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Home » Open thread 10/31/22

Open thread 10/31/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Phil Ochs was a singer/songwriter, and a leftist of the old sort. Later in his career, he was plagued by mental illness and had a tragic end. But what a beautiful and distinctive voice he had, instantly recognizable. Some of my favorite songs of Ochs’ are those with lyrics from old warhorse poems – the sort we used to learn in school – put to music. This is his rendition of the poem “The Highwayman,” a poem that had especially touched me as a youngster because the highwayman’s lady love had very dark hair and eyes, like me. The colors black and red keep recurring throughout the poem; and then there’s the great touch of “with a bunch of lace at his throat”:

The poem is featured in a moving passage in the book Angela’s Ashes. You can find the entire poem here – Ochs condensed it somewhat in the song. I wish he had included that last verse, though, to close the circle.

Comments

Open thread 10/31/22 — 44 Comments

  2. We read “The Highway Man” in seventh grade English. I brought in a Mad magazine that had rewritten it, and the teacher read it to the class. I’ve never forgotten the line “The highwayman came riding—riding—riding.” Poetry is generally over my head, but I could grasp a few, like this one.

  3. I was subjected to a PBS documentary on Ochs about a half dozen years ago, never having heard of him before. Seemed like a mediocre period piece.

  4. The outrageous slanders by Democrats are getting worse than ever. Is that even possible? The vile instinct to smear must be universal in leftists. They pile on in huge numbers without the slightest interest in truth or facts.

    Pelosi attack, Fetterman burning sign hoax, Az break in. Just keep piling up.

    Shameless lying, slandering, morally defective cheaters. All of them. Lockstep liars.

    Has anyone seen a report that a Democrat has urged caution and the importance of gathering facts? On any of these? Can we find one decent human being in the entire party?

    What’s the over/under on morally decent Democrats? I’ll take the under on any number over zero.

  5. I too loved Ochs’ voice and found it to have an aching soulfulness, especially in songs like “Pleasures of the Harbor”.

  6. Leslie Fish wrote a tribute to him called Chickasaw Mountain. One of my favorite filk songs. Filk is not a misspelling, by the way.

  7. This poem was in a Childcraft poetry collection that I had as a child. I remember my dad reading it to me.

    Loreena McKennit also did a setting of this poem–it’s lovely.

  9. I sure loved Phil Ochs when I was young. He never quite became a national figure. I learned of him from college friends from the Northeast. He started as an early sixties folksinger doing topical protest songs — much like Bob Dylan, with whom Ochs was competing.

    After Dylan broke that mold, Ochs followed, I thought successfully, with increasingly complex and visionary songs. Unlike Dylan, Ochs never broke with the Left and went further into the New Left. Nor did Ochs ever come close to catching up with Dylan’s fame.

    1968 — the assassinations, riots, the Chicago Convention — broke Ochs’ heart. His last major album was titled “Rehearsals for Retirement” and the cover showed a tombstone reading:
    __________________________

    PHIL OCHS
    (AMERICAN)
    BORN: EL PASO, TEXAS, 1940
    DIED: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 1968
    __________________________

    His career sputtered out. But it seemed his problems were deeper. Like his father Ochs became seriously manic-depressive and alcoholic. He had a few good periods, but mostly he got worse and worse until he hung himself in 1976.
    __________________________

    I found him by the stage last night
    He was breathing his last breath
    A bottle of gin and a cigarette
    Was all that he had left
    I can see you’re makin’ music
    ‘Cause you carry a guitar
    But God help the troubadour
    Who tries to be a star

    –Phil Ochs, “Chords of Fame” (sung by Melanie)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzECo5YnMDM
    __________________________

    I went with Melanie’s version because Ochs did the song country-honky-tonk style (in hope of reaching a larger American audience) which IMO belied the heart of the song.

  10. The atlantic wants an amnesty for all the lies and pain they caused for pushing lockdowns

  12. Leslie Fish wrote a tribute to him called Chickasaw Mountain. One of my favorite filk songs.

    Matt:

    Thanks for that. I’ve liked what Fish I’ve heard, but I didn’t know this one:
    __________________________

    My old fellow rebel, I know what deal he made
    The power rang through every song he wrote and played
    Made him the best of his generation
    Sang till the end of the war
    And not a moment more.

    Then it left him, the power bereft him
    Left only one fate to see
    Hanging on his sister’s apple tree

    –Leslie Fish, “Chickasaw Mountain”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1hUf4qYwbM
    __________________________

    One of the comments explained the song thus:
    __________________________

    It may be that some people who listen to this song will not understand why this is a tribute to Phil Ochs, but I can follow the concept; Ochs was so impossibly brilliant as to suggest that he had made some terrible bargain with a supernatural power, which eventually resulted in his senseless suicide in 1976. And yes, he was the best of his generation, as Leslie Fish calls him.

