Revisiting A&M Records No. 39
Phil Ochs: ‘Tape from California’ (July ’68)
When last we encountered the increasingly troubled, ultimately tragic antihero of the ‘60s folk scene, he had shed some (but never all) political skin in a bold leap away from his headlines-driven Elektra past and headlong into an expansive A&M era in which his allegorical approach might reach new sonic heights to match his imaginative wordplay.
As mentioned in No. 25 of this series, about ‘Pleasures of the Harbor’: Dylan went electric; Ochs went baroque.
So did most everyone in the wake of ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ from the Mamas & the Papas and Motown’s most sophisticated to the Rolling Stones and winsome radio far like the Left Banke’s ‘Walk Away Renée’ and especially Simon & Garfunkel.
If you’re a fan of that duo, or this phase of rock in general, and haven’t heard Ochs’s stuff, you really should correct that. Along with similarly shaded melodies and arrangements, you’ll marvel at the wealth of still-timely couplets, like this one: ‘Half the world is crazy and the other half is scared / Madonnas do the minuet for naked millionaires.’
Sounds a lot like a certain America I know.
Yet on this, his second and least commercially successful A&M effort, Ochs seems simultaneously neck-deep in such ornate finery and eager to rip it all off. In grappling with that reconstruct/deconstruct impulse, he found its on/off switch.
There’s a transformation that takes place sometime after the seven-minute title track, a poison postcard from paradise, but before the twice-as-long tone poem ‘When in Rome,’ which could be slotted favorably among Dylan’s and Donovan’s best from this period.
Having reinvigorated the ire that fueled his earlier breakthrough ‘I Ain’t Marching Anymore,’ Ochs here discovers he can remain topically trenchant whether the production is minimalist (just bugles and snares with his acoustic guitar on ‘White Boots Marching in a Yellow Land’) or flowery (the orchestrated fantasy ‘The War Is Over’) or in a drug-dream somewhere in between, like on the Van Dyke Parks-y album-closer ‘Floods of Florence’ or the harpsichord-dappled ‘Half a Century High.’
His distant vocal on that last one, deliberately engulfed in hiss, does indeed sound like music set to a tape from California. Plays awfully ghostly now.