"Living in the Heart of the Beast" has some of the overwrought political lyrics of any song ever.

Wow, depressing flashbacks. I'd never heard an english version of Surabaya Johnny.

I vividly remember that song from when I was little. My mother would play the lp of what must have been Lotte Lenya singing it. She played a lot of Brecht - Weil stuff. I still, from time to time, find myself singing softly "let's all go barmy, and join the army ..."

n.b. for the young'uns here, an 'lp' refers to a long playing 33 rpm vinyl record.

i interviewed tim hodgkinson once, he didn't come across like that song at ALL!

i kind of wish i had seen the cow in in their pomp, i am a mite too young

Hm, you want to know who's overwrought? Phil Ochs, that's who. Only he's sentimental-small-words overwrought, and I like big-words-abstractions-forces-of-history overwrought. And I also like Dagmar Krause's voice, although I could do without pretty much all of News From Babel. Seriously, Phil Ochs irritates me no end. ("A whale on the beach, he's dying/a white flag in my hand/and a white bone on the sand"? Give me "The Song of Investment Capital Overseas" any day.)

"The Song of Investment Capital Overseas" is great, but it's not very big-words-abstraction overwrought.

Out of town! My work takes me out of town! I empty villages! I burn their houses down!

(I like Krause's voice too, though I see I misspelled her name. I did once know a Kraus, but he was no Dagmar.)

True enough. It was just the first one I could think of...

I should acquire some Henry Cow to break up the steady rotation of Art Bears....variety, that's what I like.

....and ellipses.

"A whale on the beach, he's dying/a white flag in my hand/and a white bone on the sand"

Actually I quite like those particular lyrics.

4: Phil Ochs is only sometimes overwrought. ("Draft Dodger Rag"? Highly underwrought.) Many of his songs are tremendous. And his voice is such that I don't mind listening to some of the overwrought ones. I wouldn't mind listening to him sing the phone book.

I recognize that this is where the personal and the political diverge, but I can't sit still for Phil Ochs songs; they embarrass me on some level. "Here's To The State of Mississippi", "Too Many Martyrs", "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night"....they all just seem to me to have that very fakey aw-shucks country-boy-proletariat left nostalgia thing going on. And the reliance on "and the country lost a man"-type tropes, eesh.

Curiously, "Birmingham Sunday", by not-Phil-Ochs, which is an awful song, doesn't irritate me in the same way. Maybe because it's sort of wimpily badly written so I find myself more in sympathy with the songwriter. P

"Love Me I'm A Liberal" is pretty funny, though.

But I do write this as someone who actually gets all choked up when listening to "Rebel Waltz" and "Something About England" from Sandinista, both of which are definitely left schmaltz ("There was masters an' servants an' servants an' dogs/ They taught you how to touch your cap / But through strikes and famine and war and peace /England never closed this gap"---it's so sad!) so my taste is extremely suspect.

Give me "The Song of Investment Capital Overseas" any day.

But that is what Ochs was doing at his best. The Pleasures/Tape/Rehearsals was an attempt to merge the personal & political in metaphor. I can't think of anyone who did it better.

What, you don't like poetry?

I've Had Her

What, this about obsessive love or political idealism? Both, it's honest-to-god symbolist poetry that Dylan couldn't ever approach. Nobody would mistake "Desolation Row" for a lovelost song.

Time takes her toll and the memory fades but his glory is broken, in the magic that he made. Reality is ruined; it's the freeing from the fear The drama is distorted, to what they want to hear Swimming in their sorrow, in the twisting of a tear As they wait for a new thrill parade.

The eyes of the rebel have been branded by the blind
To the safety of sterility, the threat has been refined
The child was created to the slaughterhouse he's led
So good to be alive when the eulogy is read
The climax of emotion, the worship of the dead
And the cycle of sacrifice unwinds.

So dance dance dance
Teach us to be true
Come dance dance dance
'Cause we love you

And the night comes again to the circle studded sky
The stars settle slowly, in loneliness they lie
'Till the universe expodes as a falling star is raised
Planets are paralyzed, mountains are amazed
But they all glow brighter from the briliance of the blaze
With the speed of insanity, then he died.

"Crucifixion", in honor of the MLK party over at EoTAW.

so my taste is extremely suspect

Comity!

You do get it right sometimes, though.

But Joe, you're ten years dead!

the previous mouseover text is gone, how sad
there was me mentioned coz
i'm not familiar with any of the names mentioned in the post and thread, hopefully it would be a nice discovery of something fun, not until the evening though

Thanks, Bob. Now the voice of Lotte Lenya in my head has been joined by Jan and Dean. This business of containing multitudes gets tiresome.