  13. Hochul claims Republican crime concerns are a ‘conspiracy

    Hochul is an exemplar of the Peter Principle.

  14. I too have noticed that the Dems are being absolutely Vile. Hillary is getting in on the act too. Have you noticed that she has “cleaned” herself up and looks better than during the Election She Lost. She is running again!!!

  15. I never listened to Ochs that much back in the day, but what I did hear stuck with me. Many times over the past twenty years our ill-advised wars have made me think of these lines:

    “It’s always the old who lead us into war
    Always the young who fall”

    And the song “There But for Fortune” is a true classic of its type.

  17. Mac:

    Regarding the “always the young which lead us into war”; different country different time. The young Imperial Japanese Army officers that got Japan into it’s conquest of China in the early 1930s. The young can be particularly succeptable to the Good Idea Fairies. Real communism/socialism has never been tried …. and The Gods of The Copybook Headings take their toll.

    Or the current social madness regarding gender disphoria and the love of fascism (aka Antifa).

  18. No tbe young are not policy makers lord aberdeen was not a yout neither was raglan to cite on exemple

  20. He started as an early sixties folksinger doing topical protest songs

    There’s your problem right there.

  21. RE: UFOs

    Doing research on this topic, you soon discover that there is an enormous and ancient back story, a record of all sorts of encounters with all sorts of “supernatural” beings throughout all of recorded history and—if tens of thousands of years old paintings on walls, buried deep within caves don’t lie–even before that.

    In doing this research I’ve run across an interesting thing; how Angels are described in the Bible, vs. how we have, for close to two thousand years, pictured them.

    For the Angels, in the few passages devoted to their description in the Bible, are beings which are incomprehensible and terrible to behold.*

    So incomprehensible and terrible to behold that for the last two thousand years or so we humans have sought to portray them as, instead, safe and comprehensible, even saccharine, but most especially comparatively ordinary–basically just human-like figures with wings, and striped of their terror. **

    * See, for instance, here https://www.christianforums.com/articles/biblically-accurate-angels/

    ** See, for one example, https://dailyhoroscope.altervista.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/October-Guardian-Angels-1.jpg

  23. I too played Pleasures of the Harbor till the tracks wore off.
    He and Abbie disappointed in their choice of deaths. Perhaps too harsh but sometimes you have to say it.

    I wonder if Phil would be an anti Trump “Good German” backing the elites if he was alive today … I hope not

    The Highwayman was a wonderful plot element in the Canadian TV production of Anne of Green Gables/Anne of Avonlea from a couple decades ago.

  24. “Love Me I’m a Liberal” another Phil Ochs classic. Thanks for posting and inspiring this trip down memory lane.

  25. Miguel:

    Look up “always” in a dictionary. Young idiots have a power all their own; Fidel, Che were young once.

  27. OchS could also write beautiful ballads, meditative songs. “When I’m Gone” was the first occasion for me to contemplate death as a world in which I would no longer exist:
    _______________________________

    There’s no place in this world where I’ll belong when I’m gone
    And I won’t know the right from the wrong when I’m gone
    And you won’t find me singin’ on this song when I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.

    And I won’t feel the flowing of the time when I’m gone
    All the pleasures of love will not be mine when I’m gone
    My pen won’t pour a lyric line when I’m gone
    So I guess I’ll have to do it while I’m here.

    –Phil Ochs, “When I’m Gone (lyrics on screen)”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNp1kqnRw-U

  30. neo:

    Indeed. “Changes” is another Ochs ballad high on my list. Oh, Phil Ochs. Such a sad story. A lot of people loved him.

    Here’s Jim Carroll, a NYC poet and later, a short-lived rock star, on Ochs, after happily seeing him perform his version of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” in the early 70s.
    ___________________________

    That was it for Anne and Ted and I, and we left together as we’d arrived, but pumped up from Ochs…

    By the time I had reached the top of the stairs leading out of the club, the bottom fell out. I realized how sad that man onstage was. Every gesture he made was that of someone who’d been hit-and-run by time.

    –Jim Carroll, “The Downtown Diaries 1971-1973”
    ___________________________

    I hoped to find a copy of that quote online, rather than transcribe it from Carroll’s diary, and I did — from an earlier neo topic which drifted into poems set to music:

    https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/06/13/heres-a-quiz/#comment-2501666

    My point is not to plug my comment, though I don’t mind, but that I successfully found it with a Google search. It’s been a while since I could find my comments here with Google.

