's credit, they did not override us, they
did not fight us. They allowed those liner notes to go on, at what at
the time seemed like great cost."
It might have made chains and distributors reluctant
to carry it, but "if anything, in the end, it probably strengthened
Elektra's credibility in the artistic community, and didn't terribly
hurt the sales. Phil was on the cusp of the moment in the anti-war
movement, and it had a built-in core audience that was waiting for it.
He had reached so many new people, and there was such a demand to hear
new songs." – Richie Unterberger
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