Phil Ochs

There and Now: Live in Vancouver

Of more historic than aestetic significance

Review Score:

(4/10)
One of the best folk concert albums of all time is Phil Ochs in Concert, where he's in fine voice, full of wit and in easy control of his material and the audience. I first heard it in 1964, and it remains one of my favoritres of all time. Not surprsingly, the recent box set uses every track from the album.

There & Now, on the other hand, shows a shattered and disheartened man, struggling to remember the words of his own songs, awkwardly performing live versions of studio numbers that were certainly overproduced but nevertheless pretty pallid when stripped of the full arrangements that created the aural portraits that most Phil Ochs fans are familiat with. Pleasures of the Harbor is a wonderful song, which loses a lot of power when stripped of Lincoln Mayorga's piano, and Phil gives it an almost perfunctory reading. The Crucifixion with it's electronic excesses on the LP, fares somewhat better in this almost stark rendition, but again you can feel the pain and loss behind the tentative nature of Ocxhs' delivery.

I cannot recommend this to any but the most fervent Ochs fan, and then only if you must. With the Newport Concert available and even Gunfight at Carnegie Hall, you'll get a better feeling for what the man could sound like in concert. I never got a chance to see him perform live, but this is not the way I'd want to remember a once vibrant and bital voice of the American conscience.

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