    So, your recent site overhaul has paid some dividends.

  31. Are all folk singers leftists or am I imagining this??

    So the race for the US senate seat from the state of Washington is now very close, supposedly. The long long time demokrat senator, Patty Murray, is in a very close race against Tiffany Smiley .

    Here is my prediction; as the voting winds down the good cheating vote counters in King County, Wa (i.e., Seattle ) will “find” as many votes needed to put Murray in the victory column.
    This will not be the first time that the vote counters in King County have magically transformed defeat into victory.

  33. huxley:

    Yes, I finally managed to get search engines to recognize the blog again. It took a while to get the key to it, but it finally worked.

  35. Leslie Fish has some of Kipling’s poetry put to music on youtube. She does a good job. Whoever did “Harp Song of The Dane Women” needs a different hobby.

    The Highwayman is a romantic poem with the kind of guy who makes life rough for the rest of us as the hero. Scroom.

    I recall Ochs back in the day. Meh. Everybody was doing it.

    One of the best female voices I ever heard was idly doing “Windy” walking past as I helped a friend load her car to go home for the summer.

    At a brigade formal, half a dozen young lieutenants had put together “It’s Not Fair At All” and “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying”. Did a good job. Bad judgment, given the circs. Not much mascara left.

  36. RE: My comment at 12:57 above.

    Interesting how various artists and theologians have removed the primary “terror” and incomprehensibility from the image and idea of Angels.

  39. Are all folk singers leftists or am I imagining this??

    JohnTyler:

    I’m glad you brought it up.

    Yes! It’s practically a law. It’s like getting up to dance if a Patsy Cline song comes on in some bars.

    This is the Planet of the Apes. Apes are tribal. We are tribal.

    JimNorCal asked earlier:
    __________________________

    I wonder if Phil would be an anti Trump “Good German” backing the elites if he was alive today … I hope not
    __________________________

    Not many top-level folk or rock stars made it out of the Left, which, I would mention, wasn’t backing the elites until somewhat recently.

    Bob Dylan semi-broke with the Left, but that’s about the end of the list, when I think about it.

    In somewhat recent years Melanie, of “Candles in the Rain” and “Brand New Key” fame, declared herself a libertarian, if that counts.

  40. In the spirit of Open Thread Halloween goodness, I will inform one and all I am watching “The Bride of Frankenstein” tonight and it’s been far too long.

    This is an outstanding film. Striking visuals, great packed plot and dialog, real character arcs. Practically Shakespearean too.

    It’s the rare sequel which exceeds the original.

  42. The Highwayman was one of the first poems I memorized, in 8th grade, but I don’t remember this stanza being in the version we had in our books, which explains implicitly how the soldiers knew to set the ambush.

    And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
    Where Tim the ostler listened. His face was white and peaked.
    His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
    But he loved the landlord’s daughter,
    The landlord’s red-lipped daughter.
    Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say—

    It seems to me the editors also left out a few other stanzas, or condensed them, but I can’t tell how exactly at this far remove. Protecting us from undue violence, or just making it easier to learn — who knows?

    I loved the rhymes and the rhythm and the visual images, but I never could understand why the highwayman was “romantic”” for throwing away his lover’s sacrifice the way he did.

    Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
    With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high.
    Blood red were his spurs in the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat;
    When they shot him down on the highway,
    Down like a dog on the highway,
    And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.

    Although it was certainly a dramatic ending.
    If I had been Bess, I would have cussed him out when his specter rode up to my haunted window in that final verse!

    However, Ochs made a good song out of it.

  43. I only just noticed after posting that Noyes repeated the “dog” image for both the ostler and the highwayman.
    Given his skill, that was probably not an accident.

    That appeared in his Collected Poems (1947) (according to Neo’s link), and thus would have been relatively “new” when it was added to our curriculum in the sixties (compared to Whitman, Shakespeare, etc).
    Fancy that!

  44. @ Art Deco > “Is this possible?”

    About badgering, I don’t know first-hand, being retired, but Strom is not the only one who has complained. A couple of my kids keep their heads down at work.
    Also, considering that even when George W. Bush was president, as Strom says, “It was just assumed that constant talking about how evil Republicans were was standard.”

    I particularly remember two outings where the performer made comments about Bush (although not quite calling him Bushitler) and the audience in general laughed along.
    Perhaps we were the only Republicans in attendance at both, but I suspect the others were as polite as we were and didn’t cause a ruckus.
    Today, I’m not sure I would take it without comment.

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