Phil Ochs - Greatest Hits [Import]

Phil Ochs - Greatest Hits [Import]

Editorial Reviews
Product Description
The late Phil Och's last album, produced by Van Dykes Parks with contributions from Clarence White, Chris Ethridge, Ry Cooder and James Burton amongst others.

Tracks:

No More Song!

Album Description

The late Phil Och's last album, produced by Van Dykes Parks with contributions from Clarence White, Chris Ethridge, Ry Cooder and James Burton amongst others.

Customer Reviews:

One more great Phil Ochs's album..........2006-11-28

As we know, this was the last studio album of Phil Ochs's career. He did release a handful of songs afterwards, but for the most part, his career was over. It's a damn shame, because this is actually a great album. Another reviewer had said that Phil would have made a great country singer, and I really believe if he had pursued that course, he would have. I have always enjoyed Phil's later work. I feel that it's certainly more interesting and poetic than his protest music. While the protest music is good, the later stuff is more artistic. Dylan realised that politics is BS (reportedly, he said that to Phil), and he got out. Phil stayed politically active way too long, and I think that's what really killed him in the end. Phil wasn't Dylan (though he tried to be). On a lot of Phil's live albums, there's a lot of cracks against Dylan. Dylan never did a crack against Phil, though (at least not in public). This is not to say that Ochs was just a shadow compared to Dylan. Phil was a great singer, and a great songwriter. He should have gotten out of the political game and just concentrated on his art. On this album, he actually does that. There's only one song, Ten Cents a Coup, that is political, and the rest are about life and everything. I love Chords of Fame and Gas Station Women. They are great country songs, and Phil really delivers them. The rest of the album is wonderful as well. Phil never had a bad album (except maybe Gunfight at Carnegie Hall), and I wished he had pursued the country path. Sadly, we'll never know. Collector's Choice Music reissued 4 Ochs albums (Pleasure of the Harbor, Tape from California, Rehearsals for Retirement, and Gunfight at Carnegie Hall), but they never reissued this one. I found it in an obscure CD shop in an anonymous suburb of Chicago. I couldn't believe that it made its way there, but I bought it on the spot. It's the British import copy. Someone should really reissue this album....

Better than folky stuff .......2006-07-02

Ochs could have developed into a great country singer if he had lived. This introspective album is probably a bit too weird for most tastes; still, there's some good music here.

Why does this have to cost so much.......2006-05-01

I love Ochs, but $125 is too much. Why doesn't someone reissue this?

Like a Bright Falling Star.......2005-12-06

The state of the world is shameful when this album is available only as overpriced imports or rare used copies. The album contains some of Ochs' most enduring writing -- "No More Songs," "Ticket Home," "James Dean", "Basket in the Pool," "Chords of Fame" and so on. Even "Ten Cents a Coup" furnishes insight into our current world -- who could be more ugly than Johnson, Nixon and Agnew? Look at our current crop of politicians from Clinton to Bush to Cheney. But the politics is secondary to the sound. Ochs, with the help of first-rate sidemen, rocked on this, and he also soared at times, riding the crest of a C&W groove. Listening to this, at times I feel like it is a warm summer night, and I see a bright, beautiful falling star in the distance. Won't somebody reissue this in a respectful packaging at an affordable price?

The Ashes of the Dream.......2000-09-26

Yes the title of this album is a joke, a bitter one, Phil Ochs was at a commercial nadir when this was originally released in 1970. The cover is a parody of a garish Elvis Presley greatest hits album popular at the time. Ochs had had the brillant idea of combining the politics of Che Guevara with Elvis Presley, thus the image of him on the cover with the gold lame suit. However "Greatest Hits" mostly only scrapes at politics, being more an album of resignation and nostalgia. It is also a poignant and haunting coda to Phil's career being the last studio album was to do before his suicide some years later.

Most people view Ochs through the prism of his early protest music, compare him unfavorably with Dylan and don't like to talk about what happened to him later on. Well as much as I respect his early topical work, for me his most powerful music begins when he began examining his own troubled pysche, peaking with the album previous to this eeriely titled "Rehearsals for Retirement" that features a mock Phil Ochs tomb stone on the cover.

Phil Ochs was in collapse by the time of this album, his political idealism being dashed at Chicago in 1968 (he being one of the few musicians actually to show), his career imploding, and his muse drying up. On Rehearsals he chronicles his and the country's destruction (he saw them as being linked, if the country had "died" in Chicago in '68 what use was a topical songwriter except to chronicle this death, a death that he realized was forcasting his own). The themes of "Rehearsals" linger here, most noticeably in the death haunted "One Way Ticket Home" that opens the album, and contains the chilling chorus of "I would be in exile now/but everywhere's the same". It's hard not to see the title as a none to subtle metaphor for death. The album begins with Phil asking, quite literally, for a "one way ticket home" and ends with "No More Songs", which again deals with the collapse of dreams and the shrivelling muse. "No More Songs" with its odd orchestration, prefigures "Closer" era Joy Division more than it does the singer songwriters Phil is usually bracketed in with. "No More Songs" is Phil's goodbye, though he still had six more years to live nonetheless "the drums are in the dawn/and all the voice is gone/it seems that there are no more songs".

In between these mournful laments however Ochs reaches back to his childhood for some of his most exquisitely beautiful songs, such as "Jim Dean of Indiana" (though even here death hovers). Or one of my favorites "Boy in Ohio", a meditation on growing up in the country, which notes with melancholy a way of life being eradicated by progress. "Bach,Beethoven,Mozart & Me" is an oddly spooky song recounting a rather aimless afternoon in Los Angeles. "Chords of Fame" perhaps the best of the country inflected songs, tells the old tale of the price of fame from the viewpoint of someone who has been chewed up by it and than spat out.

Again this is not for a Phil Ochs fan looking for more of his topical songs, though even in his earliest days on songs like "Changes" he displayed a certain wistful introspection that bears fruit here. This is really best taken in conjunction with "Rehearsals for Retirement", this being sort of an "Illuminations" to that "Season in Hell" (in the Rimbaudian sense). Contempary equivalents would be "Dumb" or "Penny Royal Tea" by Nirvana, Kurt Cobain facing many of the same demons as Phil Ochs -- as both shared the ability to construct some beauty out of the darkest of despairs.

Greatest Hits
Average customer rating:
Greatest Hits
Phil Ochs
Manufacturer: Edsel Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Country | Styles | Music
ASIN: B00000DTGY
Release Date: 1997-12-10