Respectful, passionate and always mindful of the need to deliver the lyrical message. Phil Odgers and John Kettle do full justice to the work of Phil Ochs with this inspired selection of his songs
Release Date: 12th April 2024
Label: Vinyl Stac Records
Formats: CD / digital
Tribute albums can be a mixed bag. Sometimes, particularly if the subject is a favourite artist of yours, they can cause groans of despair and a growing wish that, whoever was responsible for butchering some of your most cherished songs, hadn’t bothered. Alternatively, those paying the tribute reinterpret an inspired selection of songs, refresh them, bring them up to date and deliver them with respect, passion and a deep understanding of what the songs were originally trying to say. And it is, without any doubt, the latter of these that Phil Odgers and John Kettle have achieved with Far Rockaway, their collection of songs from the work of Phil Ochs. The versions of the eleven songs chosen for this project are uniformly excellent; great interpretations, great musicianship and great production. You’ll play this album over and over again – and then you’ll set off for your own deep dive into the Phil Ochs songbook. Just see if you don’t.
Both Phil ‘Swill’ Odgers and John Kettle will be familiar names to At The Barrier readers. Mr Odgers remains, of course, a principal member of the enduring and legendary folk-punk band, the Men They Couldn’t Hang. John Kettle features regularly in these pages as a leading light in folk-rock’s perennial joybringers, Merry Hell. You’d expect any collaboration between two such luminaries to be a good ‘un – and you’d be right! For the purpose of this album, the pair are joined by Phil Jones on double bass and the sound they produce is delicious – clean and clear with the perfect blend of instrumentation, a deep richness when appropriate and with priority always given to Phil’s wonderful delivery of Ochs’s all-important lyrics.
We’ve had a preview, of course, having caught Swill and John whetting our appetites for this album at their London show back in March (see our review here) and now – here’s the main course: an 11-track collection of immaculately presented songs from the Phil Ochs canon.
Legendary, influential and unashamedly political, Phil Ochs was a major figure in the American folk revival of the early-mid 1960s, before, during and after it blossomed into the protest boom which spawned anti-war reformational movements such as the Youth International Party – The Yippies – with which Ochs was involved from the outset. A contemporary of Bob Dylan, Jackson C Franks, Richard Farina, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary and many others, Ochs was inspired particularly by the writings of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.
Ochs was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, and of the blind nationalism that motivated many of those who supported it, and he was unafraid of using his songs to articulate his affiliations. He was rocked by the political crises of 1968 and 1969 – the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jnr, the election of Richard ‘Tricky Dicky’ Nixon and the trial of the Chicago Seven – and, from 1970, began a move away from direct involvement with the counterculture. Drink and pills started to take a toll and, in April 1976, he hung himself at his sister’s home in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York (hence, the title of this album.) In the years after his death, it was revealed that the FBI had kept a bulging file, documenting Ochs’s political activities and even long after he had passed away, it was clear that he was still considered to be a dangerous influence.
Ochs’s legacy is huge and enduring. Not many of his songs were what the layperson would consider to be ‘hits’, but lots of them will be familiar to anyone with even a tenuous link to the folk genre; over the years, they’ve been covered by artists as diverse as John Denver, Christy Moore, Morrissey and They Might Be Giants and Martyn Joseph has done his own Ochs tribute album.
Far Rockaway isn’t the first album to compile the work of Phil Ochs. Back in 1998, What’s That I Hear?: The Songs of Phil Ochs, collected covers of Ochs’s songs by artists including Billy Bragg, Arlo Guthrie and Peter Yarrow, and there have other compilations. So, what was the motivation behind this latest collection? Phil Odgers explains: “I’d long had an idea to develop and record a collection of songs written by Ochs, and with touring banned during COVD restrictions, with the world on ‘hold’ and nowhere to go, apart from long dog walks, lockdown was the right time for me to get stuck into this project. I wanted to keep this separate from The Men They Couldn’t Hang but I also wanted to give the album a bit of depth and not record completely solo – so I got in touch with the very talented John Kettle to see if he would be interested in collaborating on the project. He was. And very soon I started sending him home-recorded guitar and vocal tracks and he would add guitar and other instruments at his studio in Wigan. I’m a strummer and he’s a mighty fine picker and multi-instrumentalist – the setup worked very well.”
With a catalogue like Ochs’s to pick from, the options for selection must have been virtually endless, so Swill goes on to explain how he made his – sometimes obvious, sometimes surprising – choices: “This album presents 11 songs which particularly resonated with me on one level or another. It’s a mixture of politically themed, for which Phil was best known and most remembered, plus some of his more personal, introspective, songs – ones for which he is, perhaps, less widely known. Sadly, 50 years on and more, the political songs are as relevant today as they were when they were written. The more reflective ones have been chosen based on their beauty and poetry, their sincerity and, in places, melancholy. These songs may appear to be primarily words of self-disclosure, yet they show a deep understanding of, and concern for, the human condition.”
And the sentiments that guided the selection of the songs are clear throughout the album. The destitution described in the lyrics to Hunger and Cold can be viewed on the streets of any UK city on any day, the observations that Ochs describes in Changes – a song from the mid-1960s – are still fully relevant today, and the futility and devastation of war that Ochs articulates in There But For Fortune (“Show me a country where the bombs had to fall”) and The Passing of My Life (“And as I see the fury of the fire and the flame, I wonder if my children will have to see the same”) apply as much to today’s conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere as they did to the wars of Ochs’s age.
But, as Swill has pointed out, Ochs’s writings didn’t just concern desolation and frustration. The Thresher – now a folk club standard – is an intriguing tale of the design, construction and launch of a doomed ship, Flower Lady is a beautiful, wistful, observation of the life of someone who spends her days being ignored (the line “Each line screams you’re old, you’re old, you’re old” gets me every time…), and the lyrics to A Year To Go By – surely one of the greatest songs ever written – resonate with me more and more, as each year passes. And the versions of these songs that you’ll hear on Far Rockaway are some the best that you ever WILL hear.
Swill and Kettle have done the wise thing and saved the very best until the very last. Chords Of Fame, a song that was chosen to provide the title both to Ochs’s first posthumous career-retrospective album and the 1984 film documentary of his life is a salutary warning to anyone contemplating sacrificing artistic integrity in the pursuit of fame and adulation – “The more that you will find success, the more that you will fail,” before the album is wrapped up with a boisterous version of Bound for Glory, Ochs’s own tribute to Woody Guthrie, the man who – more than anyone, I suspect – inspired Ochs to put pen to paper in such a timeless way. And the line: “Oh why sing songs and forget about the aim? He wrote them for a reason, why not sing them for the same” explains perfectly why Phil Odgers and John Kettle embarked on this project in the first place.
If you’re a fan of Phil Ochs, you’ll love Far Rockaway. And if you aren’t yet, you will be after you’ve heard it.
Listen to Swill and John perform There But For Fortune – one of Phil Ochs’s best-known songs and a track from the album – here:
Phil Odgers online: Facebook / YouTube / Bandcamp
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