Has somenone archived the mouseover texts?

Michael, Marianne Faithful did a great English-language version of "Surabaya Johnie" on 20th Century Blues.

Frowner, how do you feel about Stereolab, of say the Emperor Tomato Ketchup vintage?

Has somenone archived the mouseover texts?

Nobody has, so I think the answer is, "Yes, somenone archived them."

The answer is none. None less archived.

11: Ochs is a huge favorite in our household. I had always liked him, but was not a huge fan or that familiar with the body of his work. A friend once made a compilation for me, which my daughter found years later when she was 11 or 12. She became entranced with him and we soon owned lots of his stuff. I think that most of it holds up pretty well (even a lot of the "topical" stuff) and I do love his voice.

Oh, "Surabaya Johnny" is my favorite. I'd only heard it by Lenya in German. In sang it once to a boy I liked without knowing he collected Lenya records. But he turned out to be quite a Johnny himself. Sigh.

Young Lenya!

i don't believe i have knowingly heard a phil ochs song (sung by phil ochs): i feel i should rectify this

Here You Go

But he has sounded better.

Here is Ochs at his prettiest, the overproduced album version of "Pleasures of the Harbor"

The best I got, as someone said in a comment at Youtube, is live concerts, Ochs & guitar, in Canada (Vancouver Montreal?) after the Chicago convention. Ochs put up a tombstone marking his own death as the night of the riots. Something like that.

Above Ochs was called "overwrought". I think the beautiful high tenor just sounds emotional to listeners, his delivery is usually pretty flat and undramatic.

26, 27: Yeah, not the greatest selection on YouTube. The beginning is clipped, but I like this one of "The Highwayman", which I think shows his voice off well, plus pretty good eye candy (and a successful reworking of a "classic" poem, not that common in pop music).

Can't find anything decent online, but I'd suggest two somewhat lesser-known songs from Tape from California, the album after Pleasures of the Harbor (and also somewhat overproduced): the title track (shows his voice off quite well, and got some airplay after 9/11 due to the line "New York City has exploded") and "When in Rome", something of a long form Dylan (13 minutes) effort.

Here's just the last 3 minutes of "When in Rome", but worth a listen.

I left England in 1970, so have (at best) dim memories of Henry Cow (which didn't have anything like the rich lineup in these videos then). But it strikes me that they were, in the form that the videos show, a product of the 1970s. In London, and in New York, the '70s, especially the early '70s, were an amazingly productive period. The economy may have been going to hell in a handbasket, but despite that, perhaps because of that, people directed their energies to creating some remarkable works.

Maybe the bad economic times we're entering will have similar consequences.

27: It's Ochs's lyrics I find overwrought, not so much his delivery. I can't help it, can't explain it--I manage to live amongst legions of activist Ochs devotees and just don't like his stuff. I also don't care for the way he defaults to woman as fused sexual/political symbol, something I find just as irritating when good ol' punk rock Eric Drooker does it in his drawings.

On reflection, I think I'm more comfortable with the Henry Cow school of overwraughtitude precisely because it's not personalized, particularly not physically embodied in a single sort of abstract-concrete person. "We", "I", "the working class" "you", yes, but "beautiful woman [or, more rarely, strapping young man] who represents a high-flown political sentiment" not so much.

I mean, I think that's something tricky to negotiate in all political art: how do you convey emotions or tell a story about an individual without the feelings or the individualization undercutting the politics? How do you stay true to historical specificity but not get caught up in nostalgia or hero-worship? (Obviously, a novel is a text of a certain length that has something wrong with it, but there's fruitful failure and demoralizing failure)

Phil Ochs greatest talent may have been at making people uncomfortable. The bitter irony is extreme.

This part of his career I find interesting. A near-Elvis impersonation in a gold lame suit, and as far as I can tell, everyone took it straight.

In mid-1975, Ochs took on the identity of John Butler Train. He told people that Train had murdered Ochs, and that he, John Train, had replaced him. Train was convinced that somebody was trying to kill him, and he carried a weapon at all times -- a hammer, a knife, or a lead pipe.[95]

I would have to check on the timing, but there is a lot in Phil Ochs that makes me think of Andy Kaufman.

The pre-Beatle pre-Nashville Skyline counterculture welcomed intelligent sarcasm and bitterness and less obsessed with love and mindblowing and craziness and "experience" and shit.

If the Ochs biography I read is to be believed, then he basically meant all of the John Train stuff. His big ambition was to be as famous as Bob Dylan, and when it never happened he snapped.

I have no idea why I've read an Ochs biography, since I have never heard a single one of his songs.